Atomic Culture

 

Development of the atom bomb profoundly affected the lives of people in the United States and elsewhere in ways so subtle that many were completely unaware of its impact. But affect it, it did. Civil defense drills required people to crawl under their desks at work or school; high schools named their football teams "The Atoms"; and songwriters wrote about the end of the world. Movies warned of the dangers of the bomb or made grim jokes about the fate of humanity.

 

The dropping of the atom bomb on Japan in the summer of 1945 shocked the world. But the American public did not automatically view atomic weapons and atomic energy as dangerous. This was partly because the U.S. government engaged in a concerted public affairs campaign to make atomic power seem safe and positive, so that the public would not object to having an atomic power plant built in their backyard. Government information booklets and movies proclaimed the benefits of "our friend the atom." In addition, for years the United States was the only country that possessed atomic weapons. It had no rivals and it had "the Bomb."

 

But other factors also influenced the culture as well. Atomic energy and bombs symbolized power and strength and businesses sought to take advantage of this reputation. By 1947, there were 45 businesses listed in the Manhattan phone book that used the word "atomic" in their name, including one for underwear. A French bathing suit designer adopted the name "bikini", the island where two American atom bombs were tested in 1946, for his new two-piece bathing suit; he thought that the name connoted the explosive effect that the suit would have on men. Designers of everything from clocks to corporate logos soon adopted what came to be known as "Atomic Style" into their work. It was a form of design that often included rays and spheres simulating the path of electrons around the nucleus of an atom, or the burst of neutrons during the fission process. In 1946, cereal maker General Mills offered children an "Atomic 'Bomb' Ring" if they sent in a Kix cereal boxtop and 15 cents. The ring featured a secret compartment and a "concealed observation lens" that allowed children to look at flashes "caused by the released energy of atoms splitting like crazy in the sealed warhead atom chamber."

 

But while many people tried to capitalize on the image of power and energy evoked by the atom and "the Bomb," no amount of government propaganda or pop culture could obscure the fact that atom bombs were dangerous. This fact became all the more apparent when the Soviet Union detonated its first atom bomb in 1949 and various magazines began reporting on the effects that an atom bomb would have on an American city like New York. Within the United States, various groups of scientists formed anti-nuclear organizations such as the Atomic Scientists of Chicago and the Federation of American Scientists. The Chicago group published a highly influential magazine titled The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and even adopted a "Doomsday Clock" that they intended to symbolize the world's proximity to self-destruction. Newspapers proclaimed that the world was only "five minutes to midnight" and regularly reported the movement of the clock's minute hand.

 

Movies also reflected this new anxiety about the bomb. In 1946, MGM Studios released a movie titled The Beginning or the End, about the threat of atomic war. Soon many movies featured atomic themes. Strategic Air Command, starring James Stewart, who had flown bombers during World War II, was about a colonel for the U.S. Air Force's primary strategic force struggling to improve a bombing wing's performance. Even bad, or at least cheesy, movies featured the atom bomb. In Them!, giant ants, mutated by atomic radiation, threatened Los Angeles. In The Amazing Colossal Man, a military officer irradiated during an atomic test grows to huge proportions, eventually wearing a circus tent because his pants no longer fit. The Japanese movie Gojira, released in Japan in 1954, was about a lizard irradiated by an atomic test. Re-released in 1956 with English dubbing and some extra scenes featuring American actor Raymond Burr, it was renamed Godzilla! The giant lizard stomped on Tokyo, and would do so again and again in dozens of sequels.

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of movies also attempted to make social commentaries on the war. Films like On the Beach, Fail Safe and The Bedford Incident all took a grim tone about humanity's future, wagging a finger at world leaders who held the fate of the world in their hands and implying that words like "democracy" and "communism" had little meaning when the world was teetering on the brink of Armageddon. Later in the 1960s, the comedy The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! took a more light-hearted approach and tried to argue that the people of the two superpowers were not all that different after all, for instance, they all cared about little children in trouble. But the atom bomb and the Cold War often led to much darker, and more fatalistic humor.

 

In the early 1960s, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick decided to tackle the subject of nuclear war and selected Peter George's book Red Alert! as the subject of his next movie project. The book was about a Strategic Air Command general who goes crazy and launches his B-52 bombers at the Soviet Union. But after struggling with the subject, Kubrick decided that the superpower confrontation was too insane to be dealt with rationally. Instead of a serious drama, Kubrick decided to make a black comedy titled Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Released in 1964, it is widely regarded as the best movie about the Cold War ever made. It featured many classic one-liners, such as the crazy General Jack D. Ripper's monologue: "I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." But even the "sane" generals were often no better, carrying around thick binders titled "World Targets in Megadeaths" and arguing about a "Doomsday Gap." Kubrick captured the ultimate silliness of the situation when the President attempted to stop an argument by yelling: "Gentlemen, you cannot fight in here! This is the War Room!"

 

Mathematics teacher Tom Lehrer rose to prominence as a comedic piano player and singer in the 1960s with such songs as New Math and The Vatican Rag. Lehrer noted that it was common to write songs memorializing wars. But since everyone would likely be dead after World War III, he thought it prudent to write a song memorializing that war before it happened. So Long Mom (A Song for World War III) was supposedly sung by a bomber pilot on his first, and last, mission and featured lyrics such as "So while you swelter, down there in your shelter, you can see me, on your TV…." and "I'll search for you when the war is over, an hour and a half from now."

 

In 1982, with the Cold War still raging (no one knew that it would be over in less than a decade), filmmakers produced the short documentary film Atomic Cafe, which resurrected a number of absurd early government propaganda films from the 1950s on how to survive an atomic attack. They included such helpful advice as the fact that hats could help protect you from the flash of an atom bomb. The documentary notably featured the 10-minute film Duck and Cover, originally produced for the Civil Defense Administration in 1951. Duck and Cover presented the animated Bert the Turtle, who was told how to protect himself from an atomic blast, simulated by a firecracker detonating. Bert was accompanied by this little song:

 

There was a turtle by the name of Bert

And Bert the turtle was very alert

When danger threatened him he never got hurt

He knew just what to doooo...

He'd duck! And cov-er...

 

-Dwayne Day

 

Sources and further reading:

 

Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1990.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Vanderbilt, Tom. Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

 

"Clay's Atomic Cafe Wav Page." http://www.slonet.org/~rloomis/acafe.html

"Dr. Strangelove of: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." http://www.kubrick.dk/strangelove_manus.html

Federation of American Scientists. http://www.fas.org

 

Educational Organization	Standard Designation (where applicable)	Content of Standard
International Technology Education Association	Standard 4	Students will develop an understanding of the cultural, social, economic, and political effects of technology.
International Technology Education Association	Standard 6	Students will develop an understanding of the role of society in the development and use of technology.
National Center for History in the Schools	US History Era 9 Standard 4	How the Cold War and conflicts in Korea and Vietnam influenced domestic and international politics.