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Outside the Gates of Eden

The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now

The University of Chicago Press

The Atomic Sublime

The central image of the atomic age is the mushroom cloud: an icon once universal, powerful, and affecting but today almost forgotten, as the circumstances from which it arose and the world to which it spoke have faded into something else. It is an icon fundamentally American, steeped in the Protestant tradition, in which the most significant symbols are also the most sparse, austere, and, in consequence, most freighted.

In pictures, we see the mushroom cloud rising above the lush tropical isles of the South Pacific, bringing with it the rush of uplifted waters, greater than any waterspout or typhoon but somehow of that ilk, a product of nature, yet, paradoxically, the creation of men and a nation.

Or we see it rising from the desert landscapes in the great American West, blooming as light and then blinding, blotting out the harsh desert sunlight.

Judging from the early photographs, it's odd that the mushroom was chosen to describe this new thing. The reference is to something too humble, too small in scale, too much an organism of dark, closed spaces, when the atomic cloud is born of open, unbounded landscapes and inconceivable light.

Indeed, it seems a strange sort of denial. To look at the film footage of bomb after bomb (as one can do these days, thanks to YouTube) is to see that the mushroom is only a single briefly held form among many taken by an atomic explosion. If anything it is uncharacteristic of the process in which a column rises, spreads at the top, and then leans, extrudes, and—finally—dissipates.

The cloud is gone from sight and it has nearly disappeared from memory despite its return as a novelty in the digital library of the Internet. Last of all to fade is its power to draw together and represent anxiety, fear, doubt, and sorrow, as well as grandiosity, heroicism, sober realpolitik. But that too is going; the commentaries on YouTube treat these once-monumental events as curiosities of the past, presented in the same light as fiberglass dining-room sets and ads for Spam.

It is a fitting fate for the atomic age. The epoch that seemed at one time to be eternal has disappeared in much the same way it came into being. Like the culture it invoked, spoke for, and spoke to, this icon began from unformed energy, emerged into a nameless but imperative visual identity, radiated its messages, accepted our responses (terror, fear, awe, pleasure, a certain guilty regret) and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, faded into the atmosphere surrounding it.

* * *

In August of 1945, when the first representations of atomic explosion appeared in public, Americans had nothing before them but an as-yet insignificant image, a grainy, ill-defined reproduction of a photograph (itself made under difficult circumstances) within whose edges could be discerned a fuzzy plume rising above a cloudscape, seen from a great distance and at eye level or a bit above. They were looking, captions explained, at the explosion that destroyed Hiroshima from the first atomic weapon used in war. Within weeks they would be told repeatedly that they had seen both the end of things and the beginning—end of the war, but beginning of a new epoch in human power.

That image was simultaneously familiar and new; it invoked older icons from the war but connected them to an event without precedent. Americans had already seen pillars of smoke rising from the destruction of wartime sites: munitions factories, military installations, urban centers on both sides of the divide between ally and enemy. The picture magazines had regularly shown them similar photographs of natural phenomena—cyclones racing up Tornado Alley, through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas; waterspouts in the Caribbean and the South Pacific; hurricanes photographed by U.S. weather planes and captive-air balloons. Americans had developed a penchant for the photography of natural disaster, and the skinny vertical cloud, widening at its top, listing to one side, was a staple of the press: nature gone amok, striking at the innocent, reminding us of its power when unpropitiated.

From the first, then, this new image connected to nature, to the icons of nature personified—"nature's fury" or "nature's rage" or simply "raging elements" or "raging winds." But the earliest written descriptions of the bomb's blast were far more complex, more dynamic, reflective of the stakes. These first reports emanated, with little acknowledgment of the fact, from a single source. Whether rewriting military releases or looking to journalistic witnesses, editors and copywriters depended on the reporting of one witness: William L. Laurence, science writer for the New York Times and, secretly, a minion of the army's Manhattan Project, handpicked by its military overseer, General Leslie R. Groves. Laurence had been chosen as the supersecret program prepared to unleash its product and decisively enter the public stage. He was brought in months before Hiroshima, learned the science, observed the technology, witnessed the teamwork of the scientific community at Los Alamos, and grasped the immense scale of the production enterprise, from its smallest labs in places like Ames, Iowa, to its monumental structures, monoliths of windowless concrete, rising out of the desert floor in Hanford, Washington.

