1. The chronology of the Cold War has been much debated among historians, with some arguing that it lasted in total from 1945 to 1991. However, I use “cold war period” to refer to what M. Keith Booker terms the “long 1950s” and Alan Nadel calls the “peak cold war,” covering the period of approximately 1946 to 1964, and centering on the 1950s. As Booker argues, this periodization encompasses the development of the Cold War from its initial outbreak up until the period when “nuclear and anti-Soviet paranoia in the United States began noticeably to decline.” M. Keith Booker, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964 (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2001), 3
2. Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 4.
3. For a definition of the long Cold War, see, for example, David S. Painter, The Cold War: An International History (London: Routledge, 1999), 1.
4. The vast majority of critical work on Hollywood cinema and American culture, more generally during the Cold War, focuses on specific genres. See, for example, Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)
5. Cynthia Hendershot, Paranoia, the Bomb and 1950s Science Fiction Films (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999)