Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives

Chapter 3. The Debate over Nuclear Refuge

42 under the shadow The atomic bombing of Japanese cities not only triggered a whole series of narratives that attempted to describe those events, but it also served a symbolic function throughout the Cold War, which was dominated by fear of nuclear war. Only Hiroshima (and of course Nagasaki, which is usually implicitly included in “Hiroshima ”) could offer any concrete image of the new bomb’s destructive capacity. Thus, Hiroshima serves as a constant reference point throughout Cold War writing long after the development of the hydrogen bomb made it an anachronism. One of the most debated issues during the Cold War was whether there was any defense against the new bombs, and here we encounter a paradox. In 1953 Murray S. Levine, chairman of the New York Committee of Atomic Information, stated baldly that “there is no defense against the atomic bomb as a bomb” and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, “no city in this country is really prepared against atomic attack.”1 This conviction would make nonsense of civil defense measures. Yet the U.S. government could not afford to admit this since it could induce at the worst panic and at the least fatalism toward nuclear attack. In his survey of the impact of the atomic bomb on American culture, Paul Boyer argues that by the late 1940s civil defense had become a charged political andsocialissue.2Partofthedebateincludedthepossiblereplanningofcitylayouts with arterial highways to allow for mass evacuation.3 In 1948 the first Civil Defense planning office was set up and that same year the New Yorker correspondent Daniel Lang reported on the Munitions Board survey of caves and abandoned mines that might be used for storage of supplies of food and other necessities. A high-ranking officer told Lang that “people have got to be educated. They’ve got to becomeunderground-conscious,”andhecontinuedthatindustryshouldalsostart chaPter 3 The Debate over Nuclear Refuge the debate over nuclear refuge 43 considering the construction of underground factories.4 Finally, in 1950 President Truman established the Federal Civil Defense Authority (FCDA). According to a recent history by Andrew Grossman, the FCDA operations helped promote the “core myth of early Cold War emergency planning: Not only was strategic nuclear war manageable from a civil defense perspective, but it was also no different from a conventional war that the United States could and would “win.”5 Fear of the atomic bomb led a number of American newspapers to produce special issues describing the effects of an attack. The Los Angeles Times, for instance , ran a headline in March 1961 that screamed “Red Alert! What If H-Bomb Hits Los Angeles” and proceeded to describe the destruction that would follow: “Roofs collapse and crash down through upper stories. Walls crack wide and tremble perilously . . . There is no glass in any window, store front or door hit by the blast wave and fires torch everywhere, gutting the wreckage in a smother of smoke.”6Such“reports”wereobviouslynotdesignedasfiction,butneitherdothey read like authentic reports. The use of the present tense in what is essentially a generic description in articles like this one suggests that they offer a kind of future reportage of a dreaded event. Also, the focus in such accounts on blast damage conceals an even greater source of anxiety—radioactive fallout. As Spencer Weart has pointed out, “Fallout was perfectly suited to induce anxiety . . . something that rests upon helplessness and uncertainty, on the feeling that a threat cannot be escaped nor perhaps even comprehended before it is too late.”7 And it was secret in a double sense. Its operation could not easily be perceived, and its publicization was heavily controlled. We have seen how the U.S. government attempted to suppress thefactsofradiationsicknessinHiroshimaandNagasaki,butthissuppressionwas widely perceived to be institutional. In a two-part article of 1959 entitled “Fallout: The Silent Killer,” Steven M. Spencer surveyed cases where the results of nuclear tests either went awry or were concealed, and he concluded that “radioactive fallout is a silent killer which hides its poisons among the more familiar causes of human illness and death and thus postpones positive identification.”8 During these years science fiction (SF) stories and novels began appearing that, in their various ways, took issue with this government-promoted minimization of the effects of nuclear war. Whereas the official line broadly stressed limitations of scale and the survivability of such a war, this fiction articulated in narrative form fears of genetic mutation and civic collapse. The debate about nuclear war rapidly turned into a series of speculations...