Betsy Hartmann, Draft February 2012; Please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission
Chapter One: The Mystery of the Atom
Fall 1961 by Robert Lowell1
All autumn, the chafe and jar Of nuclear war; We have talked our extinction to death. I swim like a minnow behind my studio window.
Our end drifts nearer, the moon lifts, radiant with terror The state is a diver under a glass bell.
A father’s no shield for his child. We are like a lot of wild spiders crying together but without tears.
“I discovered quickly that the atomic bomb could not only destroy bodies and cities but also have an all-enveloping impact on the mind. Anyone involved with the bomb could become entrapped by it, especially survivors but also people who sought to engage it in their imaginations.”
Robert Jay Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century2
“The atomic cloud formed by the detonation seems close enough to touch, and tension gone, Poth and Wilson do a little clowning for the camera.”3
1 Chapter One: The Mystery of the Atom
If there was ever a time when apocalypse threatened to become reality, it was
during the decades of the Cold War as my generation came of age. When the Berlin Wall and bipolar world crumbled in 1989, the prospect of nuclear Armageddon radically diminished, but it left an indelible mark. My journey to the apocalypse and beyond begins
with the atomic bomb because it has to, because of how it insinuated itself into my body,
mind, and heart. It is tempting to forget those years, to compress them into a fleeting
moment, a weird blip in history, a plague from which the human race recovered and
moved on. But we cannot afford that forgetting, not just because nuclear weapons, power
and waste are still very much with us, planetary threats of enormous magnitude, but
because the shadow of the mushroom cloud still darkens and obscures our vision.
Each of us has a nuclear history, though of course those histories are not all the
same. For the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the indigenous peoples whose lands
became nuclear testing grounds, the uranium miners and weapons workers sickened by
radiation exposure, the violence unleashed by the atom bomb was close up and personal -
- and often deadly. For many others the violence remains invisible and intangible, hard to
bring into the light of consciousness especially in a country that has never had a real
reckoning with its nuclear past. There is the illusion of distance: “It was terrible, but it
didn’t really affect me.”
But it did, and it still does.
My own nuclear history begins in 1951 when I was born in the hot July of a very
Cold War. It was the year atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons began at the Nevada
Proving Ground, later renamed the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
2 The Atomic Energy Commission made no public announcements about the tests even
though they were powerful enough to light up the night sky over Los Angeles and San
Francisco, and tourists came to Las Vegas and other nearby towns to witness the
mushroom clouds.4 The November explosion of the “Dog” bomb was the first time
American soldiers conducted field exercises in conjunction with a test. The army used
them as guinea pigs, making them witness the blast from about six miles away and then
move in closer for defensive maneuvers.
Thanks to the Nevada Test Site, and other locations around the world where the
Americans, Soviets, British, French and Chinese exploded atomic bombs into the atmosphere, we all have radioactive residues in our bodies. According to a 2001 government report, if you’ve lived in the contiguous United States any time since 1951, all organs and tissues of your body have received some radiation exposure from nuclear fallout. Exposure isn’t just a question of proximity to test sites, but which direction the wind happened to blow that day or where it happened to rain. Maps of radiation exposure show higher densities around Nevada and neighboring states, but hotspots are sprinkled throughout the country. The government report estimates that excess cancer deaths from fallout exposure are likely to be the highest in persons born in 1951 because on average they received higher doses of radiation than people born either earlier or later.5
From that perspective 1951 is not a terribly auspicious birth date, but I was lucky in other ways -- lucky to be born in fact. In 1942, at the age of 19, my father was one of the first students to drop out of Princeton University to join the war effort. He became a marine dive bomber pilot, flying over 80 missions in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands in
3 the Pacific. His plane got hit a number of times, but he made it out alive. Shortly after he
returned back to the U.S. in late 1945, he proposed to my mother who was in graduate
school at Iowa State University. They settled back in Princeton where my father
completed university on the GI bill and then became a history teacher at a local prep
school. My mother bore three healthy daughters of whom I was the youngest. Sometimes
they spotted Einstein sailing on Lake Carnegie.
A year after my birth they moved to Wilmington, Delaware where my father got a
better paying teaching job. Three years later my mother developed malignant thyroid
cancer. While it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact cause, she was doubly exposed to
nuclear contamination. Thyroid cancer is one of the most common cancers associated
with fallout exposure since radioiodines such as Iodine-131 concentrate in the thyroid
gland. A 1997 National Cancer Institute study estimated that exposure to Iodine-131 from
the Nevada tests alone probably led to an additional 11,300-212,000 thyroid cancers in
the U.S.6
Risks of exposure are higher for those who worked directly with radioactive
materials in the nuclear weapons complex. While my mother was studying agricultural economics at Iowa State, her best friends there, including my godmother, were doing
secretive research for the Manhattan Project at the university’s Ames Laboratory.
Beginning in 1942 the lab developed new methods for producing the high-purity uranium
needed for atomic research. In the process it generated radioactive dusts at extremely
high levels. There were little to no personal protections, engineering controls or radiation monitoring to protect workers, though my godmother’s job was to test the urine of the scientists to gauge their exposure. In 2005, over 60 years later, the Department of Energy
4 finally established a Former Worker Medical Screening Program for the Ames
Laboratory, with possible compensation for 22 radiation-induced cancers. Thyroid cancer
is on the list.7
So where did my mother’s cancer come from? Fallout? Or exposure at Ames
where she lived with my godmother and dated one of the Manhattan Project scientists before my father swept her off her feet? Was there radioactive dust on their hands or clothes or in the food they ate? Or was she just genetically predisposed to cancer? Or could it be all of the above?
While I’ll never know the exact cause, I do know something about the effect. In
the 1950s household such things were not talked about openly with children, and my
mother’s diagnosis was a carefully kept secret from my sisters and me. But no matter
how tight the container, fear has a way of seeping out. When my mother went to Boston
for her operation, I got very sick. One of my first memories is of our favorite babysitter
giving me a stuffed toy cat as I lay in bed recovering from fever. All through childhood I
clutched that cat at night even though its fur and button eyes fell off and it looked like a
blind old alley cat that has been in one too many fights.
Fortunately, my mother survived and life went on, though a sense of danger
remained, a slight whiff of death like in an upscale nursing home where they do everything they can to keep the floors and patients spotless clean yet you can still smell the presence of the Grim Reaper. In our house he hid in the shadows, but I knew he was there. To keep him at bay my mother imposed a tight order on her life – she stopped drinking alcohol, carefully watched what she ate, took a nap at the same time everyday. I kept a messy room, but lucky for me, my psychologist uncle advised her not to impose
5 too much order on me. In the family system I was classified the happy child and for the
most part I was. But from the time of my mother’s brush with death I developed a dark
imagination that only grew darker over the years.
