Radiation as a Cultural Talisman Nuclear Weapon Testing and American Popular Culture in the Early Cold War

Abstract

"Radiation embodies some of the most paradoxical iconography of the early Cold War. Its abstract nature (invisible, odorless, tasteless), when combined with its true dangers (genetic mutation, cancers, death), allows it to evoke impossible worlds emerging from the ordinary one. Able to kill silently and invisibly at a distance and, by the late 1950s, widely reputed to be present in mother's milk and human bones, radiation represented a threatening technological world that seemed to exist beyond reach of the senses. Radiation was a tool-in-trade for television, radio, movies, novels, and short stories as the strange force that authenticated any departure from normal space and time. It was the magic bullet of science-fiction plots: passing a clicking Geiger counter across a scene was as good as waving a magic wand; be it giant bugs or bug-eyed aliens living in a vast underground city, the clicking made any plot twist believable. Radiation came to symbolize a break in the normal structure of everyday reality; it was a narrative marker to indicate that a boundary had been crossed and that from this moment on, anything was possible."