The article offers a reconstruction of the plays on nuclear fiction written in Italy in the climate of nuclear testing and the threat of atomic war in the 1950s and ’60s and of their reception in German-speaking countries. It examines the cultural framework of these texts in comparison to German nuclear plays. In particular, the article highlights the phenomenology of the motifs prevailing in these dramas, by focusing on two distinctive aspects: 1. the field of ethical and political responsibility of scientists, which runs as a thread through the entire theatre production on the subject of the atomic bomb; 2. the motif of the pilot, which dominates the nuclear discourse in the 1960s in Italy and Germany. A comparative overview of the forms of literary representation of the nuclear issue sets out to show what similarities exist in the intellectual debate on atomic war and atomic energy between both cultural areas.