And so when I look back, I see my childhood in a kind of chiaroscuro. When I
was seven, we moved to Dallas, Texas where my father became headmaster of an elite
boys’ school. Affluence surrounded us, the campus was a gigantic playground, we swam
in the pools of millionaires, diving into sky blue chlorinated water and coming up for air in a world baked white by hot sun and racial prejudice. That whiteness of being made my
fears seem all the darker by comparison and I struggled for mastery over them by reading
mysteries and then imagining and enacting my own as if I were Nancy Drew.
It was all play until the night the Prowler penetrated our walled backyard and
lurked by my oldest sister’s window. Later he broke into our garage and then the
chaplain’s house where he masturbated in the wife’s underwear. My father put alarms on
the gates and doors, but our sense of safety vanished. My imagination ran amuck. I
created a stand-in for the Prowler, an evil villain named Cliff Moss who stalked me, and
enlisted my best friend and then my whole class in his pursuit. The mini mass hysteria I
created lasted almost a year. I frightened myself into sleeping with a knife under the
pillow and the closet light on. My heart beat fast. But it was the fifties and I was a good
girl and no adult thought that I might need some help to calm me down.
And so the Prowler joined the Grim Reaper in the shadows of my childhood.
When I got old enough to analyze myself – those heady years of college when we read
Freud and Jung and smoked a lot of pot – I latched on to my mother’s cancer and the
6 Prowler’s sexual predation as the source of my early fears. But there was still a sense of
a darker, deeper mystery left unsolved.
In my late twenties I turned my hand to writing a political thriller, searching for a
neat ending, a way to tie all the knots. But the relief was temporary and the fear just kept
lingering on. It wasn’t until recently, the year I turned 60, that I came to realize the Grim
Reaper of my childhood wore more than one hat. I carried within me not only the fear of
losing my mother, but of the whole world ending in a catastrophic nuclear war.
How does one unbury one’s nuclear fears, inspect them, catalogue them, lay them
to rest? Is it about peeling the layers off the onion and letting loose the tears? Seducing
yourself with the language of trauma? Figuring out the neuropathways by which fear instantiates itself in the brain? And what about the dangers of overstating the case?
Memory is hardly reliable, and moreover how do you separate the experience of nuclear fear from all the other fears that kept and keep you awake at night?
There is no one clue, no easy answer, but sometimes something comes along to
shed a little light. While researching the Nevada Test Site, I stumbled on a government
photograph taken during a 1952 bomb test that shows two Marines lifting their hands to
touch the mushroom cloud. The caption reads, “The atomic cloud formed by the
detonation seems close enough to touch, and tension gone, Poth and Wilson do a little
clowning for the camera.”8 Of course the irony is that although they weren’t close enough to touch the cloud, its radioactivity was close enough to touch them. Is that the metaphor I’m searching for then – the bomb as magic show, with its illusions become delusions? To come to terms with nuclear fears, one first has to understand the tricks the
magician had up his sleeves, the history they didn’t teach us in school.
7 First, there is the Choicelessness Delusion. We had to drop the bomb on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end World War II and spare hundreds of
thousands of American soldiers from a deadly invasion of Japan. I grew up believing that,
believing that thanks to the bomb, my father didn’t have to return to the Pacific. He was
more certain about it than my mother. Her friends who worked for the Manhattan Project
were promised that Japan would be warned before we dropped the bomb and felt deeply
betrayed when it wasn’t.
The historical record now clearly shows that other choices could have been made.
Even President Harry Truman who called the destruction of Hiroshima the “greatest day
in history” and claimed that he never lost sleep over it, knew he had made a decision.9
And it was a decision that was less about saving American lives than punishing Japan,
justifying the huge expenditures on the Manhattan Project, keeping the Soviets out of
Asia, and displaying American power. It was common knowledge that Japan was on the
verge of defeat and seeking a way to surrender. Many World War II American military
leaders have admitted that we didn’t need to drop the bomb. In 1963 former General and
President Dwight Eisenhower wrote that when he learned from the Secretary of War
Stimson that the bomb would be used, he became depressed and voiced “grave
misgivings.” The Japanese would surrender soon so that “dropping the bomb was
completely unnecessary” and “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American
lives.”10 The official U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 came to the conclusion that
Japan would have surrendered before the end of 1945 without the bomb, the entrance of
Russia into the Pacific war, or even the threat of an invasion.11
8 Another choice also lay within Truman’s choice to drop the bomb – the deliberate
selection of civilian targets. Truman claimed that Hiroshima was targeted because it was
a military base, and “we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing
of civilians.”12 In fact, Hiroshima was a city of 350,000 people, 140,000 of whom died.
Nagasaki had 270,000 inhabitants, 70,000 died. The Interim Committee that advised
Truman on the bomb rejected the idea of a demonstration blast, and evidently bombing a
less populated area of Japan was not considered. Instead, they looked for targets with
many wood-frame buildings in close proximity to each other that would be highly
vulnerable to the blast and ensuing fires.13
The choice to target the population centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not an aberration or discontinuity in American military thinking. On the contrary, it was the logical consequence of an aerial war strategy whose main mission was the killing and
terrorizing of civilians. During the earlier part of World War II the U.S. had behaved better than either its enemies or most of its allies in terms of targeting civilians. But by
February 1945 it had moved to a total war strategy that concentrated on the firebombing
of cities. The destruction American pilots unleashed on the German city of Hamburg
alone was equal to the power of two Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. Dresden was next,
and then in March the terror bombing of Japan commenced. On March 9-10, 100,000 people lost their lives in the firebombing of Tokyo.14
In the final accounting, the U.S. outdid all other countries in terms of aerial
destruction in World War II.15 Twenty-five years later two of the key architects of World
War II firebombing, Air Force General Curtis LeMay and Robert McNamara, Secretary
of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, would support the massive
9 bombing of Vietnam -- the most intensive bombing campaign in history. More tonnage of
bombs was dropped on Vietnam than during the whole of World War II.16
What is so extraordinary about the Choicelessness Delusion is its staying power.
Despite the wealth of careful scholarship exploding its myths and blunt statements by the
men who executed the decision to drop the bomb – even “bombs away” Curtis LeMay
later admitted it wasn’t necessary and he did it “because President Truman told me to do
it”17 – the official narrative of my childhood still stands as sacred truth. The atomic
bomb ended the war and saved American lives, and we owe the Japanese people no
apology.
In 1994, in honor of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the bombing, the U.S.
