26
Popular Culture Review
story. They captured a moment, and they told it in a certain way that privileged
American civilization over others. But, in capturing the story, they also
unintentionally helped preserve it. The photographs may yield to interrogation,
and reading between the lines of text might uncover other, hidden stories as
well.
In the early years of the Atomic Age, for many Americans the atomic
bomb represented humankind (“mankind,” more accurately, in the parlance of
the times) understanding the elemental forces of nature, and understanding is a
form of control. Indeed, much of the early discourse surrounding fission referred
to “controlling the atom.” Another component of the early images of the atomic
bomb was that while it was clearly strange and terrible, it also had inaugurated a
bright future in which the atom would be put to work for the good of humanity.
One of the most startling examples of this vision was presented by Collier's in a
1947 essay on the promise of nuclear medicine. The essay included an
illustration of a smiling man rising up from a wheelchair within a superimposed
mushroom cloud (Boyer, 156). The atom and its most potent visual signifier, the
mushroom cloud, became a key sign of the technological advancement and
superiority, and even benevolence, of American society.
In many ways, Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands is the nexus of the
Atomic Age. The Marshall Islands’ recent history is, in part, a manifestation of
American imperialism in the Pacific which began in the nineteenth century and
was propelled forward by the second World War. (The Americans liberated the
islands from the Japanese in 1944 and maintained direct control over them until
the 1986 Compact of Free Association gave the islands limited sovereignty).
The American tests at Bikini brought together advanced technology/civilization,
the “primitive,” and the locus of an empire. And, just as The Bomb supposedly
achieved American victory and vindication of its larger aims (it “won the war”),
its testing in the Pacific represented the more general solidification of American
expansion into and control over the developing world in the postwar world.
Perhaps, not surprisingly, given the interest of the magazine in exotic
and primitive peoples. National Geographic focused more directly and
extensively on the peoples affected by the Atomic Age than did other
magazines. Take, for example, an essay by Edward Beach, captain of the SSN
Triton and author of Run Silent Run Deep. Beach notes that in Magellan Bay the
Triton encountered a “Terrified fisherman [who] thought Triton a sea monster.”
For Beach “It is a ludicrous situation”:
On the one hand an impassive Asian staring with curious
concentration at an unusual object in the water [the Triton's
periscope]: on the other hand, a Navy officer, equipped with
all the technical devices money and science can procure,
looking back with equally studied concentration. On one end
of the periscope, an outrigger canoe propelled by the brawny
arms of its builder: on the other end, a $100,000,000
submarine, the newest, biggest, most powerful in the world, on