Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War by John O’Brian and Jeremy Borsos (review)

In Atomic Postcards, John O’Brian and Jeremy Borsos confront readers with jarring perspectives of the Cold War. Their collection of postcards – drawn from more than a dozen countries and spanning 1945 to 1989 – shows how the nuclear industry, and the weapons it generated, somehow came to be an accepted part of everyday reality and one that was reflected in the most mundane aspects of popular culture.

To be certain, the images did change over time. The first ones included in the volume show the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. These images are the most obviously chilling, for they speak directly to the violence that was inflicted upon everyday people by nuclear weapons. One postcard, for instance, shows the shadow left on some stone steps by a person who was incinerated in one of the explosions. By contrast, later images are more banal. North American postcards from the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate how certain locations came to be associated with the infrastructure of the atomic industry. Cities vying for tourist dollars happily referred to themselves as ‘The City of the Atomic Bomb’ (in the case of Oak Ridge, Tennessee) or as ‘Ohio’s Atomic City’ (in the case of Portsmouth, Ohio). Other postcards suggested that visitors to Las Vegas could be courted by the promise of observing nuclear bomb tests, or that they would be fascinated by the interior of the American Museum of Atomic Energy if they travelled to Tennessee. Seemingly every nuclear power plant, reactor, laboratory, submarine, and museum contributed photographs to this outpouring of kitsch.

Few people appear in the images, which overwhelmingly fetishize technology instead. As John O’Brian notes in his introduction to the book, this emphasis was meant to inspire deterrence on the one hand and a kind of national pride on the other. It also explains why latecomers to the Cold War, in other words countries who did not have nuclear weapons or a sizable nuclear industry until much later than the Americans, continued to produce this kind of material long after the fad had apparently passed in United States. For example, the book ends with several postcards from China that were produced in the mid-1980s. The images proudly show missiles being paraded through a city centre, being launched skywards, and standing ready for future use. These last few postcards speak to the commonalities of Cold War culture and the pervasiveness of its tropes. In the end, Chinese nationalism looks much the same as its non-communist, American counterpart.

A final striking feature of this book is the way users of the postcards, by and large, ignored the larger implications of the images. On the postcards that have been used, we find occasional references to visiting the facilities depicted, but they tend to be buried in messages equally concerned with the weather and the overall progress of people’s vacations. After reading the backs of more than a dozen such postcards, the reader is forced to ponder the extent to which nuclear threats became normalized and simply an accepted aspect of everyday life during the Cold War.