Postal Service designed a mushroom cloud stamp with the words, “Atom bombs hasten
war’s end, August 1945.” After protests from the Japanese, President Clinton withdrew
the proposed stamp, but he refused to apologize for the bombing.18 The Smithsonian
National Air and Space Museum planned an extensive exhibit around the Enola Gay
airplane to mark the anniversary, but the content was effectively censored and eviscerated
because the curators’ script dared to raise a few questions about the A-bomb decision.19
Even a watch and a child’s melted lunchbox, found among the ruins of Hiroshima, were blocked from the exhibit lest they remind viewers of the flesh and blood individuals who lost their lives so violently that day.20
Delusion number two, the Distance Delusion, depends on such censorship of the bomb’s impact. I grew up exposed to vivid pictures of the Holocaust’s human toll, of emaciated concentration camp survivors and mass graves of crumpled skeletons.
Because of these photographs, the distance between me and the over six million victims
10 who perished was lessened. I saw and felt the horror of the Holocaust, knew it was evil,
found hope in the words “never again.” But the bomb was not about bodies, it was about
a far off mushroom cloud, more a force of nature than a human creation, eerie and even
beautiful like the blue Northers and twisters that roiled the big Texas sky. Although the
postage stamp of the mushroom cloud was never put in circulation, it is that iconic image
that is stamped indelibly on my brain.
Why didn’t I see the bodies?
The abstraction was in fact calculated. As the mayor of Nagasaki remarked during
the postage stamp controversy, the image of the cloud prevented people from seeing that
beneath it “hundreds of thousands of noncombatant women and children were killed or
injured on the spot.”21 Most Japanese survivors have no memory of seeing a mushroom cloud because it would have been visible only from high up in the sky or some miles
distant on land. At ground zero all people saw was a blinding flash.22 What happened to
them after the flash was kept carefully from us, censored in fact. Pictures of the
bombing later shown to the public were panoramic views of destruction, charred
buildings but not charred bodies.
It wasn’t that photographic footage of the dead and wounded didn’t exist.
Japanese photographer Yamahata Yosuke took pictures in Nagasaki a day after the blast.
Initially, a few photographs of the carnage found their way into the American and
Japanese press, but as the U.S. began its military occupation of Japan, most footage was seized and locked in a vault so as not to disturb “public tranquility.”23 The extent of radiation injuries was also kept hush-hush. After interviewing survivors in September
1945, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett published a story on radiation sickness and
11 confronted American authorities. Arguing that he was a victim of Japanese propaganda,
they sent him to a hospital for examination and his camera, with a roll of film from
Hiroshima, disappeared.24
The radiation effects were of keen interest to American scientists who came to
study the survivors, but not treat them, and who refused to share their findings with
Japanese physicians and scientists.25 Their photographs show close-ups of damaged body
parts, but not whole people. The Japanese were not the only guinea pigs. Back home in
the U.S. dangerous and painful radiation experiments were conducted on soldiers,
terminally ill patients, mentally disabled children and prisoners.26 According to one
physician working for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the experiments had “a
little of the Buchenwald touch.”27
With the end of American occupation in 1952, suppressed photographs and films
of the atomic victims finally became available in Japan, but they remained largely unseen by American viewers until much later. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that film footage confiscated by the American occupation authorities was finally released.28 Shielding
Americans from the visual knowledge of the bomb’s impact on the Japanese prepared the
ground for the third delusion in the magic show, the transformation of perpetrator into
victim.
The Victim/Perpetrator Delusion is one of the oldest psychological games in town, practiced by sociopaths the world over. How better to avoid moral responsibility for one’s crimes than to assume victim status? It is also an effective and frequently used tool of statecraft. The vacuum created by the censorship of Japanese footage made the
American imagination highly susceptible to government propaganda that the bomb was
12 coming to get us. The AEC, for example, distributed scary images of atomic attacks on major American cities, including one featuring a glowing nuclear fireball above the New
York skyline.29 This distraction made it even easier to forget the suffering of the
Japanese.
But it wasn’t just the government that engaged in these tactics. Well before the nuclear arms race between the Americans and the Soviets, popular media conjured up nightmarish scenarios of atomic death and destruction on U.S. soil. In November 1945, only a few months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Life magazine ran a spread on “The 36-
Hour War,” a grim depiction of an atomic attack on 13 major American cities, complete with realistic drawings of the ruins left behind. New York is pictured as a tangled mess of radioactive debris with only the two iconic marble lions of the Public Library left standing watch.30 From 1945-47 the movement of nuclear scientists against the bomb also used doomsday scenarios to attract public attention and support. While their intentions were honorable, the strategy ultimately backfired. As atomic historian Paul
Boyer writes, the fears and emotions they incited helped to create “fertile psychological soil for the ideology of American nuclear superiority and an all-out crusade against communism.”31
Initially, it wasn’t clear who our enemy actually was – we were victims of an illusive perpetrator. In Life’s 36-Hour War our attackers are an unspecified hostile force, operating from Africa of all places. But once the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, the enemy finally had a face. Already terrified and titillated by atomic thrills, many Americans fell under the spell of the Great Satan Delusion. Whatever moral
13 ambiguity had existed in the immediate aftermath of the war was lost in the new battle
between the forces of Good and Evil.
The Christian dualism that underlies the Great Satan Delusion is a force which
runs long and deep in American culture and helps explain the endurance of apocalyptic
thinking. Add the bomb to the God/Satan binary and the result is national psychosis. It
was the scaffolding that allowed the construction of the Cold War and the nuclear arms
race, and it became a defining characteristic of the age of American empire.
