The Writing on the Cloud: American Culture Confronts the Atomic Bomb

This book is a path-breaking collection of essays which explore the diverse and complex ways American culture has been shaped by the looming presence of the atomic bomb, the central icon of technology, diplomacy, and war, of the second half of the twentieth century. These essays were originally presented as papers at a 1995 conference at Bowling Green State University commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Bomb; this collection is unusual in the range of subjects addressed, which range from abstract expressionism and modernist poetry to television sitcoms and advertisements for lipstick and appliances. The papers fall into four general areas of investigation and interpretation: the analysis of widespread cultural issues or social movements; the examination of particular cultural artifacts; the explorations of aspects of political, diplomatic, or military history; and recollections or interpretations of personal experience. Contents: The Consequences of the Atomic Bomb: The End of the Soviet Union and the Beginning of Environmental Hysteria, Edward Teller; Bert the Turtle Meets Doctor Spock: Parenting in Atomic Age America, Daniel Gomes; Commercial Fallout: The Image of Progress and the Feminine Consumer in the Atomic Age (1945-1962), John Gregory Stocke; From the Missile Gap to the Culture Gap: Modernism in the Fallout from Sputnik, David Howard; Detonating on Canvas: The Abstract Bomb in American Art, Richard Martin; SANE and Beyond Sane: Poets and the H-Bomb, 1958-1960, Daniel Belgrad; From Science to Science Fiction: Leo Szilard and Fictional Persuasion, Michael L. Lewis; Sh-Boom or, How Early Rock & Roll Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Richard Aquila; 'Are You Ready for the Great Atomic Power?' Music and Protest, 1945-1960, Joseph C. Ruff; Stories Told by Godzilla and Rodan, Helen Schwartz; The Berlin Crisis, the Bomb Shelter Craze and Bizarre Television: Expressions of an Atomic Age Counterculture in the Early 1960s, Margot A. Henricksen; Peace on Earth Without Goodwill Toward Men: Nuclear Weapons & American Millenarian Aspirations, Ron Hirschbein; Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Memory (and Forgetting) in the Religious Press, Leo Maley, III; Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, Robert Jay Lifton; Appendix: Conference Program, 'The Atomic Age Opens: American Culture Confronts the Atomic Bomb'; Index; About the Contributors.