‘At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk’.

This is how the New Yorker journalist John Hersey began his 1946 account of the bombing of Hiroshima. It follows the lives of six survivors, describing how by chance they’d managed to avoid being one of the 100,000 that perished in the world’s first nuclear attack.

At a time when much of the writing was technical, philosophical, or political – focusing on foreign relations and the war – Hersey did something that led to the essay becoming a classic: it simply reported.

We take it for granted today, but when those first nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it had such a far-reaching global effect that some writers described the result as a new ‘nuclear consciousness’.

The New York Times wrote two days after that the bomb had caused, ‘an explosion in men’s minds as shattering as the obliteration of Hiroshima’.

The novelist Mary McCarthy wrote that to write about the bomb in its measurable and quantifiable destruction was to miss the point, it was ‘in the moral world, that the atom bomb exploded’.

And during one sermon in New York, a minister told his congregation that, ‘Before us on the stage of history is a panorama of the soul’.

I started researching this topic in response to this. And the first things I wanted to look at were the obvious things: Russia’s nuclear capabilities, the idea of nuclear deterrence, the literature behind Cold War atomic brinkmanship. This is what comes up first in the research. But it is impossible – even when reading serious scholars – to not come away with a sense of absurdity, of madness, of there being no ‘logical’, ‘rational’ takes. What came to be known as MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – is aptly named of course for good reason. What I quickly became interested in instead was how much nuclear thinking had effected us culturally, psychologically, philosophically in our very psyches and sensibilities. In many ways it has brought madness to the forefront of our thinking.

In fact, as the New Boston Review wrote in 1981, ‘contemporary culture grows in a dark place, beneath the shadow of the nuclear threat’.

So do we really have a ‘nuclear consciousness’? If so, how specifically did it develop? What shapes did it take? I’ll look at some surprising consequences of the discovery of nuclear power, how it changed our ideas about fear and irrationalism, about world government, how it changed literature and cinema and comics, religion, science, and our idea of progress.

The dropping of that first bomb coincided with the end of an old world, an old mentality that had persisted throughout the Victorian era up until the two world Wars. The wars, the bomb, new technologies, new media, a new international system, split the world asunder – old assumptions would no longer hold.

One thing that was new was the concept of an entire world threatened by one device. In an odd way, the bomb united the world through one shared experience.

In fact, one chapter of an influential book written in 1945-6 – The Atomic Age Opens – was titled, ‘The Whole World Gasped’.

This idea of a whole world – united by one feeling – was a new phenomenon.

Never before had an event touched the psyches of people everywhere. No one was safe.

One 1946 survey by the Social Science Research Council found that 98% of Americans knew about the bomb – ‘even the most isolated’.

Every newspaper and magazine discussed it. Every radio show.

When the war ended, for many the celebratory atmosphere in America and Europe quickly gave way to the realisation that the same weapon that had been used to end the war could, at some point, be used against them.

Norman Cousin wrote in his influential Modern Man is Obsolete that the bomb produced, ‘a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions’.

The most well recognised voice on the radio in America, CBS’s Edward Murrow, said that, ‘Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured’.

Time called it a ‘grimly pyrrhic victory’.

The anthropologist Robert Redfield wrote that the ‘fear psychosis’ was ‘a nightmare in the minds of men’.

A radio production quickly made use of the sound of a Geiger counter, the mushroom cloud became a recognisable symbol, psychological studies were undertaken to reduce fear in the army, and a 1956 animation – a short vision – about what a nuclear attack might look like terrified children when it was aired on the Ed Sullivan Show in America.

Many scientists – including the father of the bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, who became one of the US government’s biggest critics – thought that the fear was not only necessary, but should be used pragmatically.

In 1947, Oppenheimer was sent a letter by his colleague Francis Vivian Drake that read, ‘I think that we are both agreed that a sense of fear is probably necessary to break public apathy’.