In his book on fear and faith in the arms race, author Sheldon Ungar describes the
bomb as a numinous entity, provoking spiritual feelings of awe and transcendent power
on the one hand and demonic dread and fear on the other. These dimensions of the bomb
aligned well with the country’s civil religion. Ever since the Puritans set about to build
their City on the Hill, the belief that We are the Chosen People, that America is the New
Jerusalem has contributed to our imperial faith in manifest destiny and American exceptionalism. Of course only we would have the moral and spiritual capability to own
and control the bomb. As President Truman remarked in 1945, “the possession in our
hands of this new power of destruction we regard as a sacred trust.”32
When the Soviets muscled into the action in 1949, it did not take long for us to
view them as the diabolical foe. Indeed the existence of such a foe was necessary to
create the public fear that sustained the American drive for nuclear supremacy. Periodic
moral panics that Satan was about to overtake us, as occurred with the Korean War, the
Sputnik launch and the Cuban missile crisis, raised the background level of nuclear fear
into full blown hysteria, fuelling the escalation of the arms race. The close association of
the bomb with the preservation of the “American way of life” also meant that the evil
14 Soviet communists threatened the very foundations of our national identity, including that
other sacred trust of ours, the free market.33 So strong was the fear of communism in the
U.S. that a 1961 Gallup Poll found that given the choice between fighting an all-out
nuclear war or living under communist rule, 81 percent of Americans chose war as
opposed to only 21 percent of British respondents.34
For many Christian fundamentalists the battle with the Soviets signified the coming of the Biblical apocalypse. The Soviet Union was the evil enemy Gog whose
invasion of Israel would hasten in the end times. It wasn’t only popular prophesy writers
who took up the theme, but prominent politicians like Ronald Reagan. In 1971, during a
dinner with California lawmakers, Reagan stated that Russia “fits the description of Gog
perfectly.” He went on to say that “For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.”35
Of course not everyone bought the Great Satan delusion, and that includes my
own family. Growing up in a secular, liberal household, the closest I got to religion was
studying dinosaurs and Robert Frost in Unitarian Sunday school. God might or might not
exist – it was up to you to decide -- but there was never any talk of Satan. My parents
weren’t strong anti-communists either; they believed in civil liberties and political
pluralism and hated Joseph McCarthy. Even as the Soviet menace was ratcheted up, I
still believed the personification of all evil was the Nazis. Stalin had nothing on Adolph
Hitler.
It was the sports, not the religious, aspect of our competition with the Soviets that
affected me. I can still remember when my parents woke me up on a brisk fall night in
1957 to see the Sputnik satellite twinkle in the sky. I’d never been outside like that in the
15 middle of the night and the experience was more fun than scary. We were in a race with
the Russians! I understood races – I loved to run and I loved to win. A whole generation of schoolchildren was Sputnikized that night. Study hard and the country can catch up.
Run, run, run.
In the aftermath of Sputnik, federal money poured into education, scientific
research and development, defense reorganization and the space program so we could
beat the Russians. An (imaginary) “missile gap” between the Americans and Soviets was
manufactured to justify the expenditures. The military-industrial complex that President
Eisenhower so presciently warned about was birthed and fattened, even over his own objections.36 All for the race – but what lay beyond the finish line? Who would win
when there was mass annihilation on both sides? In the face of such questions, it was no
easy matter for the government to sustain public confidence in the crazy race against the
Great Satan. But there was another magic trick up its sleeve, the Shelter Delusion, designed to convince us we could survive a nuclear attack.
I came across my first bomb shelter at the age of ten or eleven, sometime between
the 1961 Berlin face-off and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, in a shopping center a few
miles from our house in the soon-to-be sprawling suburbs of North Dallas. There in the
parking lot a model of a pod-like shelter was on display, complete with mannequin
members of a nuclear family. The mother, the perfect housewife, was carrying a tray. I
think she wore an apron, but I’m not sure. For a moment I imagined myself inside, with
her as my mother, but then I turned away, hurrying into the grocery store to buy a Dr.
Pepper. By the time the Cuban missile crisis hit, rich classmates of mine had their own
bomb shelters outside of town on their daddies’ ranches. I wasn’t jealous exactly – I
16 suffer from claustrophobia and the idea of being cooped up in a small space had zero
appeal – but there was something that fascinated me about shelters, the doll-house quality
of them, as if they were made for play, for setting the mannequins in motion.
The early 1960s saw the real take-off of the Shelter Delusion. In the early 1950s
the government’s civil defense operations promoted the evacuation of city dwellers into
rural areas as a short-term response and suburbanization as a long-term strategy to reduce
likely atomic deaths in major urban targets.37 The famous Bert the Turtle’s Duck and
Cover booklet and animated film, released in 1951, ushered in an era of bomb drills in
American schools, while adults were instructed in the pamphlet Survival under Atomic
Attack how to protect themselves by sheltering in a culvert or even their cars.38 In a
particularly macabre move, New York City school officials experimented with giving
pupils dog tags so their bodies could be identified after an atomic blast.39 But with the
development of the more powerful hydrogen bomb, increased knowledge about fallout,
and then by the end of the decade the introduction of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles
(IBMs) that reduced warning time to 15 minutes, it became clearer that Bert the Turtle
could no longer safely hide under his shell.
Civil defense officials had promoted home shelters to some extent during the
1950s, likening potential nuclear attacks to survivable natural disasters like hurricanes,
earthquakes and tornadoes, and in the process naturalizing a very manmade threat.
However, few home shelters were actually built –by March 1960 there were only an
estimated 1500 shelters across 35 states.40 But then in the summer of 1961 the Cold War
suddenly got very hot. When Krushchev threatened to kick the Western Allies out of
Berlin, President Kennedy counterattacked by raising the specter of a nuclear response.
17 In a famous July speech he called for a $207 million initiative to fund public and private
fallout shelters, claiming that “the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear
blast and fire can still be saved – if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is
available.”41 The Cuban missile crisis the following year brought the world even closer to
the eve of destruction.
The home shelter business took off in these years, for it was a business, complete
with scam artists making quick bucks off people’s fears. Across the country shopping
centers and trade shows sported models, some more durable than others. By 1965 the
number of shelters in American homes had risen to a peak of about 200,000, but then the
craze died out. Historian Kenneth Rose cites a number of reasons for the demise of the home shelter. Among them are political developments like the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty that eased superpower tensions. A well-designed and well-stocked shelter was expensive too – not that many people could afford them. Psychologically, people were resistant to the idea of burrowing underground like moles, and a national conversation about ‘shelter morality’ brought up uncomfortable issues like whether or not you would
‘Gun Thy Neighbor’ if he or she demanded access. Add to these a sense of apathy and fatigue from mentally accommodating so long to the prospect of Armageddon.42 Que sera, sera.
But even if most Americans didn’t burrow deep in shelters, the idea of the bomb
shelter burrowed deep in many of us. Scholars of Cold War civil defense have analyzed
the ways it reflected and reinforced the dominant race, class and gender roles of the time.
The families depicted in bomb shelter propaganda and advertisements were typically
white and middle class, with father and son doing the construction work and mother and
18 daughter in charge of provisions.43 Hence the mannequin mommy in the bomb shelter
model I saw in Dallas was holding out a tray, offering plastic food rations to her family.
The image of that mannequin stayed with me for a long time. I had seen ones like
her before in glittery Dallas department stores where like giant Barbie dolls, they offered
up their nubile bodies to be clothed in the latest fashions. Mannequins were about buying,
not about dying, but now the two became connected in my mind as if the spectacle of the
bomb and the spectacle of consumerism were two sides of the same coin. In the bomb
shelter food and water would surely run out, I was old enough to make that calculation.
