Atomic Americans

Citizens in a Nuclear State

Sarah E. Robey

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781501762093, 9781501762093
• eBook ISBN: 9781501762109
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

At the dawn of the Atomic Age, Americans encountered troubling new questions brought about by the nuclear revolution: In a representative democracy, who is responsible for national public safety? How do citizens imagine themselves as members of the national collective when faced with the priority of individual survival? What do nuclear weapons mean for transparency and accountability in government? What role should scientific experts occupy within a democratic government? Nuclear weapons created a new arena for debating individual and collective rights. In turn, they threatened to destabilize the very basis of American citizenship.

As Sarah E. Robey shows in Atomic Americans, people negotiated the contours of nuclear citizenship through overlapping public discussions about survival. Policymakers and citizens disagreed about the scale of civil defense programs and other public safety measures. As the public learned more about the dangers of nuclear fallout, critics articulated concerns about whether the federal government was operating in its citizens' best interests. By the early 1960s, a significant antinuclear movement had emerged, which ultimately contributed to the 1963 nuclear testing ban. Atomic Americans tells the story of a thoughtful body politic engaged in rewriting the rubric of rights and responsibilities that made up American citizenship in the Atomic Age.

CHAPTER 1

Stop “Play[ing] Pattycake with the Whole Issue”

Citizen Calls for Civil Defense

In June 1947, less than two years after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the dramatic end of World War II, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveiled a startling new cover image: the stark illustration of a clockface with hands approaching midnight. The graphic, which eventually become known as the Doomsday Clock, represented an ominous vision of a world once again hurdling toward conflict. The “symbol of urgency” held heavy significance for the atomic scientists behind the Bulletin. For those scientists closest to nuclear research, their knowledge prevented them from “forget[ting] that their lives and those of their children, the security of their country and the survival of civilization, all hang in the balance as long as the specter of atomic war has not be exorcised.”¹ The Bulletin’s grim warning was just one in a range of responses to the nuclearized world, yet far from being an esoteric opinion of an elite group of physicists, nuclear dread permeated postwar American life.

The end of World War II was also the start of a strange new era: the Atomic Age. From the moment Americans on the home front caught wind of the “new bomb, so powerful that only the imagination of a trained scientist could dream of its existence,” the public was conflicted about its meaning.² From the start, the security of postwar peace was clouded by trepidation about the war to come. Polled in December 1945, 83 percent of Americans thought there was at least some danger that the United States would be subject to an atomic attack in the next twenty-five years, more than two-thirds of whom thought the danger was “very real.”³ Americans assumed that another war would come soon and that it would be characterized by an entirely new level of destructiveness. Thus, despite the fanfare and celebrations, the soldiers’ triumphant return home, and a deep desire to return to normalcy, the looming presence of war did not resolve in the months following August 1945. In fact, the postwar era was defined by a nation bracing for the next war.⁴

Despite the possibly damaging impact on public morale, federal leaders, public intellectuals, and popular media did little to prevent frightening imaginings of future war from circulating in American culture after World War II ended. As Life magazine conjectured in November 1945, future wars would include unmanned long-range missiles delivering a barrage of atomic bombs across oceans and continents.⁵ As physicist Philip Morrison concluded in One World or None, a 1946 best-selling collection of essays warning of the nuclear future, “the bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands.… The cities of men on earth will perish.”⁶ Such speculative imaginings quickly became a staple of popular media. Real images of nuclear explosions occupied the news cycle in the summer of 1946 as the United States resumed weapons testing at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, marking the first time the curtains were drawn back on wartime Manhattan Project secrecy. At the same time, Americans followed with great interest as nuclear scientists warned of what could become of a world without international control of nuclear weapons.⁷ Despite the US monopoly on nuclear weapons during these years, experts repeatedly declared that the Soviet Union was not far behind in developing nuclear arms of their own.⁸ Predictably, although sooner than some experts had estimated, the Soviets caught up and detonated their first atomic weapon in August 1949.

