If there is one key image that has changed our imagination it is the mushroom cloud – seared with that first flash of detonation into our social memory. There it is on The Atomic Count Basie album sleeve in 1958, a nightmare image as American – and genuinely iconic – as Marilyn or the Coca-Cola bottle.

The bomb has inspired entire art movements such as the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger, using acid to corrode in the act of creation. Jackson Pollock’s action paintings were, he said himself in 1950, “energy and motion made visible” in an instant, as the modern painter couldn’t express the age of the atom bomb in the old forms of any past culture. In the late ‘60s Tony Price began salvaging materials discarded from the Los Alamos labs to construct his art works, saying: “Los Alamos scrap is a kind of pure art in itself, since you are dealing with a harmonic principle of nuclear physics”.

Fear becomes fancy

Many films and books imagined a post-apocalyptic world, sometimes with a conveniently clean and white-robed new world order. Perhaps HG Wells was to blame. His book and film of Things To Come established this particular kind of futurist aesthetic. Others focused on grim survival such as Mad Max. It’s possible to argue the ultimate and most underappreciated atomic bomb film is Beneath The Planet of the Apes (1970) in which Nasa astronauts from the present find a tribe of mutant survivors in the irradiated remains of Manhattan worshipping the atom bomb itself.

By the 1970s and ‘80s the early optimism of the ‘50s had gone altogether. Fears of nuclear accident and cover-up mutated with the post-Watergate conspiracy thriller in The China Syndrome (1979) – released 12 days before the real Three Mile Island disaster – and Silkwood (1983).