Bryce Walton 11 min read

The President and the Minister of Peace pour martinis and settle in to watch the world end on TV, Operation Push Button within the hour, beamed live from the United Nations Cellar.

Bryce Walton's 1957 story is a sharp, mordant military-SF and social-SF satire. Pointed, chilling golden-age SF. Read it for a darkly funny story where nuclear apocalypse becomes a spectator event watched with cocktails, in a savage golden-age piece about the casual insanity of Cold War brinkmanship and the game of mutual destruction.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

11 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller