In a famous image, first published in 1980 in the British paper, Socialist Worker, a spoof film poster for Gone with the Wind depicts Ronald Reagan as Rhett Butler, with Margaret Thatcher, as Scarlett O’Hara, reclining submissively in his arms. A mushroom cloud billows in the background and the poster bills this version of Gone with the Wind as ‘the film to end all films’ and ‘the most EXPLOSIVE love story ever.’ Its tag line, running across the bottom of the poster, is: ‘She promised to follow him to the end of the earth. He promised to organise it!’

The poster is illustrative of an important transatlantic dynamic in nuclear discourse during the 1980s. Revitalised as a pressing public concern by technological developments, new scientific models for understanding the ecological impact of nuclear war and more fraught relations between the superpowers, nuclear anxiety was also highly charged by a transatlantic ideological alliance that saw Thatcher and Reagan marrying radical free-market policies with hard-line Cold War rhetoric. Yet, as the submissive pose of Thatcher in the poster illustrates, the relationship was not an equal one and it was haunted by anxieties about the decline of post-Imperial Britain and the rise of the United States as a superpower.

The shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic of nuclear discourse (generated not only by the closely aligned strategic policies and economic reforms of the Thatcher and Reagan governments, but also by vehement opposition to them) was hence an important feature of the cultural reception of nuclear issues in the 1980s. This paper assesses the role of this transatlantic nuclear culture, with particular attention to its treatment in literary texts from both Britain and the United States. The paper reads nuclear texts not only as sites in which specifically nuclear concerns (like the controversial decision to site American cruise and Pershing missiles in Britain; like debates over the nuclear winter theory) were played out, but also as places where a broader set of transatlantic concerns – about economy, society and culture – were contested