Reflections on Whole World on Fire

Abstract

My remarks are divided into my personal and my sociological reflections on Whole World on Fire (Eden, 2004). As an aging baby boomer – to use that awful cliche – it is hard to read Whole World on Fire without at the same time thinking about my childhood experiences growing up ‘under the shadow of the mushroom cloud’. I was too young to understand McCarthyism, but my memories of the atom bomb zeitgeist are very vivid. Until I was 12 years old, we lived in Burbank, California, home at that time to Lockheed Aircraft and, as I was often told, ground zero. I remember how Mrs Dodge, my fourth grade teacher, would be teaching us carrying or borrowing, when she would suddenly shout ‘Drop!’, and we would scramble under our seats, covering our eyes to protect us against the blinding flash of light. Later I learned that these drills prepared us for a sudden attack, when we would have less than 5 minutes. I remember my next-door neighbor, Marsha, taking me and another friend into the bomb shelter, which was a dirt trench, about 8 feet high, that her father had dug under the house. I can still remember being so scared during the Cuban Missile Crisis that I went to bed in my tennis shoes, just in case I would have to make a run for the neighbor’s shelter in the middle of the night. My mother reassured me we were in no danger, so I was shocked to find her formerly empty pantry stocked with canned goods. After we moved to a nearby suburb, I remember how impressed my friends and I were when the neighbor who owned the biggest lot built a house, a pool, and a bomb shelter. Of course, these are the memories of a child, but they do reflect the views of adults that a nuclear attack was very likely, that most people would perish, and that we should do everything we could to be among the small number of people who would survive. Years passed and some time, maybe in the 1970s and 80s, we laughed at the bomb shelters that would do no good, since we had stopped believing in a survivable nuclear war. If you were lucky enough to be born in Montana, the fallout would kill you and ultimately the world would be covered by a black dust cloud, and we would go the way of the dinosaurs. No one in their right mind – not even Ronald Reagan – believed in a survivable nuclear war. Or so I thought before reading Whole World on Fire. At one level, Whole World on Fire tells the story of how organizational processes led nuclear scientists to drastically underestimate the damage of