Word: bomb
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Television has offered the most direct and dramatic presentations of the Bomb in recent years. In 1983 the TV movie The Day After shook much of the public, at least for a short while, with scenes of missiles shooting out of silos in Kansas cornfields and of dazed Midwesterners bravely trying to go on in the aftermath of a nuclear assault. (Kawamoto's criticism of The Day After was that the survivors would never have been that alert.) Other new films and television movies like Threads have graphically shown devastated cities and families, bodies crushed by buildings, the disintegration...
...more complicated than the things they produce to represent them. No film, book, play or game ever tells how seriously we take even our own ideas. It is possible that many of these works merely indicate how the public believes it ought to feel about the Bomb, or are part of the eschatological tendencies...
...nuclear winter. It may be that after Hiroshima, Americans were no longer so keen on their seemingly infinite capacity to make things work, that the technological success of Hiroshima took the heart out of American can-do self-esteem. (At Los Alamos, a code name for the Bomb was the "gadget.") On this basis, one might work up an elaborate psychological theory explaining the subsequent fall of America's industry and the rise of Japan's as products of a national guilty conscience. But the American impulse to deplore and fret over mechanical progress has always been as strong...
...feeling of powerlessness the Bomb engenders, that may be no different from the feeling of powerlessness brought by the domination of the state. Since the state controls the Bomb, it is easy to link the two as the same source of discomfort, and since the power of the state and the Bomb grew up together, they may be confused unconsciously. The trouble is that so many threats are attached to modern life that even something as blatant as a nuclear weapon cannot always be distinguished in an array that includes every terror from cancer and insanity to a telephone call...
...there can be no question that the Bomb's presence has abetted, if not exclusively accounted for, much of what is nerve-racking and unsatisfactory in the world: a feeling of dislocation; aimlessness; loneliness; dim perceptions of unidentified dangers. Once the Bomb was used and the enormity of its effects realized, it had the impact of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud--of any monumental historical theory that proved, fundamentally, how small people are, how accidental their prominence, how subject to external manipulation. When the Bomb dropped, people not only saw a weapon that could boil the planet and create a death...