By the last decade of the Cold War, it was quite easy to imagine the end of our world. The looming of the mushroom cloud had become an aspect of the natural order of things. We all knew this, and we had been surrounded by a rich catalog of apocalyptic ideas and images since we were infants. By the early 1980s, even our president was making jokes about triggering global nuclear holocaust. 

Beyond an almost casual acceptance that we might one day see the great flash of light, however, came something else. Years of popular media had crafted the threat of planetary annihilation into entertaining, leisure-time fantasies as well. Tales of the end of us, and what would come after. Emptied places, exotic decay, and melancholy everywhere. The “Duck and Cover” air raid drills of the 1950s became the “Mad Max” movies of the 1980s.