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The Origins of British Nuclear Culture, 1895–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Kirk Willis
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Extract

The images are familiar and ineradicable: cities scorched by blasts of tremendous heat, with thousands of civilians vaporized, thousands of others burned and disfigured, landscapes rendered desolate and uninhabitable by radiation; submarines, automobiles, luxury liners, and airplanes powered by clumps of uranium the size of a human fist; homes heated and cooled by limitless supplies of cheap energy drawn from secure reactors; land-based particle beam weapons capable of destroying airborne missiles and thus of providing a protective shield for civilian populations; eccentric physicists with thick central European accents, unkempt hair, ill-fitting clothes, and a crazed gleam of unearthly mischief in their eyes; politicians, civil servants, joint chiefs blinkered by hatred and ambition, ignorant of even the first principles of science and technology, careless of civilians, reckless in brinksmanship, and arrogant in assessments of military capability.

Such images, indeed, are part of the consciousness of all citizens of the atomic age: we who have stared at the newsreels of Nagasaki and Chernobyl, sat riveted with John Hersey's unforgettable Hiroshima, laughed over the absurdities of Dr. Strangelove (1964), winced at the smiling publicity of atomic energy authorities or the local power company's plans for a new reactor, trembled at the apprarently inexorable proliferation of nuclear technologies into the Third and Fourth Worlds, or grown angry at the exaggerations—both budgetary and practical—of yet the latest “generation” of weapons systems. And yet the images of obliterated cities, atomic-powered ships, and particle beam weapons—images which have come to define so much of the anxiety as well as opportunity of the postwar world—all existed in the popular consciousness in Britain and America long before August 1945, before, indeed, December 1941 or even September 1939.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , January 1995 , pp. 59 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1995

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References

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85 The star of Murder in the Air? Who else but Ronald Reagan.

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96 There is, alas, no study of science funding in Britain. Some indication of American practices can be found in Heilbron, J. L. and Seidel, Rovert W., Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar; Kargon, Robert H., The Rise of Robert Millikan (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982)Google Scholar; Kevles, Daniel J., The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.