![]() Statement by the President on the Hydrogen Bomb This is the actual text of Truman’s announcement: You are basically listening to a faint, faint echo of a single conversation that happened early in 1950 after President Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb. If you ever saw any discussion of what happens if nuclear war ends life on the Earth, despite the fact that actually deployed arsenals would do no such thing If you ever read other apocalyptic nuclear war novels (novel) ![]() It told the world, in language that everyone could understand, that nuclear war means death. ![]() On the fundamental human level, in spite of all the technical inaccuracies, it spoke truth. Nevertheless, the myth did what Norway intended it to do. Almost all the details are wrong: radioactive cobalt would not substantially increase the lethality of large hydrogen bombs fallout would not descend uniformly over large areas but would fall sporadically in space and time people could protect themselves from the radioactivity by sheltering under a few feet of dirt and the war is supposed to happen in 1961, too soon for even the most malevolent country to have acquired the megaton-nage needed to give a lethal dose of radiation to the entire earth. The myth of On the Beach, like Jonathan Schell’s myth, is technically flawed in many ways. Twenty-five years before Jonathan Schell, Nevil Shute imagined the human species calmly acquiescing in its own extinction. There is no hope of survival there is no talk of building an underground Noah’s Ark to keep earth’s creatures alive until the cobalt should have decayed. The people in Australia, after the rest of the world is dead, live out their lives quietly and bravely to the end. The myth pictures nuclear war as silent inexorable death from which there is no escape, radioactive cobalt sweeping slowly down the sky from the northern to the southern hemisphere. The book and the film created an enduring myth, a myth which entered consciously or subconsciously into all subsequent thinking about nuclear war. His book became an international best-seller and was made into a successful film. ![]() Norway’s poignant translation of apocalyptic disaster into the everyday voices of real people caught the imagination of the world. In 1957, only two years before his death, the novelist Nevil Shute Norway published On the Beach, a description of mankind wiped out by radiological warfare. This nightmare produced a literary response which has continued to reverberate ever since. But it would account for the sudden change in the world’s direction after 1962. Just reading between the lines of many many old articles and accounts. The civilian anti-nuclear movement happened, in this hypothesis, after the real military danger was over, in kind of imitation of a silent revolt led by scientists who believed the world was in serious danger and something needed to be done. In the second part of this post, Freedom From Nuclear Fear II: The 1964 Consensus, I advance the idea that the tension built up in this article was coiled like a tightly wound spring in many psyches, and the Cuban Missile crisis gave a horrible example of how a nuclear war could and probably would happen if things went on the way they were going. This is about that conversation and its’ historical context. The conviction that nuclear war would end all life on Earth has its source in a single radio conversation in 1950. ![]() This is an longer article giving cold war history. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |