60s short story where band gives concert ending with a nuke detonation

Question

I’m looking for a short story from the sixties that had to do with a rock band giving a concert where the climax of the show was a detonation of a nuke. The US government sponsored the concert trying to convince the public to use nukes in Vietnam to end the war.

My Dad used to bring home science fiction anthologies home with him from his business trips and this is one of the stories I remember.

Answer 1

This is "The Big Flash" by Norman Spinrad. Often anthologized, I encountered it in the 1970 volume of Wollheim and Carr's World's Best Science Fiction. You can read it online here.

The band is called The Four Horsemen.

Here are the last two pages of the story showing the band's counting down to the explosion.