I have tried to capture the light side of Doomsday in my three Cold War books as well as the dark side.  Americans retained an ability to laugh at themselves even as they were building nuclear bomb shelters and teaching their children how to dive under their desks at school.  The Cuban missile crisis, which was the subject of my book One Minute to Midnight, provided the plot for the most celebrated Cold War movie of all, Dr Strangelove.

Few people succeeded better at getting us to laugh at the macabre side of nuclear apocalypse than the singer-songwriter, Tom Lehrer, as exemplified by his song, "So long, Mom, I'm off to drop the bomb," which he described as a "song for World War III."  Watch it here: