By the bomb's early light: American thought and culture at the dawn of the Atomic Age.

by the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

by Paul Boyer (Pantheon,440 pp., $22.50)

PAUL BOYER shares the political sentimentsof the anti-nuke establishment, but his main concern in By the Bomb's Early Light is reclamation, not speculation. His focus is America in the first five years of the Atomic Age, a nation presumptively reeling from the psychic aftershocks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Drawing on a variety of sources from 1945 to 1950, he covers an amorphous territory that he calls "the fundamental ground of culture and consciousness' with the precision and skill of the veteran historical surveyor he is. (Among his previous works are Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America and, with Stephen Nessenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.) His purpose is touchingly traditional, his conclusion eminently reasonable:

This [is] not an exercise in antiquarianism--and certainly not a venture in nostalgia --but an effort to deepen our understanding of the world in which we live. For it was in that era which now seems so distant that the fundamental perceptions which continue to influence our response to the nuclear menace were first articulated, discussed, and absorbed in the living tissue of our culture.

Boyer is a tireless bomb detector,scouring throughout the arts and sciences for likely material. The short-lived world-government movement, the promotion of atomic scientists "from bomb-makers to political sages,' wishful predictions of "techno-atomic utopias,' moral crises, "psychological fallout,' civil defense--all pass in familiar review. "All the major elements of our contemporary engagement with the nuclear reality took shape literally within days of Hiroshima,' asserts Boyer, and his study establishes that the presentday nuclear dialogue is a virtual replay of immediate postwar commentary, right down to polemical tactics (from calls to conscience to hysterical fear-mongering) and political agenda (from disarmament to deterrence).

Though Boyer is wary of superlativesand simplifications, his selection of representative documents is sometimes problematic. He makes a goodfaith effort to supplement his highbrow material with public-opinion polls, letters to the editor, popular magazines, and radio dramas, but the bulk of his evidence is weighted heavily in favor of elite sources, such as pastoral pronouncements, academic papers, and small-circulation journals. In part, this is due to the nature of the investigation: Articulate, soul-searching pronouncements about the Atomic Age are more likely to be found in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists or The Christian Century than on the jukebox or at the Bijou. But Boyer, who repeatedly refers to "the dense cloud of fear that enveloped the nation after August 6, 1945,' "the fear that would be the constant companion of Americans for the rest of their lives,' might have more zealously tracked this omnipresent fear. After page upon page of Angst from the likes of Lewis Mumford and Norman Cousins, it's not only refreshing but richly suggestive to encounter the bomb's lyrical presence in Country & Western music.

More seriously, this elite databasecan distort the historical picture. For example, Boyer characterizes the immediate public response to V-J Day as one in which, eruptions of "frenzied celebration' notwithstanding, "the underlying mood remained sober and apprehensive.' In support of this statement, he cites an observation by an official of the Rockefeller Foundation to the effect that "the nation's mood at the moment of victory was bleaker than in December 1941 when much of the Pacific Fleet had lain in ruins at Pearl Harbor.' In Rockefeller Center, maybe, but surely not on a troop ship off the coast of Japan.

The most engaged, if not engaging,sections deal with (and implicitly laud) the early critics of Truman's decision to drop the Bomb: Here the pointcounterpoint is replayed as fairmindedly as could be expected. Indeed, just as Benjamin Franklin was driven away from Christianity by unpersuasive sermons against deism, one may be moved in a direction quite contrary to that which is intended. The author's sympathy with the "isolated voices of protest' is transparently clear. Still, he presents no argument as convincing as that offered by former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in his lucid and carefully reasoned The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. Since Boyer affirms, in his introduction, both a religious heritage (pacifist) and a "nuclear consciousness' (obsessive) that are far from disinterested, it is a tribute to his evenhandedness that the voice of the opposition comes through so forcefully.

Doubtless Boyer is most controversial(to be polite about it) when tackling the question of a "moral equaltion' between the Nazi Holocaust and Hiroshima/Nagasaki. He knows he's on dangerous ground here, and his language deserves to be quoted in full:

Perhaps after the passage of four decades,we are ready for a more comprehensive understanding of the moral disintegration wrought by World War II--an understanding that will at least consider in the same context (without necessarily equating) the atomic bomb and the gas chamber.

The distinction between equation andcontextualization is a subtle one, especially in this observation's own narrative "context': i.e., amidst cited commentary that does, explicitly, equate the Holocaust with the atomic bombing of Japan. The sentence immediately preceding reads: ". . . The remarkable Japanese artists Iri and Toshi Maruki have moved from powerful murals of the Hiroshima horror to equally powerful murals of the Auschwitz horror.' (My italics.)

Despite its left-leaning approach tohistory, however, By the Bomb's Early Light is a valuable contribution to the nuclear debate, lending perspective and clarity to a subject more often informed by zealous sloganeering or strategic doubletalk than by the spirit of rational enlightenment.