Christian commentator Bernard Iddings Bell agreed, writing that, ‘Hitler was able to change the attitude of the German people… but he was able to do it only by ruthless propaganda. What we need for our purpose now is slogans, shibboleths, comic strips, motion pictures centering around glittering stars and crooners. The last thing that we can depend upon is an appeal to common sense’.

But the problem was so vast, so seemingly insurmountable, that apathy soon set in.

Author John W. Campbell Jr. wrote in The Atomic Story in 1947 that, ‘Human psychology is such that it is completely impossible to scare people collectively or for any length of time’.

Novelists, poets, and artists had the same problem. They seemed paralysed, unsure how to approach such an intimidating threat.

One linguist asked, ‘Is it possible that in spite of our vast and evergrowing vocabulary we have finally created an object that transcends all possible description…?’

The bestselling novels of the immediate post-war period barely mentioned the bomb. So the public turned elsewhere for guidance. To the scientists.

Scientists were propelled to stardom in the post-war period. Developments in medicine, transport, technology and weapons had proven that colossal, innovative projects that were impossible to imagine a few decades before could succeed if businesses and governments commitment to investment.

Redfield wrote in 1945 that, ‘The prestige of the physical scientist as the creator of these marvels was never higher. What a physical scientist says on almost any subject is thought more important than what anybody else says’.

President Truman wrote that, ‘The events of the past few years are both proof and prophecy of what science can do. The development of atomic energy is a clear-cut indication of what can be accomplished by our universities, industry, and Government working together. Vast scientific fields remain to be conquered in the same way’.

One scientist working on the bomb wrote that, ‘Suddenly physicists were exhibited as lions at Washington tea-parties’.

Another, Leo Szilard, wrote, ‘I did not foresee that scientists would be crowding into Washington to see Congressmen and Senators, that they would be interviewed, photographed, made into movie characters; that they would feel impelled to write and to talk on subjects other than their own, and, generally speaking, to make a circus of themselves’.

One group of scientists decided to use their newly-found prestige to start a journal: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It was important, they thought, to inform the public on recent developments in accessible layman’s terms. The magazine was a success, featuring the now famous doomsday clock, ticking towards nuclear apocalypse.

But while using widespread fear, many scientists were also optimistic. They hoped that the threat might lead to the development of a necessary, united, world government.

Raymond Gram Swing was an influential broadcaster at ABC. He said that, ‘Internationally, I was sure [the atomic bomb] meant world government, for that would be the only way to abolish war, which had to be abolished if civilization were to endure’.

Albert Einstein influentially agreed, and Oppenheimer called for ‘radical and profound changes in the politics of the world’.

Nation Magazine’s Freda Kirchwey warned that, ‘We face a choice between one world or none’.

And the conservative Reader’s Digest agreed, writing that, ‘world government has now become a hard-boiled, practical and urgent necessity’.

Supporters organised a conference in October 1945 and placed an advert in the New York Times calling for a ‘world federal government’.

And 54% Americans favoured turning the UN into a world government.

But the idea quickly lost momentum.

Government official Sumner Welles protested that, ‘I cannot imagine that the Soviet Union would participate in a world government upon any other basis’ than of ‘a World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the capital… located in Moscow’.

And the intractability of the problem led to many questioning the idea of progress altogether. What did progress even mean, if it could all be destroyed by a button? What did religion mean in this new world?

In his book By The Bomb’s Early Light, Paul Boyer reports that the ‘atomic age was opened with a prayer’.

A chaplain blessed the crew of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb.

‘It is an awful responsibility which has come to us’, President Truman remarked in a radio address the following day. ‘We thank God that it has come to us instead of our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes’.

A New York journal told its readers that, ‘Divine providence has made the United States the custodian of the secret of atomic energy as a weapon of war’.

Physicist Arthur Compton said that, ‘Atomic power is ours, and who can deny that it was God’s will that we should have it?’

Many were troubled by this outlook, but it revealed and put into sharp focus some of the assumptions of liberalism and the Enlightenment it had developed out of: that progress was inevitable, that science could liberate humans, that the path of history and technology led onwards and upwards in a single ever-improving path.

