1589;s the point?س. This viewpoint manifested itself in literature in something called the زapocalyptic temperس; an attitude or a tone dealing with a forthcoming end to the world. Also, many people, because of this realization of our impending death, were beginning to say that maybe their was something inherently wrong with all of this. That nuclear weapons are dangerous to everyone, no matter what your political views or where you live, and that we should do away with all of them. They have no value to society and should be destroyed. This apocalyptic temper and social activism was effected greatly in the early Sixties by the Cuban Missile Crisis. When Americans saw, on television, that they could be under nuclear attack in under twenty minutes, a new anxiety about the cold war surfaced that had not been present since the days of McCarthy. And this new anxiety was evidenced in works that took on a much more satirical tone. And one of the works that shows this satiric apocalyptic temper and cynicism is Kurt Vonnegut’s Cats Cradle. Vonnegut, considered by many to be one of Americas foremost living authors, was himself a veteran of World War Two. He, as a prisoner of war, was one of the few survivors of the fire-bombing of Dresden. In Dresden he saw what many believe was a more horrible tragedy than Hiroshima. The allied bombs destroyed the entire city and killed as many people, if not more, than were killed in Hiroshima. He would eventually write about this experience in the semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five. This novel, like Cats Cradle, takes a very strong anti-war stance. But along with being an Anti-war book, Cats Cradle is an excellent satire of the Atomic Age. It is essentially the story of one man, an author by the name of John (or Jonah) and the research he is doing for a book on the day the bomb exploded in Hiroshima. This involves him with members of the Dr. Felix Hoenikker familyذthe geniu...
