Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
Once again, a clutch of new books on the atomic bomb get the history and intrigue right. But where's the guilt, dread and helplessness of living under the cloud of nuclear annihilation?
Apr 27, 2005 | This summer marks the 60th anniversary of the dropping of two nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with it come a half-dozen or so books. The books may be new, but they tell the same old story. There's a definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ambivalent physicist who led the Manhattan Project, and "East Palace Avenue," an account of the support workers at Los Alamos, the secret city where the bomb was created during World War II. Two more titles, "Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima" by Diana Preston and "The Bomb: A Life" by Gerard DeGroot, take a wider view, but the territory is still familiar. Part Frankenstein, part Faust, it's a tale of science (and American know-how) caught up in a frenzy of intellectual enthusiasm and patriotic necessity, finally reaching the coveted goal, only to look on in horror at what it has done.
But this is also the year that everyone born in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War began to wind down, turns 16. For the first time in six decades, a generation is leaving behind a childhood that hasn't been overshadowed by the threat of global nuclear annihilation. A dark era has quietly passed away. This story is harder to tell, and that may be why no one is telling it. It's not a tale of progress, exactly, since war certainly hasn't disappeared from the planet, and neither have nuclear threats on a less catastrophic scale. Still, anyone who's lived under the nuclear shadow of the Cold War (that is, most of us) can testify that nothing else has ever felt quite like it.
Histories of the bomb tend to focus either on intrigues and brinksmanship among scientific and political leaders or on the often silly ways pop culture dealt with the deadly new technology. Both approaches come across as weirdly detached from the actual experience of living through those years. The current crop is no exception. Among them, DeGroot's "The Bomb" makes the best effort to describe the Cold War's shifting moods, but even he never quite manages to do justice to the tangle of guilt, dread and helplessness the average citizen felt. (This could be because he lives in Scotland, although he seems to have spent some of his childhood in the U.S.) On one page of "The Bomb," DeGroot will condemn the public for its "apathy" toward the arms race; on the next he's mocking the futile efforts of those activists who did protest it. But if DeGroot can't quite settle on what the "right" response to the nuclear menace would have been, he has lots of company.
"The Atomic Cafe," a documentary released in 1982, during an outbreak of high nuclear anxiety, is another example of this confusion. The movie stitches together '50s newsreels and "informational" films of the duck-and-cover school, all offered as camp, blackly humorous examples of postwar naiveté on the order of "hygiene" filmstrips warning teenagers of the dangers of heavy petting. We are so much wiser now, etc.
But, as DeGroot points out, even in the 1950s few people bought into the idea that nuclear weapons could be so easily survived. "One consistent theme emerged from opinion polls," he writes: "the public thought civil defense futile ... Most people understood what the bomb could do." The newsreels, drills, bomb shelter publicity stunts and magazine articles pretending to educate Americans on how to make it through a nuclear attack amounted to little more than "a carefully stage-managed performance." It was propaganda, a representation of what the authorities wanted people to believe, not necessarily what they actually did believe.
The real popular history of the Cold War, if represented as a graph, would show a steady level of fear punctuated by irregular peaks and mesas of near-terror. Some of these spikes were triggered by real-time geopolitical events, like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Others were set off by a combination of historical and cultural triggers. On Aug. 31, 1946, in the first issue of the New Yorker entirely given over to a single story, John Hersey reported on the experiences of six survivors of Hiroshima, including the effects of radiation sickness, at that time little understood. The 30,000-word essay caused a sensation, was published as a book within weeks and was dramatized for ABC radio. (It's also still in print.) This was the first inkling many people had that nuclear weapons were more than just really big bombs.
While the government tried to float cheerful scenarios of sitcom-style families surviving a nuclear attack in their comfortably appointed bomb shelters, pop culture (always a better indicator of the public's attitude) took a dimmer view. Even Hollywood's wackier imaginings -- giant mutant spiders on the rampage -- had more truth in them than the average civil defense brochure.
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