The bomb led many to rethink this view.

The editor of Catholic World wrote in 1945 that the use of the bomb revealed the breakdown of ‘the universal and everlasting moral law’.

Edward Long Jr. saw that the bomb meant that, ‘all achievement can be quickly lost, and that life does not inevitably grow better’, and historian Lewis Mumford called the bomb ‘collective suicide’.

And commenting on the horrors of Auschwitz and the destruction of the war more broadly, philosopher Theodor Adorno said to write poetry after would be barbaric: ‘mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’.

Like a new Frankenstein, many saw science as two-headed, a contradiction, something that could ironically destroy itself.

Dwight Macdonald wrote that, ‘Atomic Fission is something in which Good and Evil are so closely intertwined that it is hard to see how the Good can be extracted and the Evil thrown away’.

Atomic weapons made humans look small, precarious, insignificant even.

The dominant philosophy of Enlightenment liberalism had placed individuals at the centre of the universe. The rational person crafting his or her world according to their ideas, desires, and goals.

But the bomb, and the destruction and path of the war more broadly, had shown the individual to be less in control of the world than they thought, as part of a machine so large and so inexorable that events seemed almost too momentous to grasp.

Over 130,000 people worked on the Manhattan Project. Only a few of them even knew what they were contributing to. Let alone the deaths it would lead to.

If this was the case – if so many contributed to something they had no purposive knowledge of – if so many could be led through the war to become so destructive, so genocidal, did we not need a different model of history? One that doesn’t assume that history is crafted by rational leaders pointing the way forward?

Philosopher Karl Popper thought so. He criticised thinkers like Hegel, Marx, and Mill who saw history as an inevitable story, the product of ‘specific historical laws which can be discovered, and upon which prediction regarding the future of mankind can be based’.

He argued that it led to the inheritors of technology and military dominance thinking they’ve been, ‘selected as the instrument of destiny, ultimately to inherit the earth’.

This way of thinking often justified things like eugenics, the survival of the fittest, social Darwinism – the idea that the strongest were inevitably the most dominant and that was a rational result of the right of the strong.

Popper and others – and the later postmodern thinkers that grew up in the nuclear age – searched for ways to theorise ‘alternatives’ – open histories, different trajectories. The bomb contributed to the popularity of critical theory and postmodernism – of lines of questioning that asked simply: what if things had developed differently?

While mainstream literature in the immediate post-war period was slow to deal with the philosophical implications of the bomb, science fiction took up the mantle. Authors like Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov wrote about the bomb in different ways. And in many ways, the bomb and technology more broadly made science fiction a respectable genre. Isaac Asimov wrote that science fiction was, ‘salvaged into respectability’.

As the bomb fell, the science fiction novel was of a marginal genre, not taken seriously. But within a decade, science fiction authors suddenly found themselves being invited to government talks and offered jobs at universities.

H.G. Wells had famously predicted an atomic weapon in 1914’s The World Set Free. He’d imagined a uranium bomb that, ‘would continue to explode indefinitely’.

And science fiction writer Ray Bradley wrote in 1945 that, ‘I saw the headline, brought on the bus by a stranger, and thought: Yes, of course, so it’s here! I knew it would come, for I had read about it and thought about it for years’.

In fiction and in cinema, many quickly realised that the idea of the bomb and its consequences, and metaphors like alien invasions, zombie apocalypses, and plagues sweeping across the world, were the perfect vessels for discussing social and political issues while entertaining readers and viewers at the same time.

Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein wrote that, ‘science fiction has moved inexorably toward the center of American culture, shaping our imagination’.

The 1950s became a ‘Golden Age’ of science fiction.

Japan’s Godzilla was released in 1954, using the idea of a nuclear monster as a metaphor for atomic fear and destruction.

And where Japan saw monsters, American pop culture quickly turned radioactive fears into the optimism of superheroes. The Hulk, X-men, Spiderman, and Fantastic Four all begin with radioactive transformations or mutations. Instead of telling stories of destruction they turned tropes of radioactivity into mythical fairy tales of American heroes protecting the world.

