| Chapter 1: | Two Stories |
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American society's first response to the threat of atomic destruction was fear. The fear was so powerful that it was not limited only to those who actually witnessed the detonations, but spread all over the nation (and very likely the world) and throughout a generation. Michael Scheibach chronicled atomic energy's implications on the culture of a generation (which he called the “Atomic Generation”). He regarded the Atomic Generation as a cohort who shared the common experience of being constantly reminded of impending atomic doom. Adolescents in the period between 1945 and the late 1950s (the generation born between 1928 and 1942) were inundated with messages of atomic awareness and anxiety. Many of these information campaigns were intended to prepare the generation for the Atomic Age. The themes in the information included the introduction to the awesome power of the atom, the absolute necessity to protect democracy against totalitarianism, the importance of international cooperation to eliminate wars, and the unlimited potential of the peaceful uses of atomic energy.
The two predominant emotional elements in the nuclear information were fear and hope. A picture in an issue of Senior Scholastic from May 5, 1954, illustrated the dichotomy. (Senior Scholastic was a magazine read weekly by thousands of teachers and their students.) In this picture, a man was standing at a fork in the road: one path led to atom destruction, the other to atom peace.8 Non-nuclear peace was not presented as an option.
Persistently, fear and hope were the twin emotional themes in the Atomic Age. Following the dawn of the Atomic Age, the world was threatened by the potentialities of nuclear Armageddon. The threat was real, and there was nothing an individual could do to stop it or escape from it. Erich Fromm described the postwar era:
In such a time of desperation, people sought hope as a consolation.