Word: bomb
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...world of politics brought about both extreme reactions because the Bomb, of necessity, was kept secret from the public before it was first used and, perhaps of necessity, has been treated by those in charge of it as a secret ever since. What are secrets to governments are mysteries to the public; no one outside of a very few people in power has ever understood how nuclear weapons are developed, or why. Suddenly there was Hiroshima, suddenly the hydrogen bomb, suddenly the MIR Vs. Yet while the machinations of the experts and professionals have remained hidden from the public...
...1960s the indirect approach to the Bomb seemed to be changing. In 1963 Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was produced, and in 1964 Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. One was a standard something-is-wrong-with-nature film that made monsters of benignities, the other a headlong black-comic attack on the nuclear threat. Dr. Strangelove even incorporated the subtheme of nature out of control in the Bomb-crazy Dr. Strangelove's right arm, which goes its own way, fondly recalls the doctor's Nazi days and at one point attempts to strangle its "master." Commercially, if not critically...
...following decade, to the mid-1970s, the American public seemed to be supplied with diversions from the choice of either a direct or an indirect apprehension of the Bomb. One was the introduction into the culture of explicit sex and explicit violence--the explicitness seeming more significant than either sex or violence per se, and perhaps indicating a desire to take revenge on some threatening situation, if not the one that might have been uppermost in people's minds. Fictional heroes of the period may have offered similar distractions, functioning as little "bombs" in their own right. McMurphy...
Then, too, perhaps we were no longer so troubled by the Bomb, the initial shock having worn off. Like Lowell, Americans may have grown weary of talking, or dreaming, their extinction to death. The '50s and early '60s, the time of the horror film, were also the time of bomb shelters and "duck and cover" instructions to schoolchildren, who, like Kawamoto in the '40s, were taught to hide under desks in a bombing attack. The combination of fright and absurdity might have been enough to put the Bomb on the shelf for a while...
...there was Viet Nam, destructive and tragic in all other respects, but in terms of the tensions of the atomic age, a possible source of relief. Americans were engaged in a conventional war again, difficult enough without thoughts of the Bomb...