The debate over nuclear refuge

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Notes

1. Thomas H. Schaub, American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p.5.

2. Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p.10.

3. Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (New York: Bantam, 1976), p.192.

4. Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp.2–3.

5. Ibid., pp.53–67. It is sometimes unclear whether Nadel is accusing Hersey of a kind of cultural appropriation of this event by converting the victims into textual sources, or whether any account of Hiroshima risks distortion, in which case presumably the safest response would be silence.

6. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp.175–7, 326, etc.

7. Ibid., p.321. Urban re-planning was discussed in Ralph Lapp's Must We Hide? (1949).

8. Daniel Lang, Early Tales of the Atomic Age (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), p.113. Mine shafts for use as nuclear shelters made a ludicrous re-appearance at the end of Dr. Strangelove and underground automated factories featured in Frederik Pohl's 1959 post-holocaust story, The Waging of the Peace, where automated production methods have become the new enemy.

9. Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead Nor Red: Civil Defence and American Political Development during the Early Cold War (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p.42.

10. Quoted in Edward James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.89.

11. I have discussed Wylie and Caidin's relevant fiction in David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp.19–22.

12. David Bradley, No Place To Hide (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), pp.165, p.16.

13. Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light, p.92.

14. Bradley, No Place To Hide, pp.106–7.

15. Ibid., pp.92–3.

16. Among the many examples, see Ira Chernus, Dr. Strangegod: On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear Weapons (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1986) and Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of the Defense Intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12/4 (1987), pp.687–718.

17. The case was described in Ralph E. Lapp's The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1957] 1958).

18. In that respect Gerstell anticipates the Federal Civil Defence Authority's ‘Grandma's Pantry’ campaign later in the 1950s which was promoted through images of old-fashioned kitchens and slogans like ‘With a well-stocked pantry you can be just as self-sufficient as Grandma was’ (quoted and discussed in Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), pp.91–2).

19. Richard Gerstell, How to Survive an Atomic Bomb (Washington DC: Combat Forces Press, 1950), p.105.

20. Ibid., pp.121–2.

21. Caidin at that time was working with the New York State Civil Defence Commission.

22. Philip Morrison, ‘If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand’, in Dexter Masters and Katharine Way (eds.), One World Or None (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946), p.3.

23. John Lear, ‘Hiroshima, USA: Can anything be done about it?’, Collier's, 5 Aug. 1950, pp.11, 15.

24. William Tenn, The Wooden Star (New York: Ballantine, 1968), p.14.

25. Grossman, Neither Dead Nor Red, pp.77–8, 102–3. Grossman rejects Elaine Tyler May's view (Homeward Bound, 1988) of a ‘hegemonic paternalism’ in the FCDA as being based on insufficient data.

26. Dorothy Dearborn, ‘She'd Give Up Everything For A Trip To The Moon’, Evening Times-Globe (Saint John, New Brunswick), 10 April 1971, p.7.

27. Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary, Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), p.89. The story was rejected by Collier's because it caused ‘revulsion’ in the readers.

28. ‘That Only a Mother’ (Astounding, June 1948), was collected in Merril's Out of Bounds (New York; Pyramid, 1960). For valuable critical commentary on this story, see Elizabeth Cummins, ‘Short Fiction by Judith Merril’, Extrapolation 33/3 (1992), pp.202–14.

29. Letter by Judith Merril, 19 Feb. 1949; Merril Collection, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

30. Six Steps to Survival (1957), a government pamphlet on civil defence, available in the ‘Virtual Atomic Museum’ at www.rdrop.com/∼jsexton/cd/six/.

31. In fact this appropriateness was probably coincidental because the title was chosen by Merril's publishers in preference for her own more explicit references to nuclear war (Merril and Pohl-Weary, Better to Have Loved, p.99).

32. This story, collected in The Martian Chronicles (1950), draws an explicit analogy between the outlines of the family members and photographic negatives, as if they are memento images of the family long after the family itself has been destroyed.

33. According to Peter Tate, Merril was a member of the United World Federalists and also a supporter of Gary Davis's World Citizen Movement (‘The Fantastic World of Judith Merril’, Western Mail, 14 Oct. 1966, p.7.

