Summary
In April 1949, Doris Day summed up America's take on the A-bomb (and, by extension, Hiroshima and Nagasaki) when she sang "Tick, Tick, Tick" in the Hollywood musical My Dream Is Yours. Day chirped that her heart was so full of radioactive love it could be read by a Geiger counter (thus the "tick, tick, tick").
Three months later, on Aug. 29, America's love affair with the atom went flat when the Soviet Union successfully exploded its own bomb. The United States was no longer king of the world. Congressional committees in Washington went into overdrive, striving to weed out spies who might have sold American A-bomb secrets to the Soviets. Duck-and-cover exercises began in grade schools so kids would know to hide under their desks should the "big one" drop. As Bob Dylan sang in an unreleased 1983 song about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: "Someone says the '50s was the age of great romance; I say that's just a lie, it was when fear had you in a trance --"See the full content of this document
Extract
Atomic Anxieties & Movie Mutants
This '50s-style dread predated the certainty of mutually assured atomic destruction taken as fact in later years. The USA and USSR each pretended that nuclear war was winnable in order to deter the other from striking first. Despite the government's positive characterization of the standoff, citizens felt uneasy. This cultural anxiety was reflec...
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