Abstract
Among the great technological innovations that were developed during the Second World War, none made as strong an impression around the world as the atom bombs that destroyed two Japanese cities in August 1945. Commentators spoke of the “atomic age” that had now begun, as if the atom would, all by itself, shape a new world. Two diametrically opposed visions soon developed about the nature of this new phase in human development. On the one hand, it was commonly assumed that before long other nations would create their own nuclear weapons. A new world war would therefore be even more devastating than the one that had just ended, possibly putting an end to all human life on earth. On the other hand, the applications of nuclear fission in medicine, agriculture, engineering, and power provision promised to create a utopian world. Vehicles, from family cars to interplanetary rockets, would be propelled by cheap nuclear power, canals and harbor basins would be created by “peaceful nuclear explosions,” diseases would more easily be diagnosed and cured, food would be produced more efficiently and cheaply, and deserts would be transformed into agricultural land—in brief, material comfort for all people on earth became a realistic prospect, and with it, an end to conflict and war.1
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Notes
S. L. Del Sesto, “Wasn’t the Future of Nuclear Energy Wonderful?,” in Imagining Tomorrow. History, Technology and the American Future, ed. J. J. Corn (Cambridge, MA: M. I. T. Press, 1987), 58–75.
E. Van der Vleuten, “Toward a Transnational History of Technology: Meanings, Promises, Pitfalls,” Technology and Culture 49 (October 2008): 974–994
J. Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 39–44
P-Y. Saunier, “Transnational,” in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, ed. A. Iriye, P-Y. Saunier (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 1047–1055; Hartmut Kaelble, “Die Debatte über Vergleich und Transfer und was jetzt?,” accessed January 8, 2012, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/id=574&type=artikel.
B. Goldschmidt, The Atomic Complex. A Worldwide Political History of Nuclear Energy (Lagrange Park, IL: American Nuclear Society, 1982).
L. S. Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb, 3 Vols. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993–2003)
S. R. Weart, Nuclear Fear. A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)
H. Nehring, “Cold War, Apocalypse and Peaceful Atoms. Interpretations of Nuclear Energy in the British and West German Antinuclear Weapons Movements, 1955–1964,” Historical Social Research 29 (2004): 150–170
H. Nehring, “National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957–1964,” Contemporary European History 14 (2005): 559–582
Benjamin Ziemann (Hg.), Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA during the Cold War (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2007).
Overview in Clemens Zimmermann, Manfred Schmeling (Hg.), Die Zeitschrift—Medium der Moderne. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006).
A. Briggs, P. Burke, A Social History of the Media. From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002), 234, 237, 241.
This approach is loosely based on the model developed in P. Weingart, Die Stunde der Wahrheit. Zum Verhältnis der Wissenschaft zu Politik, Wirtschaft, und Medien in der Wissensgesellschaft (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2001), 27–30.
The cultural background, well analyzed, for example, in Weart’s Nuclear fear, K. Willis, “The Origins of British Nuclear Culture, 1895–1939,” Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 59–89
Del Sesto’s “Wasn’t the Future of Nuclear Energy Wonderful?,” is little considered by Weingart. On science and technology popularization: R. Whitley, “Introductory Essay: Knowledge Producers and Knowledge Acquirers. Popularization as a Relation between Scientific Fields and Their Publics,” in Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularization, ed. T. Shinn, R. Whitley (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 3–28
S. Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 519–539
D. Nelkin, Selling Science. How the Press Covers Science and Technology (New York: Freeman, 1995 2nd rev. edn.)
Marcel C. LaFollette, Making Science Our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910–1955 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990)
M. Kohring, Wissenschaftsjournalismus. Forschungsüberblick und Theorieentwurf (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005).
R. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove. Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1994).
J. Bruner, Making Stories. Law, Literature, Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
L. Herman, B. Vervaeck, Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005)
J. Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies (London: Routledge, 1990, 2nd edn.).
The main literature used for this overview: P. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light. American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985)
P. Boyer, Fallout. A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1998)
Susanna Schrafstetter, Stephen Twigge, Avoiding Armageddon. Europe, the United States, and the Struggle for Nuclear Nonproliferation, 1945–1970 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004)
R. Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986)
R. Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly. The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New York: Knopf, 2007)
G. Skogmar, The United States and the Nuclear Dimension of European Integration (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
J. Krige, “Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence,” in Global Power Knowledge. Science and Technology in International Affairs, Osiris 21, ed. J. Krige, K-H Barth (2006) Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2006: 161–181
John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon. Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38 (2008): 5–44.
K. Osgood, Total Cold War. Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006), chapters 5 and 6, on the Peaceful Atom initiative and diplomacy during the Cold War; Goldschmidt, The Atomic Complex; Weart, Nuclear Fear; Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb.
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© 2012 Dick van Lente
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van Lente, D. (2012). Introduction: A Transnational History of Popular Images and Narratives of Nuclear Technologies in the First Two Postwar Decades. In: van Lente, D. (eds) The Nuclear Age in Popular Media. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137086181_1
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