Laurence demonstrated his fealty and earned the right to accompany the bombing flight over Nagasaki and then furnish the scripts that lifted the veil of secrecy that had hidden the Manhattan Engineer District from view for the life of the war. When General Groves spoke to the press, he spoke Laurence's words; when Truman made his announcement on August 7, 1945, warning of "a rain of ruin from the air the likes of which has never been seen on this earth," the president was reading the speech Laurence had prepared for him.

Laurence's words derived from, and simultaneously established, the official language of the atomic age. His own report on the Nagasaki bombing was widely published, most fully in Life on September 24, 1945. It began with a string of metaphors: "A giant flash ... a bluish-green light that illuminated the entire sky ... a giant ball of fire ... belching enormous white smoke rings ... a pillar of purple fire."

Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being.... At one stage, the entity assumed the form of a giant square totem pole, with its base about three miles long, tapering off to about a mile at the top. Its bottom was brown, its center was amber, its top white ... it was as though the decapitated monster was growing a new head. As the first mushroom floated off into the blue, it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petal curving downward, creamy-white outside, rose-colored inside. It still retained that shape when we last gazed at it from a distance of about 200 miles."

Lawrence originated what would rapidly become the standard description of nuclear detonation: he split the occurrence in two, with infinite power, sublimity, and triumph above, high in the skies, and horror, death, and destruction below.

What lay below, indeed, was the very reality American military figures and their propagandists wished to dispel. Lawrence's eyewitness report on Nagasaki carried the reader away from the darkness and into the light. Look up and see this glorious creation, "a living thing, a new species of being." His description of that new species might be seen as an unconscious sequence: first sun, then meteor, then mushroom, then decapitated monster, and finally a beautiful, delicate, roseate flower. By the time Laurence was through, the atomic cloud belonged to God and nature, and its powers for horror and destruction had been transmuted into redemption and resurrection.

* * *

Lawrence's narrative was compelling. It yoked the specific cruelties of a new weapon of war to the foundations of human experience, and thereby absorbed complex questions of culpability and the specific individuals and nations involved into a drama of types and universal messages. To look at the flood of images in the popular magazines and journals was to see, over the next months and then years, the imbedding of a narrative that declared a brooding drama and a glowing triumph. Heroes emerged, not just military heroes like Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Hiroshima bomber, or General Groves, but scientists at Los Alamos and Chicago, who appeared in the media as stereotypes—brilliant, thoughtful, yet activist intellectuals, men and women of the new elite, deserving of our trust. Depicted in the illustrated newspapers and picture magazines, these scientists worked intently at some unexplained experiment, or they stood before blackboards full of arcane symbols and formulae. And they gazed, with awe and triumph, at the mushroom cloud, artifact of their genius.

It was appropriate that the dominant medium for the presentation of a new atomic age was photography, for it froze the unthinkable, the infinite, and the terrifying into something incontrovertible, measurable, capable of capture and then release into familiar surroundings. The editors of the principal popular journals wrung everything they could from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when the military released pictures and scripted reports of the earliest test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, from that story as well.

By the end of September 1945, each site had adopted a particular symbolic function. Alamogordo represented the triumph of American knowhow, courage, and dedication. Hiroshima became the vengeance for Pearl Harbor, the necessary escalation required to save American lives and decisively end the war. The refusal of the Japanese to surrender, requiring the bombing of Nagasaki, proved that the enemy was as weird, as irrational, and as intrepid as the propagandists had proposed—a kamikaze nation. Japs: "savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic," in Truman's words.

Over the fall and winter of 1945 and into the spring of 1946, journalism, propaganda, denial, and desire combined to form a stable fiction about a weapon terrifying in both principle and actuality. It became a fitting end to the war and a portentous test of humankind's capacity to seek good and resist evil. A campaign of this magnitude, this sharply focused, seems appropriate to the steady swell of frustration, fear, and doubt about the future that made this war's end unlike others. And so, like the ripples from a pebble dropped in a still pond, the atomic sublime expanded into its surroundings. Whether on purpose or by happenstance, the atomic cloud became the symbol of an atomic age—an isolated singularity became a universal inevitability.

