The original image of the mushroom cloud over the New Mexico desert at the first atomic bomb testing on July 16 , 1945 reflects the expanding effect of the Project on popular culture over time . The energy pushed out from that test continues psychically into today . Humans still live under the fear of nuclear annihilation , and although the awareness is not as acute as it was in the 1950s through the 1980s , the ongoing cultural discussion of the bomb reflects the importance of its initial condition , the Manhattan Project . The Project affects all future cultural understandings in a fractal-like image extending to politics , history , and the arts , and is reflected in popular cultural renderings such as art , drama , music , and literature .
Popular representations of the Project ’ s afterlife can serve as fun or ironic reports on the sense of lurking danger below the reality of the existence of global nuclear weaponry . To reduce a growing sense of doom created by the reality of what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 , people made popular icons with positive connotations about atomic might . For example , in the 1950s and ’ 60s , functional kitchenware appeared with stylized symbols of nuclear fission , propaganda posters suggested that “ atomic energy ” was useful for average citizens , and children ’ s toys reflected popular infatuation with atomic power and suggested that children should enjoy toys that mimicked atomic power at the individual level ( fig . 1 ).
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