The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age

Notes

Notes Introduction: At the Core of the Bomb, Narratives 1. Information on the nature and naming of this experiment can be found in Lillian Hoddeson, Paul W. Henriksen, Roger A. Meade, and Catherine Westfall, Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 340–42; Thomas P. McLaughlin et al., A Review of Criticality Accidents, 2000 Revision (Los Alamos , N.M.: Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2000), 74–75; and Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 611–12. 2. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1954), 81. 3. John Canaday, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bomb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 3; see also H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (London: Macmillan, 1914). Canaday mentions that the physicist Leo Szilard had read Wells’s book before imagining the possibility of chain reaction in 1935. 4. Canaday, Nuclear Muse, 6. 5. Dee Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 66–67. See also Arthur Kramish, ed., Project Sunshine: Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand Corp., 1953). 6. My examination of what I call the alchemical narrative is not to be confused with studies of “nuclear narratives” that focus on the narration of the decision to drop the bomb, written by scholars such as John Dower and Peter Kuznick. The narratives this book examines have to do with the construction of nuclear iconography in culture and society and not on the public framing of political decisions. See John Dower, “Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia,” in Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 37–51; Peter Kuznick, “The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative,” Japan Focus, July 23, 2007, japanfocus.org/products/topdf/2479. 7. “Text of Statements by Truman, Stimson on Development of Atomic Bomb,” New York Times, August 7, 1945, 4. 8. Donald Porter Geddes, ed., The Atomic Age Opens (New York: Pocket Books, 1945). 9. Norman Cousins, Modern Man Is Obsolete (New York: Viking, 1945), 7–8. This is the expanded Viking Press edition published in October 1945; for the original editorial of the same title see Saturday Review, August 18, 1945, 5–9. 10. “One Victory Not Yet Won,” New York Times, August 9, 1945, D8; italics added. 11. Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 13, 5; Mark S. Morrisson, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. Weart describes Soddy as consciously seeing himself as an alchemist, bringing energy and abundance to the world from simple atoms. 12. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 421. 13. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), xix. 14. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 421. 15. Cousins, Modern Man Is Obsolete, 7. 16. “Text of Statements by Truman, Stimson,” 4. 17. Formally known as the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere , in Outer Space and Under Water, signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, and entered into force on October 10, 1963. A full text can be found in Glenn T. Seaborg, Kennedy, Krushchev, and the Test Ban (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 302–5. Seaborg was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time the treaty was negotiated and signed; he was also the discoverer of plutonium (1941) and a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1951). 18. Peter B. Hales, “The Atomic Sublime,” American Studies 32:1 (Spring 1991): 5. 19. Vincent Leo, “The Mushroom Cloud Photograph: From Fact to Symbol,” Afterimage 13:1 (Summer 1985): 6. See also A. Costadina Titus, “The Mushroom Cloud as Kitsch,” in Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, ed. Scott C. Zeman and Michael A. Amundson (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004), 101–3. 20. Leo, “Mushroom Cloud Photograph,” 10. 21. “264 Exposed to Atomic Radiation after Nuclear Blast in Pacific,” New York Times, March 12, 1954, 1. Hundreds of U.S. servicemen taking part in the test were...