the Pilgrim Award for lifetime scholarship in 1983. In his 1988 War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination,selected by Choice as the Outstanding Academic Book of 1989, Franklin turned his interest in science fiction to an examination of the American fascination with superweapons. His book presents a view that, ironically, from Robert Fulton's submarine Nautilus in the 18th century to the death-dealing weaponry of the late 20th century, superweapons ostensibly designed to end war have proved capable of exterminating the human species. The expanded 2008 edition explores how this cultural history led to the seemingly permanent state of warfare of the 21st century. War Stars is informed by Franklin's own earlier experience as a navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command. In 1990 he was named the Distinguished Scholar for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. In 1991, he was Guest Curator for the Star Trek and the Sixties exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution; this show subsequently traveled to the Hayden Planetarium. Vietnam and its aftermath A recurring subject area for Franklin is the history of the Vietnam War and its role in American literature and culture since 1966. His books M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America and Vietnam and America: A Documented History (which he co-edited) have been used in courses on the Vietnam War. His Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (2000) synthesized his previous work and extended it into an overview of 21st-century American culture. One of Franklin's themes in writing about Vietnam is that the supposed existence of surviving American prisoners of war in Vietnam after the war was a myth created after 1980 with the tacit approval of the Reagan administration, and that the psychological foundations of the myth arguably originated from justifications for the war offered by the Nixon before 1973, in that the war had to continue in order to bring the prisoners of war home. In the 1980s and 1990s, many Americans believed, incorrectly, that there were many "prisoners of war are still being held in Indochina" and that the American government was lying to the public about their existence. When Franklin was assembling an anthology in 1996 entitled The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs and Poems, he sent a fax to musician Bruce Springsteen requesting the singer's permission to put the song Born in the U.S.A. in his anthology;