But outside, as long as the world still existed, the promise of affluence beckoned like the
Christmas star.
I didn’t know then that mannequins were also employed in experiments at the
Nevada Test site where the army constructed imitation small towns and suburbs to see the
effects of the blasts. The mannequins were always white and well-dressed; in a
particularly macabre form of product placement, in one test they sported clothes donated
by the J.C. Penney corporation.44 Knowing I was writing this book, a friend of mine unearthed a 1953 issue of National Geographic with a puff piece on how “Nevada Learns
to Live with the Atom…Sagebrush State Takes the Spectacular Tests in Stride.” Among the photographs is a picture of a pretty mannequin driving a Cadillac – lucky for her, the bomb only buckled the top of the car. In another a “winsome” female dummy, a classy robe slipping provocatively off her shoulders, sits smilingly intact in a cellar shelter.45
Shop till you drop in other words.
And this brings us to the last delusion, the promise of an Atomic Utopia. For every stick of scarcity the Cold Warriors threw at us, they dangled a golden carrot. It
19 wasn’t hard to do. After all, the postwar years saw the spectacular rise of American
consumer capitalism: the economy was booming, living standards were improving,
Madison Avenue and the middle class danced in step.
The bomb was part of the heady mix. Entrepreneurs and advertisers quickly
seized on its sex appeal. The radioactive dust had barely settled in Hiroshima when
“Atom Bomb Dancers” performed in burlesque shows in Los Angeles and Life magazine
ran a full-page picture of “The Anatomic Bomb,” a new MGM starlet who was featured
lying languidly by a swimming pool, soaking up the rays. In 1946, when American
nuclear tests began in the South Pacific, the first bomb dropped on the Bikini islands had
an image of Rita Hayworth painted on the side, and a French designer coined the name bikini for a new skimpy bathing suit. For the kids more wholesome items like the atomic
bomb ring were available for 15 cents plus a Kix cereal boxtop from General Mills.46
In the aftermath of the Bikini tests, the public became more wary of radiation
effects, and the bomb started to lose its allure as a sexy consumer fetish. In the 1948
bestseller No Place to Hide, David Bradley, a physician employed by the Radiological
Safety Unit in the islands, wrote powerfully about the ecological damage caused by the
bombs and their impact on the displaced natives.47 As Americans began to shed some of
their tasteless innocence, Cold Warriors turned to other ways to sell the bomb.
The main strategy they hit on was to promote the “peaceful atom.” Whether you
want to call it a conspiracy or a just a concerted effort, growing hype about the peaceful
atom was consciously orchestrated by government, big business and the media.48
Appealing to the American Dream of eternal abundance, the AEC, with corporate
partners such as General Electric, initiated a public relations campaign in the late 1940s
20 that included exhibits, comic books, movies, and school textbooks about the wonders of
the atom, particularly its potential as an energy source. The 1948 high school study unit,
Operation Atomic Vision, told students that with nuclear power:
You may live to drive a plastic car powered by an atomic engine and reside in a completely air-conditioned plastic house. Food will be cheap and abundant everywhere in the world…No one will need to work long hours. There will be much leisure and a network of large recreational areas will cover the country, if not the world.49
In 1953 President Eisenhower gave his famous “Atoms for Peace” speech before the UN,
and in 1957 the first nuclear power plant was inaugurated in Shippingsport, Pennsylvania.
As AEC Chairman David Lilienthal openly acknowledged, there was a symbiotic
relationship between nuclear weapons research and the atom’s peaceful uses: they were
“virtually an identical process: two sides of the same coin.”50 Some scientists went even
further, promoting nuclear bombs as tools for massive earthworks such as the
construction of canals and harbors. In 1957 the AEC initiated Project Plowshare to
investigate such possibilities, and a year later H-bomb guru Edward Teller launched
Project Chariot to dig out a deepwater harbor at Cape Thompson in northwestern Alaska with thermonuclear bombs. The ostensible purpose was to bring economic development to the region, but the real motive was to test the weapons and to show the Soviets who was boss.51
While Project Chariot was ultimately foiled by resistance from Inupiat Eskimos,
scientists and ecologists, the utopian promise of nuclear energy lived on, reaching another
peak in the 1960s and early 1970s as over a hundred nuclear power plants were
constructed across the country. Ironically, their formidable financial costs gave lie to the
21 idea of cheap energy abundance, but in the era of climate change, the prospect of a
“nuclear renaissance” is now upon us, a subject I return to later in the book.
Living with these delusions, and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation, made postwar America a crazy place to grow up. Yet remarkably little attention was paid to the bomb’s psychological effects on children -- or on adults for that matter, except as it pertained to the efficient execution of the Cold War. The government had to perform a careful balancing act between scaring the public enough that they would take civil defense seriously and keeping them from panicking, or even worse, from rejecting nuclear weapons entirely.
The psychology profession offered a helping hand in the development of civil defense and propaganda operations needed to establish this “nuclear normality.”52 In the mid-fifties, for example, the National Security Council and the Federal Civil Defense
Administration included prominent psychiatrists on a special panel to study how to prepare Americans psychologically to accept the risk of a nuclear attack. In its 1956 report, the panel recommended “less emphasis on the symbols and images of disaster” since drawing attention to the possibility of annihilation could cause the public to be
“attuned to the avoidance of nuclear war, no matter what the cost.” Such a pacifist response would weaken support for government policies that involved a significant risk of nuclear war. The authors made a patriotic call to “our pioneer background and inheritance [which] predispose us to count hardships as a challenge and fortify us against complacency.”53 An ironic choice of words since public complacency was exactly what they were aiming for.
22 It wasn’t until the early 1960s that a few real pioneers in the psychology
profession dared to find out how children were experiencing the nuclear threat. In 1962-
63, Sibylle Escalona and colleagues conducted a survey of 311 schoolchildren of varied
socioeconomic backgrounds and between the ages of 10-17 in the New York City area.