By 1966 Star Trek had hit our screens, by 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and in 1977, Star Wars would change cinema forever.

Gradually, mainstream cinema and literature caught up with the early science fiction writers.

1959’s On the Beach – based on the 1957 novel of the same name – focused on a group of people in Australia dealing with the knowledge that they’re waiting for nuclear fallout to reach them and coming to terms with their impending death.

1964’s Doctor Strangelove explored the absurdity of the bureaucracy, politics, and arbitrary events and decisions that could set off a chain reaction leading to a nuclear attack.

Typically postmodern, Strangelove is full of missteps, failed attempts to stop the bomb, absurd and random moments that derail the logic of keeping nuclear weapons as deterrence.

1964’s Fail Safe imagines what happens when a nuclear bomb is dropped on Moscow by accident. In the end the president bombs New York himself as a sign of good will to prevent Soviet retaliation.

These films highlight a central realisation of nuclear power: that in the same way that a single death could be the result of accident, the human race can now be wiped out be accident. They dealt with the absurdity of nuclear weapons and provided a powerful critique of the military-industrial complex.

The idea of nuclear holocaust provided the material – in film, literature, and science fiction – to imagine new social contracts – ground zeros from which authors could discuss what human psychology was in post-apocalyptic worlds or without the current political systems. The social contract theorists of the Enlightenment theorised how governments and states and nations began. These new writers and film-makers imagined how they’d end.

So in some ways, while the bomb led to a widespread fear and a questioning of modernity, it also ironically created a space for critique, a way to imagine different worlds.

The absurdity of the foreign policy doctrine MAD – that mutually assured destruction would prevent either side from attacking first – and the idea that one person, one accident, one slip-up could wipe out the entire human race, contributed to the feeling of absurdity seen in films like Strangelove.

Many novels – like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – played with this absurdity. By the sixties, these contradictions, the idea of openness and different worlds, and dissatisfaction with both the US and the USSR, contributed to the emergence of many philosophical and artistic ideas that would become labelled as postmodern.

This discontent, as Michael Miller has argued, contributed to the feeling of disaffection on student campuses during the sixties. Many saw the figure of the establishment liberal bureaucrat in charge of a world that could lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis as ridiculous. Miller wrote that they ‘feel it is somehow implicated, if only by default, in the heritage of nightmares that compose recent history: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Cold War, McCarthy’.

But that space – the marches for nuclear disarmament, the films, the focus – has largely been forgotten.

And in most ways, the idea of nuclear war made us collective pessimists. In the cultural, logical, literary, political, and psychological landscapes it produced, it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the possibility of utopia.

But like those who dreamed that the bomb might lead to global unity, it’s important to remember that ironically, the logic of MAD does create a space of shared interests. No country desires its own destruction and the nuclear threat has created channels to discuss and commit to disarmament in the interest of our shared humanity.

Arms controls treaties require each side to be transparent, to share numbers and information on facilities, to commit to inspections.

Global nuclear stockpiles are so exhaustive that if 90% were destroyed there would still be enough to end all life on earth.

So maybe this is the time to renew our demands to political parties to promise to pursue arms agreements and reduce those stockpiles. Maybe we should remember that this is still one the leading threats to our race’s survival.

Ultimately, we should remember that the bomb did a lot for pacificism’s cause. A.J. Muste made the most influential early case in 1947’s Not by Might. He said, ‘We must ponder the meaning of the bomb steadfastly [and] relentlessly’, ‘until it has burned its way into our consciousness and in doing so has burned away all illusions about war, including World War II’.

Sources

Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light

Samira Ahmed, How The Bomb Changed Everything, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150702-how-the-bomb-changed-everything

Keith Booker, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War

Edward Demenchonok, Philosophy After Hiroshima

John Dorsey, Atomic Bomb Literature in Japan and the West

Susanna Lindberg, Technologies of the End of the World