The nuclear horrors of the last war were not easily forgotten either. John Hersey’s devastating narrative of six survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima, first published in 1946 in a special feature of the New Yorker, became a best seller in book form. Several official government reports provided Americans with physical images and quantifiable calculations of the devastation wrought in Japan.⁹ These visions of nuclear destruction stood uncomfortably up against projections of military might, security, and victory. Fourteen months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after hearing a news report of an Armistice Day celebration featuring an atomic bomb–shaped cake, Eva Hill of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was disgusted. Noting that several US Navy admirals had attended the party, she wrote to President Harry Truman: “I was horrified and embarrassed for our Country that men in such high and important positions could be guilty of such an atrocity, commemorating with levity the destruction of thousands of human beings.”¹⁰ Even for Americans many thousands of miles away, the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as lasting reminders of past and present nuclear terror.

It was not difficult for Americans in the late 1940s to connect the dots between nuclear destruction and concerns for their own individual safety. Yet despite anxiety over the possible approach of World War III, the federal government was slow to take action to organize a system of nuclear public safety, or civil defense. Offices within the Department of Defense (DOD) spent much of the late 1940s studying the problem of civil defense and distributing reports to a limited circle of officials. By the end of the decade, congressional committees had begun to discuss civil defense in closed sessions. Although the news media occasionally covered these incremental developments, Americans knew little about their substance and saw even less of an effect on their everyday lives. Then in 1949, Truman assigned temporary civil defense responsibility to the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), a mobilization agency created by the National Security Act of 1947. Although the NSRB made little discernible progress in mobilizing civil defense volunteers, public attention to civil defense—and the current US lack thereof—increased dramatically at the turn of the decade. Slow federal action and growing international tensions in the late 1940s and early 1950s drove citizens to demand a broader and more urgent range of solutions to meet the nuclear threat. Many citizens felt that the nation was, regrettably, “in a state of apathy and disinterestedness” about the dangers of the Cold War.¹¹ This interval of apparent federal inaction between the end of World War II and late 1951—when the new Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) began implementing coordinated nationwide programs—created a moment of opportunity for increased public dialogue about and support for nuclear public safety.

Hoping to combat the fatalistic attitude among their fellow citizens that “if an atom bomb falls there is no hope,” many thousands of Americans wrote to their elected officials and to newspapers across the country expressing their faith in a civil defense program and their willingness to remobilize for the demands of the Atomic Age.¹² Their messages reached the offices of mayors and governors, the halls of Congress, the desks of Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) employees and military officials, and Truman and his staff. “There is a good deal of spontaneous interest entirely independent of Pentagon influence, in civilian-defense plans,” Lieutenant Colonel Barnet W. Beers explained in a magazine profile in the summer of 1949. Beers, who for a time oversaw one of the DOD’s civil defense offices, had been on the receiving end of countless letters from across the country. “Citizens who are convinced that another war is impending,” he said, “have been badgering the government for three years to get on with a project.”¹³

That Americans badgered officials about civil defense in the late 1940s is largely lost in popular and historical accounts of nuclear civil defense in the United States.¹⁴ While the fear of future nuclear wars is well documented in this era, it is less acknowledged that citizens demanded civil defense programs, sometimes in specific and concrete terms. This gap in memory can be attributed to several forces, namely the dominance of FCDA initiatives just several years later. Federal studies, evacuation drills, and information campaigns such as Bert the Turtle and his “duck and cover” message became visible reminders of a top-down public safety strategy. However, these cultural artifacts also obscure the fact that a significant subset of the American population was deeply invested in the outcome of civil defense planning. The threat of nuclear war thus created space for a new kind of civic activism. The ways Americans understood the meaning and function of civil defense in its formative years reveals how diligently some worked to accommodate the new perils of the Atomic Age into an existing cultural landscape. As the federal government worked to build a legal and institutional structure for civil defense behind closed doors, public ideas about civil defense were forming the basis of a new articulation of American ideals, that of nuclear citizenship.

As concerned Americans asserted their ideas about civil defense strategies, they focused on the continuity of idealized American cultural and political institutions. This impulse aligns with related worries about the emergence of the Cold War and domestic anticommunism. These Americans wrote about the need to preserve the American way of life from nuclear war in the same way that they hoped to defend it from the evils of communism. It is not surprising, then, that Americans who petitioned the federal government about civil defense called upon the strength of tradition, national community, and cultural identity. As they had in wars past, Americans saw home front defense as a broad national project and as such looked to the federal state to take the lead. Americans also understood civil defense as something that must be supported by all levels of government and society, including civic associations, businesses, and individual effort. Thus, although a number of Americans called for a strong centralized federal program of civil defense, they also saw opportunities to make civil defense a part of nongovernmental organizational and cultural traditions.