Even though the students were asked about their views of the future without specific
reference to war, over two-thirds mentioned its probability – “all the people will die and
the world will blow up,” wrote one – and even those who didn’t think war would happen
imagined a grim future, including everyone living underground. Only a few externalized
the danger on Communism; the vast majority saw the problem as nations and people just
needing to get along. “I wish Russia and Cuba be our friends,” wrote a ten-year-old in
what was a common refrain.54
In 1961-62, Milton Schwebel and colleagues conducted similar surveys of about
3000 mainly high school students in the New York City area, upstate New York and
suburban Philadelphia. The questions the researchers asked were more explicit: did
students think there was going to be a war, did they care, and what did they think about
fallout shelters? They concluded that students knew and cared about the threat of nuclear
war and described the “the nightmarish horrors with such vividness” that one would think
they had read accounts of Hiroshima survivors.55 Most students believed that shelters
should be available to all people and worried about being separated from their families
during an attack. Many desired peace. “Time and again,” Schwebel writes, “the students
described their universe as a highly uncertain one, its people greedy and irrational, its
future questionable. Their great hope lay in the fact that no nation could win and that rational people would not choose suicide, or that, at least conflict would be postponed
23 until they had a chance ‘to live’, i.e. to work, marry, have children.”56 While most
children functioned normally in their everyday lives, these fears gnawed at them and
some turned to denial. Schwebel’s concluding advice was that the threat of nuclear
disaster should be a focus of “therapeutic collective action” – by helping to build amore
peaceful world, students would feel more secure.57
What was the reaction to these studies? The silence was deafening. For over a
decade no one else took up the torch. Was it because young people were voicing
subversive truths and realistic fears that government and society wanted to avoid? Or
because psychologists and psychiatrists themselves couldn’t deal emotionally with the
subject matter, too worried for the safety of themselves and their own children to plumb
the depths of nuclear fear?58 Whatever the case, it wasn’t until the late 1970s that attention focused again on the issue. Surveys of over a thousand high schoolers by the
American Psychiatric Association Task Force on the Psychosocial Impacts of Nuclear
Developments found “a profound dis-ease and uncertainty about the future and a considerable amount of general pessimism” when students were asked nuclear war, civil defense and survival.59
The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought the Cold War to another
boiling point, as U.S. nuclear policy went from the status quo of MAD, Mutually Assured
Destruction, to the craziest yet – the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star
Wars. In 1983 Reagan announced the government’s plan to build a ground and space-
based missile defense system that could protect the country from a nuclear attack. In
reality, Star Wars was more about a first strike offense than a last ditch defense. If we
could hit the Soviets first and then protect ourselves from a counter-attack, we could win
24 a nuclear war. And if a few Soviet bombs managed to penetrate our shield, we could
survive through building simple shelters. As Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for
Strategic and Nuclear Forces, T.K. Jones, famously told reporter Robert Scheer, “Dig a
hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top…It’s the dirt
that does it…if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.”60
Reagan’s belligerence, along with his literalist belief in Biblical apocalypse, set
off alarm bells throughout the body politic. The same year Reagan announced Star Wars,
the widely viewed TV film The Day After graphically and emotionally represented what
life would be like for a family in Lawrence, Kansas in the aftermath of an atomic bomb.
Fears of a nuclear winter enveloping the globe also sent shivers up the spine. In the U.S.
and Europe, anti-nuclear movements gained supporters and strength.
This led to a new wave of research on children by psychologists and educators
who actively opposed the nuclear build-up. In addition to undertaking student surveys,
groups such as Educators for Social Responsibility and Union of Concerned Scientists
created curricula and sponsored dialogues in schools to help children voice their concerns
about nuclear war.61 There were also workshops for adults, such as Buddhist eco-
philosopher Joanna Macy’s Despair and Empowerment exercises with titles such as
“Spiritual Exercises for a Time of Apocalypse.” 62
Anti-nuclear curricula in the schools drew the ire of conservative hawks. A 1983
Congressional Hearing on Children’s Fears of War by the Select Committee on Children,
Youth and Families provides a fascinating window on how this aspect of child psychology became politicized. A Republican representative from Virginia, for example, accused anti-nuclear curricula as being a form of “political indoctrination.” A Kansas
25 psychiatrist testified that the approach could lead to the “devitalization” of America and induce in students despair, hopelessness, and an unwillingness to support the military or aggressive foreign policies. He attributed rising psychological distress in children not to
nuclear weapons, but to the decline of the family and women’s liberation:
As you know, family life in our society is deteriorating at a terrifying rate. The divorce epidemic is the major factor for this deterioration, but the mass exodus of women from the home, often due to economic pressure but also and probably largely to the seductive but false drumbeat of the women’s lib movement are major determinants…The developing child pays the highest penalty for the breakup of the home, the part-time or pathological home.63
Prominent anti-nuclear psychiatrists, including Robert Jay Lifton, and three eloquent
students from Iowa, New York and California offered opposing views.
I was in my early thirties at the time of that hearing, living in England, about to
become pregnant with my first child, hardly a schoolchild any more. I remember the sense of impending apocalypse very well, of sitting around with my husband and friends and worrying ourselves sick about nuclear war. On the wall of our apartment we had a
mock movie poster of Gone with the Wind picturing Ronald Reagan holding Margaret
Thatcher in his arms with a mushroom cloud in the background. “The Film to End all
Films,” the top caption read, “The Most EXPLOSIVE Love Story Ever.” And then
below, “She promised to follow him to the end of the earth. He promised to organize it.”
No doubt such gallows humor helped get us through – just as Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant black comedy Dr. Strangelove had in the 1960s -- but I found real therapy in collective action. I joined anti-nuclear protests, and in 1983 marched with a million people in London in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s protest over the siting of
American Cruise and Pershing 2 nuclear missiles in England. Similar demonstrations took place in other Western European capitals, and in the U.S. the Nuclear Freeze
26 Movement attracted many new adherents, including Democratic Party leaders. The sense
that sense would prevail, that we were finally waking up from the nuclear nightmare was
empowering. And the historical record shows that the anti-nuclear movement was
powerful – it had a major impact on pushing the Americans and Soviets towards
disarmament.64
While the end of Cold War considerably reduced the potential for nuclear
Armageddon, there was no real national reckoning about the insanities of the nuclear age or American responsibility for ushering it in by dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We won World War II and the Cold War so we much have been right.
Even now over 30 years later when you visit atomic tourist sites, the basic
message is that it’s good the Cold War is over, but we should be grateful that the nuclear
balance of terror kept us safe. If all you knew about the atomic bomb you learned from
the video at the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, you’d think the Manhattan
Project scientists were so brilliant that they created a bomb that killed no one in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and just brought American soldiers home to the waiting arms of
pretty women. At the Titan Missile Museum outside of Tucson, you can descend into the
underground control room of a de-commissioned Minuteman ICBM missile, but that’s as
deep as it gets. You’re encouraged to feel a kind of nostalgic awe for the mechanics of it,
the clever engineering and loyal soldiers who spent shifts underground, always at the
ready to destroy the world. At the museum’s perimeter fence white Border Patrol trucks
wait to make forays into the desert against one of our latest national security threats –
poor Mexicans.
