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Conclusion The Magical and the Mundane A great many people enjoy war. Doris Lessing () Nuclear weapons have a unique history: introduced to humanity by Harry Truman, arguably the most powerful person in the world, as a harnessing of the “basic force of the universe” to human will, a force that would end war and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, they threatened futures and haunted nightmares. In a single day they renamed an era. The sheer force of their existence cast doubt on the inevitability of a human future. This mythic, almost supernatural framing was the way most Americans first encountered the bomb, and it would remain their primary experience of it for many years. Truman and others employed divine rhetoric to describe the bomb: that it was given to the United States by God, that it liberated the elemental forces of nature that powered the sun, and that it ended the war—and might well make war obsolete. But there was a dark and disconcerting shadow to atomic rhetoric: the placing of such power in the hands of political and military leaders. From the wholesale slaughter of World War I, to the orgy of unrestrained capitalism that caused the Great Depression, to the mechanized slaughter and genocide of World War II, human nature had revealed a violent and predatory side that made faith in the wise stewardship of these new powers impossible. Within days of the news from Hiroshima, alongside the celebrations of victory came deep anxiety about what the advent of nuclear weapons meant for the long-term survival of human civilization. To many, it seemed inevitable that these weapons would be unleashed against the people of the world in their own lifetimes. It is against this background and this tension that nuclear weapons became facts of life. Even those responsible for its design and use in World War II publicly stated that the human race was at a crossroads where a choice would be made about whether the next decades would bring a golden age or the end of the world. Most people did not feel like Conclusion c 119 they were participants in the making of this choice but rather felt themselves and their children to be cast to the wind, along with human destiny . It was a powerless position, but human agency would indeed find avenues of expression in the coming decades. This initial designation of nuclear weapons as signifiers of social transformation would color nuclear iconography indelibly. Nuclear detonations reset calendars to Year Zero; nuclear targets became Ground Zero, survivors of nuclear war became the Last Man. Nuclear history and culture would encode this rhetorical DNA into its very structure. In subsequent years, the U.S. government tried to domesticate the imagery of nuclear weapons. To protect its testing program in Nevada, they talked about “clean” bombs and “fallout-free” nuclear tests. These attempts would bump up against more resonant cultural renderings of the impact of the tests. Already seasoned with magic and possessing seemingly apocalyptic powers, these weapons could not be tamed in the minds of the most Americans. While government descriptions of nuclear weapons moved from the fantastic to the mundane, earlier mythic tropes of nuclear weapons continued to resonate in popular culture sources. Indeed, it became easier to believe in giant mutant bugs than it was to believe that nuclear weapons could be “safe.” Science fiction movies and books explored the post-nuclear landscape, a world where social rules no longer applied, and in which the imagined futures contained very few functioning societies. Surviving humans were left to fight an array of radiation-contaminated mutants and genetically distorted animals and bugs. These stories, drawing on the supernatural mythology of nuclear weapons, expressed widespread anxiety over the dangers of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing and became a driving force behind the ultimate banning of atmospheric testing. The fact that science fiction movies expressed a relationship to nuclear weapons that was more believable than the official government declarations and the reassurances of the civil defense literature or Eisenhower’s “clean bomb” speeches demonstrates the power of the alchemical narrative of the bomb. People insisted that aboveground testing had to stop because it was easy to believe such testing was invoking a contaminated, dystopic future. The belief that nuclear weapons were capable of altering the trajectory of the human future was perhaps the most powerful disruption caused by the weapons. Prior to August 6, 1945, it was easily assumed that the...

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