Just as the title says-I would like to know when and where that phrase came from.
The Simpsons? The ep where lisa has a crush on nelson. She goes to his hoyse and he has the poster that says that. “Gotta nuke something”
That’s the first and only place I’ve heard it.
[QUOTE=Jon Pennington on Quora]
According to a letter to the editor published in the New York Times Book Review on October 7, 1979, the origin of phrase “Nuke the Whales” was in the lyrics to a punk/new wave song that was written by Robert A. Falk, a senior at Harvard University who played bass under the pseudonym Töd Venice in the band Supreme Pointiff.
[/QUOTE]
I remember seeing it on bumper stickers early-to-mid '80s. I just assumed it was a humorous combination of the “No Nukes” and “Save The Whales” movements going on at the time.
I remember seeing bumper stickers in the 80s that were an amalgam of many common bumper stickers at the time. They read “Nuke a gay whale for Jesus”.
This
In the Schroedinger’s Cat trilogy, Book One: The Universe Next Door
(1979) Robert Anton Wilson introduced the “Committee to Nuke the Whales”. An invention of one of the main characters Markov Chaney. (He liked random things.)
This was a pretty popular work amongst science geeks (perhaps running on the tails of the Illuminatus! trilogy) and given the number of such geeks working on The Simpsons and their habit of dropping obscure references into the series, I can’t imagine that this isn’t the origin.
It definitely pre-dates the Simpsons. I remember seeing “Nuke the whales” in the early 1980s, long before the Simpsons even existed.
I remember a poster that had Nuke the Whales at the top, a one-eyed smiley face in the middle, and Mutants for Nukes at the bottom. Poking around on google, I can find some Mutants for Nukes images, but none that also have Nuke the Whales.
Save the Whales had its origin in the early 1970s, and I suspect that Nuke the Whales came around as a parody of it in the mid 1970s, before either cite given so far.
Same here. A parody of then-popular stickertivism.
Go easy on snfaulkner, A Whale once bit his sister… No realli!
Specifically … baleen whales …
Francis Vaughan’s reference fits the timing perfectly … and it became a “push-back” slogan for a new generation of youths … not anti-environmentalism, rather anti-extremist-environmentalism … the hippies did a good job bringing awareness of destruction of the lands and seas, but they advocated extreme solutions, for example in timber country every tree was a god and we shouldn’t cut down any of them … how everyone was to have a free house was unclear …
The story I heard was that with the on-going and raging debate about climate change and greenhouse gases at that time … the idea was floated that it was the plankton in our oceans that would save us from the Soylent Green* dystopia … except them damn filthy baleen whales were eating the plankton up by the megaton … trying to kill all the humans … bastards …
Thus the dichotomy inherent in the environmentalist movement … either we save the endangered plankton OR we save the endangered baleen whales … can’t have it both ways …
Note that as the baleen whales recover and increase their numbers, global temperatures have spiked … cause and effect … we need a massive international program to bring back the basic corset into fashion again …
- = Yes, the movie Soylent Green (1973) is based on the prediction the greenhouse effect would ruin society by 2022 … kids today think this is a new debate … [rolls eyes] …
I think I first saw the phrase in a Bloom County strip. Let me check my archives:
Yep-November 6, 1981.
How is it I already knew you were a dandelion sniffer?
Anyway, here’s the cite …
I had a button that said that. It was an efficient way to offend a wide variety of folks.
I was visiting the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley in the early spring of 1977, where their student activity space had several advocacy tables: gay rights, pro-Iranian rights (this was before the Shah was overthrown), US military, abortion rights, ERA, environmentalism. Man, the 70’s were a groovy time…
Anyway, there was a meme going around I heard then: “Nuke the gay whales” just to be reactionary. I don’t recall any “official” posters but there were hand-written wits posted around campus, and the phrase was repeated by word-of-mouth.
Anyone hear this earlier than 1977?
A link above said it originated in a song written in 1979 (the link says an article in 1979 first referred to it, but other web sources say the song itself was written that year) but I too heard it before that, somewhere around 1977. A friend of mine had a ‘Nuke the gay baby whales’ tee shirt, might have been before or after '77, I only met him in '75 and it wasn’t right away, but it was before '79.
Just because the phrase was used by a rock band that year, or picked up by Robert Anton Wilson, doesn’t mean it wasn’t circulating before that. The Google ngram viewer gives the first published instance in a book as 1976. It started to rise precipitously in 1979.
To be fair, lots of things once bit my sister. 
Colibri, although it’s true that if you look at the graph you’ve linked to, it says that there is a use of “Nuke the Whales” in 1976, if you click on the 1800-1982 link below, none of the publications mentioned is from before 1979.
I guess that I don’t understand how the viewer plots references then. But I note that there are many disparate references from 1979, from New York, Canada, and apparently other locations, citing banners and bumper stickers (including in San Francisco), which suggests to me that the expression was already widespread by then and did not originate in Boston. Unfortunately the links only offer a snippet of text and don’t give the exact date of publication. I’m inclined to believe the recollections of JohnGalt and Corry El that it was before 1979.