The participation of nonstate actors, such as these women’s clubs, in nuclearpreparedness debates brings us to a final but important feature of the early Cold War’s political and cultural landscape: nuclear fear. As Presidents Truman and Eisenhower embraced atomic weapons as the basis of US military and diplomatic power, citizens found themselves in a Cold War with ever-sharper atomic teeth. Much has been written about how Americans began to sense their own nuclear peril after their leaders dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. Some have noted a correlation between escalating nuclear-age insecurities and a rise in religiosity. Membership in mainly Christian churches spiked in this era, perhaps a sign that organized religion provided some comfort amidst global instability. Higher church attendance certainly meshed with the postwar culture’s emphasis on what McCall's magazine termed "togetherness." The image of nuclear families huddled together in church and in the other sacred space - the suburban home - was a fitting Cold War counterpoint to the allegedly "godless" Soviets. Political leaders, too, sponsored measures to bring church and state closer together, putting God on currency and into the Pledge of Allegiance.
These were clearly symbolic gestures, but it is too cynical to argue that they held no real meaning for citizens. People of faith leaned on churches in times of crisis, as they always had, but it is simply impossible to determine precisely how religious practice and Cold War nuclear fears interacted. For some, religious conviction endorsed preexisting views about the bomb and Communism, generally. Television evangelists and prophecy writers told their millions of followers that nuclear war was part of God’s design; thus, opposition against the inevitable end time was futile. The "new evangelicalism" of the postwar years was a diverse movement, with moderates, such as Billy Graham, and hardliners, such as the Christian Anti-Communist
Crusade’s Fred Schwarz, but all of its leaders saw the growing nuclear faceoff as a call to preach a steady sermon of anti-Communism - using their burgeoning media outlets. For other people of faith, in contrast, the bomb generated urgent and fundamental questions about human fellowship, national leadership, and the fate of the planet. Faith-based organizations were a significant presence in some of the early nuclear activism, offering both moderate and radical critiques of the arms race. Their critiques resurfaced decades later in the antinuclear protests of the Ronald Reagan era. 698
Looking at more secular manifestations of nuclear fear, studies of films, television, science fiction, comic books, and music suggest that from August 1945 through the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, citizens vacillated between elation, horror, fear, and hope. Paul Boyer’s study of Hiroshima’s immediate aftermath reveals that "there was an almost compulsive post-Hiroshima effort to trivialize the event and avoid its deeper implications."699 Initially, Americans endorsed the use of the bomb; they were war-weary and open to Truman’s rationale for using the weapon. But as the months and years went on, there was a growing ambivalence, despite both Truman’s and Eisenhower’s efforts to hail atomic energy’s salutary and "peaceful" uses.
The atomic bomb was obviously the technological creation of World War II, but the Cold War gave that technology its most menacing cultural meanings and images: genetic mutation, social chaos, the mushroom cloud, and apocalypse. The duck-and-cover exercise, too, has now become a staple of our cultural memory of the era. Still, to catalog the ample metaphors and maneuvers of Cold War nuclear fear becomes redundant - even if instructive as a history lesson. It is more useful to historicize that fear by giving it a more concrete policy and social history, grounded in the ideological and political currents ofthe Cold War. Most Americans had what one policymaker called a "bomb consciousness," and it could certainly be heightened during periods of international crisis. Still, a cultural consciousness about the bomb did not translate into a grassroots national-preparedness movement, as planners had hoped. Policymakers asked citizens to stock supplies, learn civil-defense techniques, and build shelters; leaders endorsed a privatized nuclear preparedness, financed, built, and practiced by citizens themselves. Most Americans,
35. Children test the escape hatch of their family's bomb shelter in Bronxville, New York, 1952. Bomb shelters were publicized, but largely rejected.
However, rejected this kind of self-help defense. Only a tiny minority built family shelters, for example.700
In a sense, Cold War citizens were private pacifists but public militarists. That is, they refused to practice self-help defense inside their homes, largely rejecting nuclear readiness as daily practice. But this rejection should not be read as a no-confidence vote on the national security state. Citizens made political choices to tolerate a much higher level of preparedness outside their homes. As taxpayers and voters, they endorsed the principles of national security, anti-Communism, and an arms buildup through several presidential
Administrations. Policymakers may have successfully raised people’s bomb consciousness, but most of these fears found material expression in horror films, comic books, and other forms of Cold War pop culture, not in actual state-sponsored shelter programs, nor in civil-defense efforts in the urban neighborhoods and suburbs populated by nuclear-age Americans.701
World History
