ABSTRACT

This chapter considers a selection of novels from Pakistan and its diasporic writers that deal with nuclear weapons. The chapter outlines how novelists have responded in various ways to Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear armament. This analysis of literary and genre fiction demonstrates how the heterogeneous novelistic responses – a contentious mixture of pride, audacious hope, and fear – correspond to the political complexity of nuclearised Pakistan, as well as to the expansive metaphoric capacity of the image of ‘the bomb’.