One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture

1 A New Age Dawning

c h a p t e r 1 A New Age Dawning Often forgotten in the post-Hiroshima world is that the most common first reaction to the dropping of atomic weapons on Japan, at least among Americans and their allies, was not universal horror but unalloyed joy and relief. By the summer of 1945 preparations were under way for a November invasion of the Japanese home islands, an operation that had the potential to become a military nightmare.The use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would make that invasion unnecessary . Paul Fussell, an infantryman during the war, remembered that when the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that“Operation Olympic”would not,after all,be necessary,when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy.We were going to live.1 Freeman Dyson,who worked for the RoyalAir Force Bomber Command duringWorldWar II,was scheduled to be sent to Okinawa in the summer of 14 1945, where three hundred British bombers (calledTiger Force) would take up the bombing of Japan.As Dyson noted,“I found this continuing slaughter of defenseless Japanese even more sickening than the slaughter of welldefended Germans.” Dyson was at home when he heard of the Hiroshima explosion:“I was sitting at home, eating a quiet breakfast with my mother, when the morning paper arrived with the news of Hiroshima. I understood at once what it meant.‘Thank God for that,’ I said. I knew that Tiger Force would not fly, and I would never have to kill anybody again.”2 As nuclear weapons have increased in strength and number since 1945,the enormity ofTruman’s decision to use these weapons has grown to the point that it is now widely considered to be the most controversial act of the twentieth century. If nothing else, it has spawned a bitter debate among historians , some of whom believe that Japanese surrender was imminent, and that therefore use of atomic weapons was totally unjustified, while others maintain that the Japanese were prepared to continue fighting indefinitely.3 Truman himself expressed no regrets about the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,and in a 1961 speech he responded to his critics in his inimitable fashion by observing,“I haven’t heard any of them crying about those boys in those upside-down battleships at Pearl Harbor.”4 Regardless of one’s opinion on whether or not the use of atom bombs was necessary to end the war, the fact that they were used has assumed a prominent place in modern history. Indeed, the importance of this event is now universally acknowledged (a group of sixty-seven of the nation’s leading historians and journalists in 1999 called this the most important news story of the twentieth century), but in the immediate aftermath the transformational implications of what had been wrought at Hiroshima were absorbed by Americans only slowly.5 As late as 1960 Arthur Koestler argued that humanity had found it difficult to come to terms with the Nuclear Age because “from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.” Koestler compared the reluctance to accept the post-Hiroshima world to the slow, difficult acceptance of the Copernican system over the Ptolemaic.6 VincentWilson,Jr.,also found little evidence that this much heralded new era had taken root, and even argued that “it would seem more to the point to label these past years theT.V.Age—considering the apparent impact of television on the population as a whole.”7 Even military strategists at first refused to believe that the bomb had changed anything.That a single airplane had visited such destruction on Hiroshima was impressive, but the quantity of destruction was still on a recognizable scale, such as had been seen in earlier Allied bombings. Referring to A New Age Dawning 15 atomic weapons in the fall of 1945, JamesV. Forrestal, secretary of the navy, cautioned that it was “dangerous to depend on documents or gadgets, as these instruments do not win wars.”8 A few months later the Pentagon issued its first assessment of the...