structural:scholar_edition, information:extraction
War

In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut recounts meeting the film producer Harrison Starr at a party, who asked him whether his forthcoming book was an anti-war novel—"Yes, I guess", replied Vonnegut. Starr responded: "Why don't you write an anti-glacier novel?" In the novel, Vonnegut's character continues: "What he meant, of course, is that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death". Vonnegut was a pacifist.

In 2011, NPR wrote: "Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s." Vonnegut stated in a 1987 interview: "my own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that", and that he wanted to write war-focused works without glamorizing war itself. Vonnegut had not intended to publish again, but his anger against the George W. Bush administration led him to write A Man Without a Country.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the Vonnegut novel best known for its antiwar themes, but the author expressed his beliefs in ways beyond the depiction of the destruction of Dresden. One character, Mary O'Hare, opines that "wars were partly encouraged by books and movies", starring " Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men". Vonnegut made a number of comparisons between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima in Slaughterhouse-Five and wrote in Palm Sunday (1991): "I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima".

Nuclear war, or at least deployed nuclear arms, is mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In Player Piano, the computer EPICAC is given control of the nuclear arsenal and is charged with deciding whether to use high-explosive or nuclear arms. In Cat's Cradle, John's original purpose in setting pen to paper was to write an account of what prominent Americans had been doing as Hiroshima was bombed.