How pop culture and I split the atom...
This summer, a fair few people will likely have been pondering on the genesis of the atomic bomb, having seen the big film of the season, Oppenheimer. The BBC has also dusted off its own telling of the story, filmed in 1980. Watching the BBC series – which is an excellent primer for anyone with more than a passing interest in how atom bombs work – I was set to thinking about how the public derives its ideas about such a big and complex subject, through the media, and via pop culture.
The first most people knew about atomic energy was the use of the Manhattan Project’s prototype weapons against the Japanese in 1945. Atomic power emerged, seemingly from nowhere, as an inconceivable new existential threat, whose shadow has loomed over the world ever since. But even as the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still being treated in makeshift hospitals, new US President Harry S Truman was assuring the world at large that atomic energy would be harnessed for peaecful purposes.
Thus it was that when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II opened Britain’s first atomic pile at Calder Hall in 1956, it was presented to an awed public as a piece of engineering genius, proof of Britain’s global status as a pioneer of white hot technology. What was not revealed until much later was the true purpose of the atomic pile at Calder Hall: producing plutonium for use in Britain’s own atom bomb.
By the mid-50s, atomic science was beginning to look like a bit of a lark, as typified by Geoffrey Willans’ third Molesworth book, Whizz for Atomms, published in 1956. Atomic structures were being referenced by designers around the world, especially here in Britain where the iconography of nuclear science could be seen in cultural endeavours like the Festival of Britain (1951). Atomic design meant lots of little dots or, in physical terms, globes, influenced by the laboratory models that scientists used to depict atomic structures. It was all harmless, clean, futuristic fun. What came to be known in retrospect as ‘atom age’ design influenced every aspect of suburban life. Kettles, kitchenware, curtains and all manner of domestic appliances suddenly began to assume a new and futuristic appearance, best exemplified by American industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss’s iconic Hoover Constellation vacuum cleaner, launched in 1956. With its shiny spheroid casing, the Constellation anticipated the look of the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor at Windscale, which would be commissioned in 1963. So much so that when the modelmakers on Thunderbirds needed an atomic reactor to appear in an episode, they ended up customising a Hoover Constellation. Art imitates life, imitates science...
In the realm of popular culture, you couldn’t move for atomic concepts in the 1950s. ‘Atomic’ was, to the science fiction writers of the era, what the term ‘quantum’ is to today’s. You could put it in front of anything and it sounded instantly futuristic. You couldn’t write science fiction and not use the term ‘atomic’, any more than you could ignore other buzz words of the age like ‘cybernetic’ or ‘video’. Atomic was a concept that did double duty: on the one hand, you could use it to power your spaceship to the stars – hooray! On the other, you could use nuclear tests or accidents to explain away horrors like Godzilla. Science fiction writers had never had it so good.
By the time I was born, in 1961, the whole ‘atom age’ thing was beginning to look a bit jaded. When the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of Armageddon in October 1962, ‘atomms’ didn’t look like quite so much fun any more. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been spreading its message since 1957, and the Cuban crisis only served as a wake-up call to the rest of the world. Stanley Kubrik delivered his own devastating message the following year in the form of Dr. Strangelove. No other pop cultural endeavour speaks so clearly to the paranoiac mood of the times.
I’m not sure exactly when I first became aware of the existence of a thing called atomic science. It was most likely through the worlds of Gerry Anderson, where nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles made frequent appearances. They may have been disguised as ‘planetomic bombs’ and the like, but the intention was clear. Nuclear reactors were shown to be tricky and temperamental: in an episode of Fireball XL5, Lieutenant Ninety almost perishes in outer space when the nuclear reactor in his space capsule malfunctions. Later, in Thunderbirds, an entire atomic station went up in smoke, releasing a deadly radioactive cloud. At the time, it looked like science fiction, but Dennis Spooner’s script was almost certainly inspired by a fire at the Windscale reactor in 1957.
Exposure to the science fiction of the 1960s added new words to my vocabulary. I was aware of the term ‘nuclear bomb’ by around the age of seven or eight, without having the remotest idea of what such a weapon could do. Amongst our dad’s record collection was a Count Basie album entitled The Atomic Mr. Basie, whose colourful cover featured a photograph of an American test of an experimental thermonuclear device. Codenamed ‘Hood’, the test had been conducted on 5 July 1957, producing a yield equivalent to 74 kiltons of TNT. This was almost certainly the first picture of a genuine nuclear explosion that I ever saw, and yet it still didn’t convey to me the horror of what I was looking at. If anything, it looked pretty incredible. Sure, it was obviously a bloody big bomb, but the picture told me nothing about fall out, or radiation, or the effects they had on human tissue. It was just a great album cover, and if it signified anything, it was that 'atomic' stood for cool, modern, space-age, jazz.
For a long time, I remained blissfully unaware of how close the world had sailed to the brink of Armageddon when I was a mere eighteen months old. Nuclear paranoia had cooled off somewhat in the aftermath of Cuba, but it didn’t deter filmmaker Peter Watkins from directing the first serious attempt to depict the reality of nuclear confrontation on film. His harrowing documentary style production The War Game, made in 1966, was banned by the BBC – but 16mm copies were still allowed to be shown in schools, which rather defeated the object of the ban. It’s hard to fathom quite whom the BBC imagined it was serving in concealing the ‘truth’ in such a manner. Most likely the same ‘persons of a nervous disposition’ who had to be given advance warning of things like Quatermass.
The terrifying reality of the atom bomb was finally brought home to me on 24 April 1974 when Thames’ landmark series The World at War dealt with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The episode pulled no punches, and included graphic scenes of the victims, and interviews with survivors. Also interviewed was Colonel Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay. I watched all this in a kind of horrified fascination. Until this point, I’d never considered the possibility of what might happen in the event of a Third World War. But this was all history, and even after watching the episode, I didn’t lie awake at night worrying about the bomb.
Nuclear paranoia only really kicked in for me in 1980 when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Suddenly, the media was rife with speculation about a Third World War. Before long, the BBC lifted its ban on The War Game, and even more harrowing fare arrived on the small screen in the form of Threads. By the autumn of 1980, even pop groups were getting in on the act. The Piranhas’ updated take on Tom Hark began with the cheerful query ‘does anybody know how long till World War Three’, whilst XTC’s single Generals and Majors played on the paranoia of the times. By mid decade, it was hard to turn on the television news without seeing film of the protests at Greenham Common or another CND march.
For much of the 1980s, I remained if not convinced then genuinely worried that nuclear war would come in my lifetime. Many people even believed that such a war would be started accidentally. Incidents in 1979 and 1983 saw first America and then Russia believing that pre-emptive strikes had been launched, on the basis of false alarms. War did not come. But the nuclear nightmare took on a new form in April 1986 with the explosion of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl, an accident which had been forseen as far back as 1965. It was number 4 reactor that had exploded in Thunderbirds. The imaginary world of Gerry Anderson was bleeding through into reality, from the fictional nuclear future of childhood,to the real life world of grown-up paranoia.
Nearly eighty years on from the dawn of the atom bomb, it’s intriguing to look back on an age when nuclear power was similtaneously the shiny new future of humanity and potentially the end of the world. Today, the promise of cheap, clean energy has been shown up as a sham. Calder Hall, opened to such excitement and fanfare in the 50s, is now known as Sellafield and in process of being decomissioned, work which will endure well into this century, while the spent nuclear fuel at the plant will remain hazardous for a quarter of a million years.
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