34. For commentary on the increasing prominence of doctors in the debate over fall-out from the mid-1950s into the following decade, see Paul Boyer, Fallout (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), pp.81–6.

35. Judith Merril, Shadow on the Hearth (London: Roberts and Vintner, 1966), p.21.

36. Here Merril reflects the ‘mania for finding spies everywhere‘: Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895.1984 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), p.17. Brians. survey is an invaluable guide to this body of fiction.

37. Merril, The Shadow on the Hearth, p.39.

38. David Dowling, Fictions of Nuclear Disaster (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p.59.

39. Merril, Shadow on the Hearth, pp.131–2.

40. Charles Poore, ‘Books of the Times’, New York Times, 5 June 1950, p.29?

41. In that sense it is not helpful to lump Merril's novel in with other narratives under the heading of ‘The “Civil Defence” Plot’, as Martha A. Bartter does: The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp.122–3.

42. Merril, Shadow on the Hearth, p.192.

43. Robert Heinlein, letter to Merril, 7 November 1962; Merril Collection, Ottawa.

44. English-language transcript of interview with Elisabeth Vonarburg and Luc Pomereau in Solaris 69 (1986), p.2; Merril Collection, Ottawa.

45. The TV play script was written by David Davidson and the production directed by Ralph Nelson.

46. This and subsequent passages transcribed from video recording of Atomic Attack.

47. Merril registered misgivings about this simplification when she saw the film and later recalled: ‘For the first time I became aware of the major differences in the media’, Merril and Pohl-Weary, Better to Have Loved, p.100.

48. Letter of 19 Aug. 1958; Merril Collection.

49. Philip Wylie, ‘A Better Way to Beat the Bomb’, The Atlantic Monthly (Feb. 1951), p.42.

50. Val Peterson, ‘They Said It Would Never Happen …’ The New York Times Book Review, 17 Jan. 1954, pp.4–5. Wylie had written to Truman to stress the importance of people remaining in the cities while under nuclear attack and sent an advance copy of Tomorrow! to Eisenhower.

51. Philip Wylie, Tomorrow! (New York: Rinehart, 1954), pp.124–5.

52. Letter from Eugene Rabinowitz to Philip Wylie, 18 Jan. 1954; Wylie papers, Princeton University.

53. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red, p.62.

54. Richard Foster, The Rest Must Die (New York: Fawcett, 1959), p.150.

55. James Blish, So Close To Home (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), p.63.

56. ‘The Box’ was also collected in ibid.

57. James W. Deer, ‘The Unavoidable Shelter Race’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 13/2 (Feb. 1957), pp.66–7.

58. James Blish, A Case of Conscience (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p.96. In his 1956 story ‘To Pay the Piper’ (collected in Galactic Cluster, 1959), Blish dealt further with the neurosis-inducing conditions of living in underground shelters in the aftermath of a nuclear and biological war.

59. David Ketterer, ‘Covering A Case of Conscience’, Science-Fiction Studies 9 (1982), p.208. Ketterer notes Blish's use of the Deer article at p.199.

60. Kennedy's shelter campaign is discussed in Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp.253–8.

61. For a discussion of these and similar works, see Chapter 11 of my American Science Fiction and the Cold War. In Gina Berriault's novel preachers promote the cause of shelters by giving them an epic grandeur (‘the greatest migration in the history of mankind is to be the migration underground into the shelters’), and by convincing their audience that descent really constituted a spiritual ascent (The Descent, London: Arthur Barker, 1961, pp.110–11).

62. Pat Frank, How to Survive the H-Bomb. And Why (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1962), p.9. Similarly, his nomination of Los Angeles as the city least likely to survive would have offered little comfort to his readers in that city.

63. Philip Wylie, Triumph (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), p.96. Paul Brians suggests that the exception mentioned was On the Beach (Nuclear Holocausts, p.347).

64. Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp.88–9, p.92.

65. Boyer, Fallout, pp.110.22. Among other reasons for the reduction of concern after 1963, Boyer cites the remoteness and abstraction of nuclear reality, the tranquillizing effect of the ‘peaceful atom’ programme, and the emergence of the New Left in the USA.

66. Endorsement in Dean Ing, Pulling Through (New York: Ace, 1983), p.i.