sixth mass extinction, the deployment of killer robots on the battlefield, and a host of other science-themed challenges we now face. Science and technology have delivered awesome power to governments and industry, but they have not granted us total awareness of the consequences of this power or sustainable mechanisms for its use. We are ever like teenagers being handed the car keys for the first time.
After the war, this feeling—that our scientific ability had outstripped our moral and ethical development as a society, perhaps as a species—was not limited to physicists. The Austrian Jewish biochemist Erwin Chargaff emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis in 1935. His work would lead to James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Chargaff’s autobiography described his changed feelings about science:
The double horror of two Japanese city names [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] grew for me into another kind of double horror: an estranging awareness of what the United States was capable of, the country that five years before had given me its citizenship; a nauseating terror at the direction the natural sciences were going. Never far from an apocalyptic vision of the world, I saw the end of the essence of mankind—an end brought nearer, or even made possible, by the profession to which I belonged. In my view, all natural sciences were as one; and if one science could no longer plead innocence, none could.
Military leaders shared a similar concern. Omar Bradley, the first chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of the top generals in North Africa and Europe during World War II, gave blunt voice to this cultural angst in a 1948 Armistice Day speech:
Our knowledge of science has clearly outstripped our capacity to control it. We have many men of science, but too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
The Endless Frontier: From Wonder to Fear
In November of 1944, Roosevelt had asked Vannevar Bush to consider how the wartime science organization might be extended to benefit the country in peacetime—to improve national security, aid research, fight disease, and develop the scientific talent of the nation’s youth. After the war was won, Bush submitted his report to President Harry S. Truman. Science, the Endless Frontier, made the case that the creation of knowledge is boundless in its potential. The report is widely credited with laying the groundwork for the second golden age of Western science, during which governments, rather than wealthy philanthropists, became the principal funders of scientific research in peacetime as they had been in war.
In his report, Bush argued that science was of central importance to freedom, an argument that was powerfully underscored when, in August 1949, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb of its own, as Oppenheimer had feared it would. The sense of impending doom over the power scientists had unleashed by splitting the atom turned into the fear of a clear and present danger: nuclear war.
In less than a year, a bill creating the National Science Foundation (NSF) was signed into law, and science began to undergo a subtle but profound change in its relationship to Western culture. For two centuries, it had been motivated by a sense of wonder on the part of noble idealists and adventurers, wealthy visionaries, civic-minded philanthropists, and scrappy entrepreneurs. But it was now largely driven by government investments that were, in no small part, motivated by the public’s sense of fear.
Atomic Terrorism
This fear would impact the world for the next fifty years. Western troops developed a gallows humor when referring to the nuclear weapons they monitored and strapped to the bellies of airplanes. Canadian troops stationed at Zweibrücken, a NATO air base in West Germany, called the bomb “a bucket full of sunshine.”
Stateside, American defensiveness bordered on hysteria. Americans knew what a nuclear weapon could do—they’d done it. And now the possibility that it could boomerang back on them was very real. They’d sacrificed and died and put off love, children, and careers in order to beat back the authoritarian threat, and now suddenly it was back in a different way, and what was at risk was society’s most precious asset: their children. The baby boom.
The Federal Civil Defense Administration determined that the country that would win a nuclear war was the one best prepared to survive the initial attack. Achieving this required a homeland mobilization on an unprecedented scale, and children needed to know what to do when nuclear war came. The government commissioned a nine-minute film called Duck and Cover that showed Bert the Turtle pulling into his shell to survive a nuclear explosion that burns everything else. The film exhorted millions of schoolchildren to “duck and cover” like Bert by covering the backs of their heads and necks and ducking under their desks if they saw a bright flash. The film didn’t mention that the gamma-ray burst, which carries most of the lethal radiation, arrives with the flash, nor the fact that school desks were hardly sufficient protection against the flying shrapnel of broken glass and building materials. As the film said,
Now, we must be ready for a new danger, the atomic bomb. First, you have to know what happens when an atomic bomb explodes. You will know when it comes. We hope it never comes, but we must get ready. It looks something like this: there is a bright flash! Brighter than the sun! Brighter than anything you have ever seen! If you are not ready and did not know what to do, it could hurt you in different ways. It could knock you down hard, or throw you against a tree or a wall. It is such a big explosion it can smash in buildings and knock signboards over and break windows all over town. But, if you duck and cover, like Bert, you will be much safer. You know how bad sunburn can feel. The atomic bomb flash can burn you worse than a terrible sunburn.
The children were reminded regularly that, because a nuclear attack could happen at any time, they, like soldiers in a combat zone, needed to maintain a high level of alertness, forever vigilant to the possibility of attack without warning, ready to duck and cover. As Hiroshima City University nuclear historian Bo Jacobs put it,
This is the narrative about nuclear war, about the Cold War, and about childhood that millions of American children, the Baby Boomers, received from their government and from their teachers in their schoolrooms: a tale of a dangerous present and a dismal future. Ducking and covering is, after all, a catastrophic pose, one in which the emphasis is on avoiding head injury at the expense of bodily injury: it is the desperate posture of an attempt at bare survival. To duck and cover is to fall to the ground and hope that you live to stand back up. As we watch each setting of childhood succumb to the bright flash of death and destruction in the film, no grown-ups are in sight; it is up to the children to survive the world that their parents have made for them—a world seemingly without a future, where survival is measured day to day, minute to minute.
They did drills in school, and participated in citywide mock Soviet atomic-bomb attacks. Many were given metal dog tags so their burned bodies could be readily identified by their parents after a nuclear explosion burned them beyond recognition. “While adults perceived a threat to the American way of life—to their health and wellbeing and those of their families—their children learned to fear the loss of a future they could grow into and inhabit. These kids of the Atomic Age wondered if they might be the last children on Earth,” a worry that Jacobs says “had unforeseen and profound effects on the Baby Boomer generation.”
At the same time that the federal government was promoting Duck and Cover, the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM) was broadly distributing public-service pamphlets whose intent was to instill in everyone a sustained alertness to danger, the better to prepare the country to survive the first wave of a nuclear attack. These pamphlets were bundled with vinyl recordings of survival instructions, such as this one from Tops Records:
Our best life insurance may be summed up in four words: be alert; stay alert. This will take some doing on your part. It will take ingenuity; it will take fervor; it will take the desire to survive. . . . We might label our nuclear weapons “instant death.” There is no doubt about it: if you live within a few miles of where one of these bombs strike, you’ll die. Instantly. . . . It may be a slow and lingering death, but it will be equally as final as the death