Robert Arneson’s sculptures and large color drawings about nuclear war are direct statements of a private orientation toward the subject. He is dealing with his understanding, as a citizen, of a probability that society seems to cherish as ardently as it denies. The subject is vulgar and no fun; it is ugly. Its symmetries—the symmetry, for instance, of a cloud from a nuclear blast—a redull. But the projected spectacle of a world totaled in its own karmic knot is endlessly enticing; it’s the media barrage par excellence (a “bomb,” in common parlance, being both high and low on the scale of public