Spencer R. Weart

As a former physicist, Weart is an excellent historian of science, but he lets his climate doomsday beliefs color his view in this work. You'd think a physicist would be able to tell the difference between apocalyptic prophecies, computer model speculation and empirically demonstrable falsifiable scientific methodology but I guess that's too much to ask in the age of climate "truth." At least he recognizes the skeptics are treated as heretics and the believers are dogmatic...that should at least be a clue that he's in a cult but he hasn't quite snapped out of it. This is still pretty darned good history of the topic though. Three stars.… (plus d'informations)

In Nuclear Fear: A History of Images, Spencer R. Weart draws upon the techniques of cultural history to examine popular perceptions of atomic and nuclear radiation from the late nineteenth through late twentieth centuries to explore how Americans and others perceived the latest scientific discoveries and reacted to them. Weart argues, “The images we cherish have a greater role in history than has commonly been thought” (pg. xiii). He continues, “In pointing out the tremendous dangers we face from the power of imagery, whether this power is used consciously by propagandists or whether we impose it unwittingly upon one another, I am not preaching pessimism. On the contrary, it is only when we see clearly all the strengths of a danger that we feel capable of opposing it” (pg. xiii).
Weart writes, “It is not enough to look at the facts of physics in order to understand the fateful enthusiasm for nuclear energy that would sweep the world during the first half of the twentieth century. It is equally important to look at certain popular images, which in [Frederick] Soddy’s day lay scattered about in odd corners of Western culture” (pg. 7). In this way, “The scientist’s dream of inventing weapons to deter war, a persistent part of the nuclear legends, would eventually exert a mighty influence on armament programs. Belief in the virtues of science and technology could be so strong that even a threat of destruction might sound like a promise of peace” (pg. 28). In the early Cold War era, Wearth writes, “There is no final way to prove that nuclear fear, or any other combination of emotions and imagery, played a specific role in history. What can reliably be said, based on a large sample of writings, films, polls, and so forth, is the this closely knit structure of associated emotions and images did pervade Cold War and McCarthyist discourse” (pg. 127). Discussing Atoms for Peace, Weart writes, “The program could bring national security: the United States would help a nation build reactors only if these were subject to inspection, for example by an International Atomic Energy Agency, to make sure that no plutonium was diverted to make bombs” (pg. 164). Addressing fallout and contamination, he writes, “The powerful theme of contamination was historically, psychologically, and socially in a good position to link up with nuclear energy. Of course, the linkage does not explain why people were horrified by nuclear bombs; it only indicates why the emotion was expressed in particular ways and linked with particular images” (pg. 189).
Of fears of Armageddon, Weart writes, “There was no single moment when everyone began to feel they were living on the edge of universal death. Even in the 1960a a substantial minority around the world felt that although a war might kill them personally, their nation would survive handily, while an equally substantial minority had feared since the early 1950s that all civilization would perish” (pg. 216). Of antinuclear protests, Weart writes, “Most visible of all were the young. For the first time in modern history young people made up a large part of a mass campaign…This was an incredibly alienated, rebellious culture, and young people began to call nuclear bombs a prime example of everything they distrusted in adult society” (pg. 245). Addressing popular culture, Weart writes, “The 1958-1965 spate of films, novels, and magazine articles about accidental war brought down the curtain on the long series of important nuclear war fiction and nonfiction published since 1945. Debate over accidental war was the final burst of serious argument before attention turned elsewhere” (pg. 279). He continues, “By 1982 the number of American magazine articles dealing with nuclear weapons had shot up to a level attained only once before, in 1964. Meanwhile paperback racks in the United States and Europe, which a few years earlier had been loaded with books on reactor dangers, filled up with sensational fiction and sober factual warnings about war” (pg. 376). Further, “Nuclear weapons gave the twentieth century’s nihilism a dismal solidity. Immediately upon hearing the news from Hiroshima, sensitive thinkers had realized that doomsday – an idea that until then had seemed like a religious or science-fiction myth, something outside worldly time – would become as real a part of the possible future as tomorrow’s breakfast” (pg. 392).
Weart concludes, “The archaic symbols of nuclear legends resonate with universal anxieties and hopes. Peeking at forbidden secrets; punishment through abandonment or other victimization by an authority; a corresponding all-destructive rage; homicidal and suicidal urges and the accompanying guilt; struggle through chaos; heroic triumph over peril; miraculous life and regeneration of self; world rebirth through a marriage of survivors; entry to a joyful community: these are the stages of transmutation imagery in ancient tradition, repeated in a thousand modern works on nuclear energy” (pg. 424).… (plus d'informations)