27 But there is another kind of reckoning missing too, especially for us children of
the bomb, the baby doom generation. Could the bomb be at the root of some of more pernicious anxieties and continue to influence our relationships with people, nature, and death? Does it make us more susceptible to apocalyptic thinking about the future? To speak in generational terms is surely to over-generalize since no two people have the same experience, much less mental make-up. But the times you grow up in matter. They churn the water you swim in, steer the direction of the currents, make it easier or harder to come up for breath.
Of all the psychologists and psychiatrists who have studied the human dimensions
of the nuclear bomb, Robert Jay Lifton stands out for the depth and breadth of his insight.
In the early 1960s Lifton was the first American to study the psychological legacy of the
bomb in Japanese survivors. He went on from there to study its effects at home,
becoming a powerful voice against nuclear weapons professionally and politically.
Lifton uncovered a number of hidden influences. The fact that the bomb was
shrouded in secrecy gave it the special power of forbidden knowledge, especially in
children. Adults developed psychic numbing as a defensive measure against the ever
present threat of mass annihilation. The continued existence of the nuclear weapons
complex depended in fact on a high degree of collective numbing. When fear periodically
broke through, it often led to feelings of helplessness and the desire to seek safe haven in
resignation, cynicism and a bleak view of the human species. “Well, what is so special
about man?” is how Lifton describes the syndrome. “Other species have come and gone,
so perhaps this is our turn to become extinct.”65 For many the bomb also represented the
final victory of the machine over humanity, Frankenstein on steroids.
28 But numbing and cynicism weren’t the only reactions. Other people were keenly
aware that they were leading a double life: going about their day-to-day business quite pleasantly in affluent post-war America when at any moment they and their loved ones, if not the whole planet, could be obliterated. In the best of circumstances, this sparked a radical absurdity that helped inspire organized action and political art against the bomb.
“It is when we lose our sense of nuclear absurdity that we surrender to the forces of annihilation and cease to imagine the real,” Lifton wrote.66
The bomb profoundly shaped relationships with nature too. Holding in our minds
violent images of mushroom clouds and ravaged environments intensified the feeling of
painful separation from the ideal of a healing and eternal nature. The desire to overcome
that separation contributed to the lure of the back to the land movement, in which many
of my generation, including myself, sought to lead a purer lifestyle and free ourselves
from the ugliness of capitalism and the military-industrial complex. It was also a
survivalist strategy; with its doctrinaire emphasis on self-sufficiency, the movement acted
“as if the bomb had already been dropped.”67
The search for purity took other forms as well. No doubt there were many
reasons for getting high on drugs or meditation or both, but one of them was a yearning for transcendence, for peak experiences as a counterweight to atomic extinction. “When the structure of existence is threatened, people seek to do more with or to their bodies, to extend the experience of their total organisms,” observes Lifton.68 For writer Norman
Mailer, the radical experientialism of the nuclear age was (gloriously) embodied in the macho figure of the “hipster” or “the American existentialist” who directly confronts
29 death, divorces himself from society, and sets out on “that uncharted journey into the
rebellious imperatives of the self.”69
For those who chose instead to tow the government line and embrace nuclear
weapons, the result could be a retreat into fundamentalism to make sense of the world
through rigid categories of good and evil, a romanticized view of the past and religious
certainty about the future.70
For people of a more secular persuasion, the bomb called the future into question,
and a sense of “radical futurelessness” created doubts about the authenticity and
endurance of individual achievement. But of all the psychological effects of the bomb,
Lifton identified our changed relationship with death as the “most fundamental psychic
deformation.”71 The bomb turned what would otherwise be our normal fears of death –
or rather our fears of normal death – into an association with grotesque images of nuclear annihilation, creating profound anxiety about the end of life. One of the major psychological challenges of our times, then, was to reclaim “plain old death” and distinguish it from the insane policies of nuclear holocaust pursued by our leaders.72
Many of Lifton’s insights ring true in my own experience: growing up with the
sense of a double life and the absurdity of it all, seeking a purer relationship with nature
through hallucinogenic drugs and the back to the land movement, always doubting the
value of my own achievements, fearing death as a violent, cataclysmic event. In a country
of abundance I had an irrational fear of scarcity too, maybe because of the anxiety that
food, water and fresh air would run out in the bomb shelter and nothing would grow in
the barren world outside. In the end the mannequin mommy, no matter how pretty and
resourceful, could only offer me an empty tray. Lifton didn’t write about this fear of
30 scarcity, but I believe it haunts my generation like the Great Depression haunted our
parents.
Of course if I was lying down now on a therapist’s couch, she or he would tell me
that you can’t blame all of these problems just on the bomb. Likewise, historians would
remind me that you can’t isolate the impact of the bomb from the larger American drive for military dominance after World War II.
That’s true, but even so the bomb still casts a long shadow, accounting in no small
measure for the endurance of apocalyptic thought in the other realms explored in this
book. And it still threatens world peace. The prospect of an all-out nuclear war has thankfully diminished, but as I write this chapter the U.S., Israel and Iran are rattling sabers over Iran’s nuclear program, increasing the possibility of yet another American military adventure in the Middle East. Political instability in Pakistan calls into question the safety of its nuclear facilities, and North Korea remains a wildcard. Poorly protected nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union raise the specter of terrorists acquiring the wherewithal to make radioactive devices. The U.S. nuclear arsenal stands at 5000 warheads, with 2000 ready to use at short notice. Russia has even more.73 Nuclear
disarmament, in other words, has quite a long way to go.
And then there is the bomb’s ugly twin, nuclear power. In addition to generating
electricity, nuclear reactors generate radioactive waste, including the by-product
plutonium, one of the most poisonous substances on earth and a key component of
nuclear bombs. They can also cause massive environmental disaster, such as occurred at
Chernobyl and Fukushima.
31 Back in 1979, shortly after the Three Mile Island reactor accident in Pennsylvania,
Lifton wrote that the more immediate risks of nuclear power might help sensitize people
to the threats posed by nuclear weapons. Reactors were closer-by, in people’s backyards,
neighborhoods and cities, whereas nuclear weapons were “’out there” – “apart from one’s
everyday life.”74 In his study of the impact of the Manhattan Project in post-Cold War
New Mexico, Joseph Masco makes the point that the apocalyptic spectacle still
surrounding the bomb distracts us from seeing the everydayness of the U.S. nuclear
complex and economy.75 A true reckoning with the bomb demands that we understand
and face its more mundane realities.
The solution to the mystery of the atom, in other words, is that we come to see
that in the end there is no mystery – only certain human beings going about certain kinds
of deadly business that we are either complicit in or fight against. That knowledge is the first step in my journey beyond apocalypse, but not the last in terms of coming to grips with the power the bomb still yields over us – and inside us.
32 Endnotes to Chapter One
1 Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead, New York, 1964, p. 11.
2 Robert Jay Lifton, Wintess to an Extreme Century: A Memoir, New York: Free Press, 2011. 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Exercise_Desert_Rock_IV_%28Tumbler-Snapper_Dog%29_001.jpg 4 Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, p. 304. 5 A Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population of Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations, Progress Report prepared for the U.S. Congress by the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, August 2001. 6 Cited in Ibid. 7 Former Worker Medical Screening Program, Ames Laboratory http://cph.uiowa.edu/IowaFWP/ames/EEOICPA.html; Laurence Fuortes, MD, MS, “The Legacy of the Manhattan Project and Cold War in Iowa,” http://cph.uiowa.edu/IowaFWP/documents/FWP_presentation.pdf 8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Exercise_Desert_Rock_IV_%28Tumbler-Snapper_Dog%29_001.jpg 9 Sheldon Ungar, The Rise and Fall of Nuclearism: Fear and Faith as Determinants of the Arms Race, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, p. 59; Sadao Asada, “The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches: Japanese and American Perceptions of the Atomic-Bomb Decision, 1945-1995,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997, p. 179. 10 Gar Alperovitz, “Historians Reassess: Did We Need to Drop the Bomb?,” in Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow, Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998, p. 11. 11 Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 184-186.
12 Ibid, pp. 188-189.
13 Ungar, The Rise and Fall of Nuclearism, p. 56. 14 Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light. 15 Laura Hein and Mark Selden, “Commemoration and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan, in Hein and Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb, p. 5. 16 http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/7/765/papers/Roland.pdf 17 Alfonso A. Navarez, “Gen. Curtis LeMay, an Architect of Strategic Air Power, Dies at 83,” Obituaries, New York Times, Oct. 2, 1990. 18 Asada, “The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches,” and Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light. 19 Mike Wallace, “The Battle of the Enola Gay,” in Bird and Lifschultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow. 20 George H. Roeder Jr., “Making Things Visible: Learning from the Censors,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb. 21 Cited in Hugh Gusterson, “Remembering Hiroshima at a Nuclear Weapons Laboratory,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb, p. 262.
22 Lane Fenrich, “Mass Death in Miniature: How Americans Became Victims of the Bomb,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb, p. 127. 23 Ibid., p. 126. 24 Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, p. 187. 25 Monica Braw, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Voluntary Silence,” in Hein and Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb.
26 Gusterson, “Remembering Hiroshima at a Nuclear Weapons Laboratory.” 27 Cited in Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, p. xi. 28 Fenrich, “Mass Death in Miniature.” 29 Roeder, “Making Things Visible,” p. 89. 30 Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, p. 67. 31 Ibid., p 106.
33
32 Cited in Ungar, The Rise and Fall of Nuclearism, p. 65. 33 Ibid. 34 Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, New York: New York University Press, 2001, p. 9. 35 Cited in Paul Boyer, When Time Shall be No More: Prophesy Belief in Modern American Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 162. 36 Ungar, The Rise and Fall of Nuclearism. 37 David Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, DATE. 38 Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, New York: New York University Press, 2001. 39 Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, p. 313. 40 Rose, One Nation Underground, p. 79. 41 Cited in Ibid., pp. 3-4. 42 Ibid. 43 For example, Monteyne, Fallout Shelter; Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militiarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 44 Monteyne, Fallout Shelter, pp. 27-29. 45 Samuel W. Matthews, “Nevada Leanrs to Live with the Bomb,” The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. CIII, No. 6, pp. 839-850. 46 Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, pp. 11-12, 85, 88. 47 Ibid., pp. 91-92. 48 Ibid., p. 294. 49 Cited in ibid., p. 298. 50 Cited in ibid., p. 295. 51 Dan O’Neil, The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement, New York: Basic Books, 2007. 52 Robert Jay Lifton, “The New Psychology of Human Survival: Images of Doom and Hope,” Occasional Paper No. 1, Center on Violence and Human Survival, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, n.d., p. p. 8; for more on the psychological operations of the Cold War and their relation to the war on terror, see Jackie Orr, “Making Civilian Soldiers: The Militarization of Inner Space,” in Betsy Hartmann, Banu Subramaniam, and Charles Zerner, eds., Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 53 William F. Vandercook, “Making the Very Best of the Very Worst: The ‘Human Effects of Nuclear Weapons’ Report of 1956,” International Security 11, Summer 1986, cited in Lifton, op. cit., pp. 8-9. 54 Sibylle K. Escalona, “Children and the Threat of Nuclear War,” in Milton Schwebel, ed., Behavioral Science and Human Survival, Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books, 1965, pp. 204, 206. 55 Milton Schwebel, “Nuclear Cold War: Student Opinions and Professional Responsibility,” in ibid, p. 217. 56 Ibid., p. 219. 57 Ibid., p. 222. 58 This was suggested by William R. Beardsley, M.D. and John E. Mack, M.D. in “Adolescents and the Threat of Nuclear War: The Evolution of a Perspective,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 56 (1983), pp. 79-81. 59 Ibid., p. 81. 60 Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, New York: Random House, 1982, cover quote and Chapter Two. 61 See Beardsley and Mack, op. cit., and David S. Greenwald and Steven J. Zeitlin, No Reason to Talk about It: Families Confront the Nuclear Taboo, New York: Norton, 1987. 62 Joanna Rogers Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1983. 63 Children’s Fears of War, Hearing before the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, House of Representatives, Ninety-Eighth Congress, First Session, Washington, D.C., September 20, 1983, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984, pp. 7, 11, 13.
34
64 See. For example, Lawrence S. Wittner, “Reagan and Nuclear Disarmament: How the Nuclear Freeze Movement forced Reagan to make progress on arms control,” Boston Review, April/May 2000, accessed at http://bostonreview.net/BR25.2/wittner.html 65 Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism, New York: Basic Books, p. 11. Also see Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life, New York: Simon and Schuster 1979. 66 Lifton and Falk, Indefensible Weapons, p. 7. 67 Lifton, The Broken Connection, p. 343. 68 Ibid., p. 345. 69 Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, New York: Signet Nooks, 1960, cited in Lifton, The Broken Connection, p. 347. 70 Lifton, The Broken Connection. 71 Lifton, The Broken Connection, p. 365. 72 Lifton and Falk, Indefensible Weapons, p. 115. 73 Philip Taubman, “No Need for All These Nukes,” New York Times, Sunday Review, January 8, 2012. 74 Lifton, The Broken Connection, p. 387. 75 Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
35