Atomic Tunes

Between the late 1940s and the fall of the Soviet bloc, musicians wrote more than 500 songs about the nuclear age. They covered atomic weapons, the Soviet threat, civil defense drills, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, spying, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. Atomic Tunes treats these recordings as a record of the era, one that reveals things about those events that documentaries and written histories tend to miss.

Tim Smolko and Joanna Smolko survey the full range of this music, from solemn to silly and from grim to vulgar. Their analysis shows how many musicians were wrestling with the effects of communism on American society and with the possibility of a global nuclear war. The result is a musical history of the Cold War, built around songs that capture the dread of people living under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.