Dashiell Larmer-Beech
Dec 28, 2025
Why we keep romanticising war
- Lucy Wongwian
- Oct 29, 2025
- 3 min read
Century after century, war still captivates us. It flashes across our screens in cinematic light: heroic, aesthetic and strangely beautiful. The more devastating the weapon, the more radiant the image. After the Manhattan Project, artists and photographers faced a challenge of trying to portray something that is both an achievement and a tragedy. The first photographs of the mushroom cloud were treated almost like trophies, symbols of scientific genius and national pride. However, each image quietly conceals the human costs and implications beneath it. My painting ‘Man-Made Sun’ is born from that contradiction. It depicts the 37 kiloton atomic bomb in 1957 called the “Priscilla Test”, three times the size of the nuclear device dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. (Terdiman, 2012) If it wasn’t for J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose creation of the atomic bomb changed the course of history, such tests would never have existed. When Oppenheimer watched that fiery sphere rise over the New Mexico desert in 1945, he recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
The Glorification of Violence
The Manhattan Project is the perfect embodiment of how we aestheticise war through science. Photographs of the Trinity Test still circulate today – perfect symmetry and binding light – images that could hang in a gallery. These pictures were meant to symbolise victory and scientific progression rather than the catastrophic implications that would follow. The paradox of the image makes human extinction look magnificent. As one historian observed, the bomb “appealed to man’s Promethean sense of creativity – the sublime act of mastering nature” (Rhodes, 1986) This highlights what was effectively the birth of mass death was marketed as progress.
The aesthetic still continues. Films such as Dunkirk or Apocalypse Now continue to provide warfare as visually breathtaking, with sweeping camerawork, orchestral crescendos and noble sacrifice. The line between commemoration and glorification blurs. Even propaganda has learned to look like art.
The Comfort of Control
Part of why we keep romanticising war is that it gives chaos a sense of control. The atomic bomb in particular was sold as a triumph of human intellect and ego, proof that we could harness the power of the sun itself. But what makes it so alluring isn’t just the power, it's the clarity that it provides us. In conflict, there are heroes and villains, right and wrongs, victory and defeat. The moral simplicity comforts us. As the Guardian noted during the early coverage of the war in Ukraine, even viral clips on TikTok “package suffering into stories of bravery,” digestible in 30 seconds. (Guardian, 2017)
Aesthetification of Destruction
After the creation of the atomic bomb, artists and photographers struggled with how to represent something so beautiful yet so terrible. Even now, our collective memory prefers the whimsy of the mushroom cloud over the horror of its victims. Walter Benjamin once warned that when politics becomes aesthetics, destruction becomes pleasurable to watch. That’s the danger we still face: from drone footage edited to music, cinematic war games and patriotic marketing campaigns. The romanticisation of war didn’t end with the atomic age; it simply changed mediums. Today, conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and Gaza present images of destruction that turn real suffering into shareable spectacle. Modern media curates these videos and images and transforms it into tragedy, striking enough to scroll past.
I created Man-Made Sun to challenge the way we continue to find beauty in destruction. The painting depicts the 1957 Priscilla Test. I wanted viewers to feel both awe and discomfort, to realise how easily power can masquerade as progress when portrayed as a spectacle. Through this work, I hope to confront our instinct to romanticise what should horrify us. The soft glow of the explosion isn’t meant to glorify, rather to unsettle and remind us that behind every display of brilliance lies an ugly truth we choose to ignore.
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