Bombs Away and Smash Hits at Home
Among the many horror films of the early Cold War period depicting the
Russian enemy as Martian invader, Hollywood’s 1953 cinematic version of The
War o f the Worlds1 deserves special attention, not only for its complicated
figuration of the Russian threat, but also for its remarkable reflection of the
tactical and ontological shift in the war- and peace-making endeavors which
characterized that era. Perhaps because War was a remake bom of generic,
geographic, and temporal transplantation, the status of H.G. Wells’ Victorian
scientific romance in 1950s Technicolor Hollywood as “alien” itself served
perfectly to complexify the question of just how different the Russian Other really
was. I will argue below that this confusion as to the Russian’s identity resulted
from the equally confusing and frightening transition from old to new definitions
of war: tactically, we observe a shift from traditional grenade-and-trench warfare
to world-conflagrating atomic capabilities, from a hand-to-hand combat approach
to the need to distance oneself so far from the enemy that one is ultimately
capable of visiting nuclear Armageddon upon its cities and its children. And yet,
ontologically, mid-century warmakers recognized, simultaneous with this
distancing, a seizing together of disparate and contesting nations, bom in part
from globe-constricting advances in technology and from the fashioning of a
postwar enemy out of what was once a powerful ally, the forging of new political
and economic bonds with the most hated foes of World War II.
Thus war in the pre-bomb era can be described as an insulated, protected
state, a condition of living within boundaries that held, that enabled us to lob a
grenade or mortar shell “over there” without necessarily and immediately
incurring like damage and blood loss over here. The closely held race to
complete and detonate an atom bomb—yet also the environmentally devastating
effects of even one bomb and its overture of above-ground home-based tests—
made it clear to those involved in creating, dispatching, or celebrating the bomb’s
destructiveness that we had entered a new era. Now these boundaries had
dissolved; our fate was entangled with an unknowable other’s, and to our rapidly
expanding arsenals we were forced to add a last-ditch “weapon”—diplomacy, the
befriending of an enemy we had successfully distanced enough in previous
decades to bomb or consider bombing at enormous cost.
If, in light of the bomb’s wide-reaching capabilities, we acknowledge
that one’s home territory can never again be “immune” from the biological and
psychological threats of nuclear war , we observe then a situation of violence
giving way to one of illness; a traditional air raid on London or Dresden in the
earlier years of the war left the effects of violence behind it: broken glass, dead
bodies, blood and gore. While it is true that germ warfare has been used in battle