Americans campaigned for civil defense in a variety of civic and private spaces, including town halls, clubhouses, and living rooms. The results of a University of Michigan Survey Research study published in 1947 claimed that approximately 70 percent of Americans polled had discussed the atomic bomb with other people in social settings.¹⁵ As will be discussed in chapter 2, however, federal leaders saw American civilians of this era as uninformed, apathetic, and irrational about the nuclear threat. In reality, American civilians actively engaged with the unfamiliar and uncomfortable conditions of the Atomic Age. Many saw civil defense as a practical solution, and rather than panic or disengage, they looked for creative ways to fit civil defense into the varied contours of American civic life. When confronted by the specter of an overwhelmingly disruptive future war and an uncertain future, then, Americans stretched their understanding of cultural citizenship to accommodate the idea of nuclear survival. In the earliest years of the Atomic Age and in the earliest public engagement with civil defense ideas, nuclear citizenship was beginning to take shape.

Looking Backward and Looking Forward

The tension of being simultaneously at war and not at war defined American life in the postwar years. Indeed, the very term “cold war” is encoded with this ambiguity and contradiction.¹⁶ With no true pause separating the finished war from the thought of preparing for the war to come, Americans remained partially in a war mentality. And as Americans had experienced just months and years earlier, wartime carried certain civic obligations, from rationing and a draft to more ambiguous requirements of loyalty. The total war model of World War II, with the federal state at its center and a demand for unity, had become familiar and well rehearsed. It is unsurprising, then, that so many Americans carried over the civilian experiences of World War II into their expectations for civilian life during the Cold War. But a parallel current of public information insisted that the new era was unlike anything they had ever known. More so than ever before, all Americans—whether soldier or citizen—could expect to suffer personally if war should come. While the lessons of recent wartime applied, the war of the Atomic Age would require new ideas creatively overlaid onto the experiences of wars past.

According to strategists, pundits, and policymakers, nuclear war reoriented the front lines to the home front. Therefore, civilians would be required to “fight” in nonmilitary theaters: in homes, schools, shops, or workplaces. Moreover, postwar public information about Atomic Age wars insisted that basic survival—not simply the acquisition of territory or the defeat of an enemy’s military—would be the key to victory. The nation with a surviving population could ensure its continuity of government, industry, and the economy and thus win the war. But how could a project to ensure the survival of the home front be organized? Would the civilian defense programs of World War II be enough? Most commentators agreed that it would not.

Despite early attempts to create distance between Atomic Age public safety and that which came before, World War II remained an omnipresent touchstone for nuclear civil defense discussions. Some of these lessons were cautionary. Especially in the mid and late 1940s, the press disparaged scattershot World War II civilian defense “activities [such] as victory gardens and fan dances” as useless in the face of nuclear war.¹⁷ Eric H. Biddle, chairman of the NSRB Interagency Working Group, was more charitable a few years later, but the basic assumption remained: “such things as bond drives, scrap collections and victory gardens … are activities necessary in war time, but actually are not civil defense questions.”¹⁸ Nevertheless, Americans themselves learned from the home front practices of previous wars and carried those experiences with them as they searched for a new approach. Thus, civilian defense in World War II gave Cold War civil defense an operational mandate, if not a direct model.

Unsurprisingly, individuals and organizations that had been involved in World War II–era civilian defense claimed a special authority over managing Atomic Age civil defense. The Citizen Participation Committee (CPC), for example, formed in the wake of World War II “to continue and extend the gains made in [civilian defense voluntarism] during the war.”¹⁹ By the late 1940s, hundreds of former civilian defense organizers maintained seventy-five volunteer offices across the country with ties to other national civic organizations. The CPC knew that maintaining citizen interest was a difficult challenge, however. Writing to the NSRB, Chairwoman C. H. L. Pennock warned federal planning groups that “if the mobilization of civilians gets started in a haphazard way [as it had during World War II] the task is made immeasurably harder.”²⁰ The CPC, like other organiz...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Stop “Play[ing] Pattycake with the Whole Issue”
• 2. “Between the Devil and the Deep”
• 3. The Man in the White Lab Coat
• 4. The Fallout from Fallout
• 5. Atomic America
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index