Abstract
The idea of countering the threat of nuclear war with the establishment of “one world government” gained popularity after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by 1950 succumbed to the realities of the Cold War. The world was seemingly split in two, a democratic-capitalist West squaring off against a Communist world. These and other divisions contributed to differing views of the emerging nuclear age. Developing nations were charting a course between East and West, exploring their options, including the creation of a nonaligned movement, and developing their own perspectives on the nuclear age. The perspective of members of the “nuclear club” and of countries with nuclear power was different from that of their nonnuclear neighbors. Superpowers saw the world differently than did “mere” great powers, not to mention small countries. Were these differences reflected in popular media depictions of nuclear power and nuclear war? Did commonalities or differences prevail? Do the magazines analyzed in this volume fall into categories? But popular media were by no means mere receptors of structural forces. Rather, they actively molded popular perceptions of the nuclear age. How did they portray the nascent nuclear age, and thus encourage their readers to see the changing world, and did this happen in nationally or regionally specific ways?
The authors would like to thank Sonja Schmid and Hans Bieber for their very valuable suggestions for this chapter.
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Notes
Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century. U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 14.
L. S. Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb, Volume II, Resisting the Bomb, 1954–1970 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997), 300.
Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light. American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), xix. Wittner, Struggle, Volume I, One World or None (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1993), 55. One example of the influence of scientists is a survey of the summer of 1946 that showed how the American public shared several ideas of the scientists that were not so obvious at the time, such as the inevitable and imminent loss of America’s nuclear monopoly: Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 23, 59.
See also S. R. Weart, Nuclear Fear. A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 111–118.
One indication of how quickly the idea of “one earth” was disseminated are cartoons showing planet earth being threatened by the atomic bomb. Jacobs points out that boundaries between states were not indicated in these images. Jacobs, “Target Earth. The Atomic Bomb and the Whole Earth,” in Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future. Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb, ed. R. Jacobs (Lanham, MD: Lexington books, 2010), 187–205, esp. 194.
K. Osgood, Total Cold War. Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006), esp. chapter 6.
President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” Speech, December 8, 1953, accessed January 8, 2012, http://www.atomicarchive.com/. The complicated motives behind Eisenhower’s initiative are analyzed in John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon. Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, 1 (February 2008): 5–44
G. Skogmar, The United States and the Nuclear Dimension of European Integration (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
For the following L. S. Wittner, “Blacklisting Schweitzer,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 51 (1995): 55–61
Norman Cousins, Dr. Albert Schweitzer of Lambaréné (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973. First edition Harper & Bros, 1960). We quote from Schweitzer’s speeches as they appear in the appendix of this book.
Illustrating the famous theorem of the sociologists W. I. Thomas and D. S. Thomas, “If men define their situations as real they are real in their consequences,” originally in W. I. Thomas and D. S. Thomas, The Child in America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1928), 572.
Jens Jäger, “Fotografen des globalen Dorfs? Bildjournalismus der 1920er und 1930er Jahre,” in Die Zeitschrift—Medium der Moderne. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, Hg. Clemens Zimmermann, Manfred Schmeling (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2006), 85–109, esp. 103–106. Literature on the international circulation of news photo’s is extremely scarce.
See, for example, A. Fechter, J. Wilke, “Produktion von Nachrichtenbildern. Eine Untersuchung der Bilderdienste der Nachrichtenagenturen,” in Nachrichtenproduktion im Mediensystem. Von den Sport- und Bilderdiensten bis zum Internet, Hg. J. Wilke (Köln: Böhlau, 1998), 55–120
N. Gidalewitsch, Bildbericht und Presse. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Organisation der illustrierten Zeitungen (Inaugural dissertation Tübingen, 1956), 40–53.
The Family of Man, 179. On “globalizing humanitarianism” see Kiosk. Eine Geschichte der Photoreportage, 1839–1973, Hg. R. Lebeck, B. von Dewitz (Göttingen: Steidl, 2001), 252; on “The family of man” in the Netherlands: M. Roholl, “‘A Full and Fair Picture.’ American Foreign Cultural Policy vis-á-vis the Netherlands, 1945– 1960,” in American Culture in the Netherlands, ed. D. Bosscher et al. (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996), 165–196, esp 190.
See David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: M. I. T. Press, 1994).
See Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980), esp. 42–43, 73, 269–275, 385–386
Jonathan Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)
Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer. Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993)
Susanne Schattenberg, Stalins Ingenieure. Lebenswelten zwichen Technik und Terror in den 1930er Jahren (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2002), 70–107
Paul Josephson, Red Atom. Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 2000), esp. 7–19.
The Netherlands were not unique in this. See J. Radkau, Natur und Macht. Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (München: Beck, 2002), 293–294, 300–303; Weart, Nuclear Fear, 323–327.
See Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France. Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: M. I. T. Press, 2009).
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Augustine, D., van Lente, D. (2012). Conclusion: One World, Two Worlds, Many Worlds?. 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_9
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