The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age

6. The Atomic Kid: American Children vs. the Bomb

6 The Atomic Kid: American Children vs. the Bomb The first graders . . . learned to spell “atom” and “bomb” before they learned “mother.” Mrs. Elise E. Beiler, teacher, Indian Springs, Nevada (1952) Alone in the Flash: Training Children to Survive an Atomic Attack As the United States embarked on a furious program of weapons testing in response to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union in late 1949, there was one group of model citizens who had a more specific understanding of what to expect from the frequent detonation of atomic bombs in the Nevada desert: the students of the Indian Springs School in Indian Springs, Nevada. Collier’s magazine showed Americans into the two-room schoolhouse that was located in “a converted supply room at the Indian Springs Air Force Base, a security area attached to the closely guarded atomic testing grounds. The children have witnessed four atomic blasts in the last few weeks. Some of the children have seen as many as a dozen of the atomic test detonations” (fig. 13).1 A spokesman for the Atomic Energy Commission explained that these children were models for the rest of America’s youngsters: “The children in this school by their sheer proximity to the tests are getting the same type of psychological indoctrination we are giving some of our combat troops. If all the school children in the nation could witness an A-bomb blast, it would do much to destroy the fear and uncertainty which now exist.” Mrs. Nevin Bartley, one of the two teachers at the school, offered her own assessment: “It’s difficult keeping one jump ahead of these Atomic Age youngsters.”2 The Cold War was a very different experience for American kids than it was for their parents.3 The parents felt it as a threat to the American way of life, to their health and well-being and those of their families. The children were threatened by the loss of a future they could grow into and inhabit, by the knowledge that they might be the last children on the earth. 100 c The Dragon’s Tail 13. Students prepare for atomic attack near the Nevada Test Site in a 1952 Collier’s. Fear of and preparation for nuclear war were pervasive in American society as the Cold War took hold. With a belligerent enemy in possession of nuclear weapons at the beginning of the 1950s, the decade was gripped by frightening realities. Massive government efforts to design, construct, The Atomic Kid c 101 and deploy nuclear weapons helped to fuel the emergence of what Dwight Eisenhower would later call the military-industrial complex.4 Historian Michael Scheibach has pointed out another critical element of American Cold War society: “educators, government officials, and parents realized the necessity, even the urgency, of preparing the country’s youth for a new, more precarious world. This required information about the atomic bomb itself and its political and social implications.”5 This generation’s children were not the passive, blank slates their adult guardians imagined, however. They were born into a continuum of both American and human culture that carried its own stories. In the United States, that tradition had to do with presenting Americans as the good guys, fighting wars fairly for noble causes. Tom Engelhardt has called this heritage of a triumphalist narrative “victory culture.” As he points out, the narrative of the Good War and the narrative of the new Cold War did not fit together seamlessly. “The question of whether or not to use triumphal weapons of a suicidal nature to accomplish national ends proved deeply unsettling not just for adults planning global strategy, but also for children experiencing both the pride of parents returning victorious from the world war and the fear that that war’s most wondrous weapon engendered.”6 Engelhardt argues that this tension had unforeseen and profound effects on the baby boomer generation: “If the story of victory in World War II was for a time endlessly replayed in the movies, in comics , and on television, other cultural vistas were also opening up for the young, ones that led directly into whatever terrified grown-ups. To escape not into the war story but into places where that story was dissolving held unexpected pleasures, not the least of which was the visible horror of adults at what you were doing. . . . Many children instinctively grasped the corrosiveness of...