3-16-00

THE DAWN OF THE ATOMIC AGE

Objectives: Today we will discuss Peter B. Hales' analysis of American cultural representations of atomic weaponry. We will also look at clips from The Atomic Cafe, a documentary that includes extensive film footage from the1950s.

Questions:

1) What does Hales mean when he says that "the atomic explosion . . . . arrived as something close to what Roland Barthes has called a 'pure sign'"?

2) Early in the Cold War era, who controlled access to information about atomic weaponry? How did dominant media, such as Life Magazine, shape American perceptions of atomic weaponry?

3) What does Hales mean by "the atomic sublime"?

4) How did accentuating the natural and divine settings for atomic explosions affect the perception of human responsibility?

5) How does the placement of atomic weaponry within a natural landscape compare to representations of railroad technology in nineteenth-century America?

6) How do representations of atomic weaponry compare to other representations of military technology during and after World War II?

7) According to Hales, what ultimately became of "the atomic sublime"?

Passages:

When Americans first saw an atomic explosion, it was not a mushroom cloud, an image of holocaust, or a moral indictment. Instead it was a fuzzy, dark cloud rising above an indeterminate landscape. But the process of making sense of that image was affected from the first by two peculiarities--one belonging to the thing itself, the other to the culture on which it burst. The first was the absolute magnitude, the near-infinite power that the bomb represented, a phenomenon that set it apart from all that had preceded it, even as it demanded some means by which that infinitude could be harnessed and made comprehensible. At the same time, though, this new event, with its implications, came to Americans through a peculiarly narrow channel of communication--the result of wartime and then postwar censorship and of the more general consolidation of communications media during the period immediately surrounding the war. Hence Americans looking at the dominant media saw and read essentially the same report, no matter where they turned for information. The military and later the Atomic Energy Commission limited access to the test sites, information about the explosions and, for a time at least, regulated the production of visual artifacts to accompany any written texts. This meant that the process of absorption and adaptation into the existing culture was heavily controlled, and that the process of negotiation that usually characterizes such adaptation was severely limited. (8-9)

But certain elements were common to these early written descriptions. Most notable was the emphasis on natural imagery. By choosing such analogies, the writers did more than simply appropriate a language that could illuminate this new phenomenon. They bridged a previous gap between what was human and what was natural--the atom bomb became a man-made marvel of nature, and thereby the question of responsibility for the effects of the explosion remained slippery. (10)

Life's editors, and the representatives of mass culture more generally . . . rejected the fatalistic, horrifying vision of a science and scientists whose discoveries moved far beyond their moral capabilities, or those of their age. In their place lay the more reassuring vision of a rationalized, modernized, laboratory of control, in which the products remained sterile, controlled, and threatening only to the transgressor. (11)

As Laurence and, over time, many others, described and redescribed the atomic sublime, these accounts came to fit themselves symbiotically within the broader constellation of ideas that had developed in nineteenth century America around the notions of blessed nature, landscape, religion, personal psychology, and manifest destiny. Laurence and his fellows reinvoked the American doctrines of nature in a way that enabled this profoundly disruptive new presence to enter the language of American culture as an element of the mythic natural landscape. And so . . . the atomic explosion became not a purely human circumstance (for which we must accept responsibility), but rather a part of that benign collaboration among man, nature, and divinity that had defined American destiny, a predetermined, even foreordained event.

Though dominant in mass culture, this mythic embedding of the Atomic Bomb in the grandeur of Nature, as the manifestation of God's will, had its vocal opponents from the first. . . (17)

Then came the next stage in mediating and Americanizing of the bomb: relocating the atomic cloud from Japan to new regions--to the paradise of the South Pacific and the Great American Desert stretching behind Las Vegas, Nevada. (17)

The effect of this conjuction of South Pacific Eden and nuclear holocaust cannot be too heavily emphasized, for it was successful in continuing, even amplifying, the strain of aestheticism that had characterized the earliest attempts to anchor the atomic sublime. Terror and beauty, together, begot a terrible beauty, one that needed the guiding hand of an authoritative and authoritarian military father-figure. (19)

And so article after article in the dominant voices of the era, each with its worrisome words, would be accompanied by the reassuring, sensual, awesome photographs of the atomic sublime. Implanted in the mythology of the American landscape for a decade, the atomic explosion had become inextricable from its surroundings. No gothic horror, it seems, could eradicate its majestic beauty, its resonance with the Numinous Absolute, its freedom from moral imperatives. (25)