Many films and books imagined a post-apocalyptic world, sometimes with a conveniently clean and white-robed new world order. In the late ‘60s Tony Price began salvaging materials discarded from the Los Alamos labs to construct his art works, saying: “Los Alamos scrap is a kind of pure art in itself, since you are dealing with a harmonic principle of nuclear physics”. Jackson Pollock’s action paintings were, he said himself in 1950, “energy and motion made visible” in an instant, as the modern painter couldn’t express the age of the atom bomb in the old forms of any past culture. The bomb has inspired entire art movements such as the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger, using acid to corrode in the act of creation. There it is on The Atomic Count Basie album sleeve in 1958, a nightmare image as American – and genuinely iconic – as Marilyn or the Coca-Cola bottle.
If there is one key image that has changed our imagination it is the mushroom cloud – seared with that first flash of detonation into our social memory. It would be powering our cars and spaceships in a Jetsons or Dan Dare future just as the manned space programme grew directly out of the technological race to build the Bomb. Some children’s books, or comics such as Eagle in the UK, celebrated its liberating technological potential. And even The Ed Sullivan Show screened A Short Vision – a creepy British animated film about nuclear devastation in 1956, and twice in two weeks at that, traumatising a generation of children who saw it by chance.īut optimism about atomic power coexisted with the fear of the Bomb. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove still disturbs. Pal went on to add the Bomb to his film of The Time Machine (1960) so that HG Wells’ traveller witnesses a nuclear war in 1966. Even dramas purportedly about outer space and not bombs, such as George Pal’s When Worlds Collide (1951) or the Quatermass serials and films are really exploring the cataclysmic potential of this new power. Val Guest’s The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1954) documents the breakdown of society and the environment as nuclear tests shift the earth’s axis and humanity hurtles towards doom through accelerated climate change. There was a striking willingness in family entertainment just after the horrors of WW2, to face the new possibility of annihilation. The film also employs a documentary-style realism showing the mass evacuation of London in preparation for the detonation. In Seven Days to Noon (1950) a British atomic weapons scientist, driven to madness by the horror of the power he has helped unleash, threatens to detonate a stolen device in central London if the government doesn’t close down the weapons programme. Post-war British cinema was quick to grapple with the moral dilemmas of the atomic age. John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955) imagined a return to medieval superstition after a nuclear war and a paranoid hunt to root out mutants as witches. In science fiction literature, especially in Britain, where the atomic bomb had first been imagined, the vision was darker from the start.
For the Fantastic Four (1961) it was cosmic ray exposure in their rocket ship as they raced to beat the commies into space, while the X-Men (1963) celebrates the concept of mutation as a kind of youth liberation movement. But in Cold War America, unlike Japan, atomic radiation made superheroes more often than it made monsters: some were obvious like the Incredible Hulk, a scientist accidentally exposed to gamma rays during a bomb test and Spider-man, bitten by a radioactive spider (both 1962). In Richard Matheson’s novel The Shrinking Man, the change is triggered by an encounter with a mysterious radioactive mist at sea and becomes a sophisticated exploration of post-war fears about masculine identity, as the hero is reduced to living in a dollhouse. Mayo Clinic 2020.Radiation-triggered mutation seeped into the popular imagination. Health Education and Content Services (Patient Education).The common cold in children: Clinical features and diagnosis.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. American Academy of Allergy Asthma & Immunology. American Academy of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery.
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