Atomic Historiography Michael Kimmage (bio) Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler, eds. The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Illustrations, bibliography, index, and notes. xxxi + 447 pp. $42.00. The large-scale periodization of American history rests on a few phrases, usually referring to a military conflict of one kind or another. There is the age of conquest, the revolutionary age, the antebellum era, the interwar years, the postwar period and, finally, the atomic or nuclear age. This is the age that began definitively with the creation of the atomic bomb, and it encompasses both the Cold War, which would not have been cold without atomic weapons, and the rise of the nuclear family. One could go a step further and describe the individualism of the postwar period as atomistic individualism, as if the mobile atom—and its power—were metaphors for modern culture and modern geopolitics alike. The Atomic Bomb and American Society, a collection of essays edited by Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler, takes as its working premise the link between atomic weaponry and the drift of postwar American history. Based on a 2005 conference held in Oak Ridge, Tennessee—itself a significant site in atomic and American history—The Atomic Bomb and American Society is devoted to charting “the social swath of this atomic sword [nuclear weapons] in the context of the Cold War” and to examining the atomic bomb and “its lead role in the culture surrounding the Cold War” (pp. xix, xxiii). The included essays range from military to cultural history, from women’s history to the history of public memory. They demonstrate how wide the bomb’s “social swath” was, wider perhaps than Americans may have known during the Cold War. In the volume’s concluding essay, “The Challenges of Preserving America’s Nuclear Weapons Complex,” Jason Krupar remarks on the vastness and the relative invisibility of America’s nuclear weapons complex. “The Cold War created a national web of black spaces,” Krupar writes, “zones hidden from public sight even while located in the midst of it” (p. 399). The Atomic Bomb and American Society helps to illuminate these black spaces, without fully proving the bomb’s lead role in the culture surrounding the Cold War. In an essay that frames this volume as a whole, “Sixty Years and Counting: Nuclear Themes in American Culture, 1945 to the Present,” Paul Boyer [End Page 145] addresses the complexity of the bomb’s role in postwar American culture. A distinguished historian of American culture and the bomb, Boyer breaks this role into three phases: an early phase of anxiety, running from 1945 to the mid-1950s; a relaxation of fear in the 1960s and 1970s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had passed without incident; and a widening fear of atomic catastrophe in the late 1970s and 1980s.1 Boyer emphasizes that nuclear fear or questions prompted by the existence of nuclear weapons were unsteady variables in American culture, waxing and waning for the duration of the Cold War. Nor did nuclear questions disappear together with the Cold War: the 1995 dispute over the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibition demonstrated precisely how unmasterable America’s nuclear past had remained, some six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.2 What did disappear after 1989, according to Boyer, was the coherence or urgency that had previously been attached to nuclear questions. “In contrast to earlier eras, a fundamental disconnect arose between politics and the popular culture” after the Cold War, Boyer writes (p. 14). Nuclear proliferation was sharply relevant as a strategic issue in the 1990s, while American popular culture was celebrating the harmless incompetence of Homer Simpson, the cartoon employee of an atomic energy plant (p. 14). And yet, the old fears were still there under the surface, made worse, in fact, by the fading of the Cold War. “During the Cold War, the adversary was at least the nation-state headed by rational leaders with whom one could negotiate,” Boyer states. “In the volatile destabilized post–Cold War world, lethal menace could lurk anywhere, and the popular culture reflected the resulting anxieties” (p. 12). One...
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Jul 3, 2022
Samuel Spellmann 
Open Access