It seems paradoxical that this emblem of the infinite, of absolute power and responsibility rendering "words and statistics, and even pictures inadequate," should become the trademark of the age in the form of a photograph mass-reproduced in popular illustrated journals on coffee tables, in dentists' and doctors' waiting rooms, and in the browsing area of the public library. But that was the magic of this icon—the way it could simultaneously domesticate the unimaginable while charging the mundane surroundings of our everyday lives with a weight and sense of importance unmatched in modern times.

* * *

Two American landscapes served as theatrical stage sets for the redemption of the American atomic empire in the decades of nuclear testing after the end of the war: the tropical paradises of the Pacific islands and the harsh sublime landscape of the American West. Both came with powerful associations. Both had been memorialized in books, movies, photographs, paintings, and music. Both would serve the staging of new myths.

The challenge was this: to test the bomb required an empty landscape—empty of people, and also of associations, myths, and symbols. This is impossible, at least as it concerns the American empire, because emptiness itself is a central element in America's origination myth: empty landscape in America signifies promise, a vacuum drawing new and renewed people and institutions. Preparing these landscapes for testing involved complex adaptations of mythology, symbolism, and association. Official propagandists began the process. Enthusiastic journalists expanded and promulgated the atomic narrative. Everyday citizens consumed, adapted, and passed it on. Landscapes of national promise and possibility became monuments of national sacrifice.

But what of those who lived there? The land had to be emptied, of course. It would be best of its people chose to make the sacrifice, offering redemptive absolution for the rest of us. Or its population might be deemed not human, or less than human; in that way, the moral cost of evacuation might be lessened. Both strategies came to be applied in the decades of nuclear testing.

The first postwar tests took place on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands of Micronesia in 1946. Bikini was a logical choice because it was already a protectorate of the United States; it had been "liberated" from the Japanese (having been occupied by exactly 6 soldiers); it was small, with an exploitable deepwater port where obsolete naval vessels could be anchored, the better to see the effect of atomic weapons on the navy. Bikini was home to 167 natives, still (largely) unaffected by the modern. They could be evacuated, and, according to the reports of naval assessors, they were docile, grateful, susceptible to persuasion that took advantage of their devout Christian religiosity, and politically inept. With a minimum of fuss, a military representative was dispatched to present the case to the natives, a "replacement" atoll, Rongerik, was prepared, and the natives were evacuated, along with their outriggers and, in a concession to their Christianity, their chapel. (The saga of their outrageous mistreatment, their conversion from self-sufficient tribe to desperate, starving reservation dependents, their return to an inadequately decontaminated Bikini, and their subsequent reevacuation, is told eloquently elsewhere.)

The entire event was a matter of propaganda far more than one of science. The purpose of the test was political far more than scientific or military. Conflicts between naval and air forces over the future of the American armed services formed one subplot; the need to make atomic warfare imaginable as a military strategy formed another; the desire to send a strong signal to the new enemy in Moscow, a third.

This first postwar atomic test was conceived from the first as a theatrical event. Thousands of radio stations ran remote feeds; 175 reporters and numerous senators, congressmen, UN observers, and a cabinet member were among the 42,000 or more witnesses to converge on Bikini Atoll. By the time the bomb finally went off, less than a year after Nagasaki, somber moral reflection had successfully dissipated into something closer to a festival atmosphere. We might oversimplify by contrasting the titles of two articles, less than six months apart: "What Ended the War," in Life's September 17, 1945, issue, and Newsweek's "Atomic Bomb, Greatest Show on Earth," of February 4, 1946. Not just the titles, but the substance of each article reflected the shift. Newsweek's Washington editor and bureau chief, Ernest K. Lindley, announced the advent of atomic tourism: "Many who have had these firsthand experiences have felt words and statistics, and even pictures inadequate to convey their impressions to others. They doubt that anyone who has not been an eyewitness can sense finally the power of the atomic bomb."

The Bikini test wasn't just spectacle; it was a spectacle of nature, with the American as its caretaker. And at its core lay one of the founding myths of American civilization: the noble savage, primitive, technologically innocent, but wise to the universal laws that linked the divine, the natural and the human into one. Transplanted from the North American wilderness to the South Sea Islands, this prophetic type served the old functions in a new Eden: not the frontier but the globe. Here too, though, his role was the same: to symbolize the passing of one order and the ascendance of the new, to bless this transition even as he and his people were pressed aside, relocated, and then abandoned.

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Excerpted from Outside the Gates of Eden by Peter Bacon Hales. Copyright © 2014 Peter Bacon Hales. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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