Society and Culture in the Atomic Age.

On July 22, 1957, air-raid sirens pierced the early morning calm of Schenectady, New York. The horrible wail signaled residents to evacuate their homes and head for civil defense shelters. A nuclear war might already have begun. But only one family responded. Everyone else rolled over and went back to sleep. The somnolent citizens were suffering from "atomic apathy." Or they rejected the crazy idea that you could defend yourself against a nuclear bomb. Or they were just tired. In any case, their inaction proved harmless - the rude awakening was a false alarm.

On September 29, 1961, in another American town, a radio report interrupted Doc Stockton's surprise party. Radar had detected UFOs that looked like missiles and everyone was urged to seek cover. Doc said a hurried goodbye to his friendly neighbors and hustled his wife and boy into their family bomb shelter. The evicted guests began to panic. Ill-prepared for Armageddon, they begged the good doctor to share his bunker. He adamantly refused. There was only enough food for one family. Tempers flared and the neighbors procured a battering ram. Fortunately, before blood could spill, the radio announced an all-clear. The UFOs were merely satellites. Worry not - we "just crossed over . . . into the Twilight Zone." Doc Stockton was an episode from Rod Serling's land of "shadow and substance" that filled the television airwaves from 1959 to 1964.

Margot Henrikson, a history professor at the University of Hawaii, establishes temporary headquarters in many fictional dimensions like Serling's. While she occasionally returns to actual places like Schenectady, Dr. Strangelove's America is mostly an analysis of Hollywood movies (some five dozen!), novels (two dozen), and an assortment of television shows, plays, paintings, songs, and poems from the late 1940s to the early 1960s (with a final chapter venturing toward the early 1970s). Henrikson's loaded footlocker of a book - full of clippings and plot summaries - addresses a truly fascinating question: How was American culture shaped by "the bomb" during the early years of the cold war?

Henrikson believes nuclear weapons were critical to the formation of a "culture of dissent" that posed fundamental challenges to cold war orthodoxy. Stated this way, the thesis strikes me as perfectly plausible, even banal. It is not very surprising to learn there was extensive cultural discourse about nuclear dangers long before Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth (1982). What makes the book less convincing than it might be is the limited way the author handles the fictional materials that dominate her conception of "culture." If we are to believe there was significant cultural dissent to the "atomic corruption of American power," we need to know more about both the nonfiction culture and the real "atomic system" - the construction, testing, deployment and use (real and threatened) of nuclear weapons. After all, as Henrikson indicates, Dr. Strangelove is a subversive film in large part because it comes so close to the marrow of high-minded nuclear strategy. General "Buck Turgidson," the movie's bomb-happy warrior, quotes Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War (1960).

Henrikson's cultural analysis is most suggestive when she addresses the postwar preoccupation with madness, family breakdown, and violence. She locates countless representations of a schizoid America torn between anxiety and apathy, violence and passivity, rebellion and obedience. Here she is less determined to claim nuclear dissent; it is sufficient that the culture "matched" the violence and "split" nature of the bomb.

Schizoid may not be too strong a word to describe a culture in which teachers taught schoolchildren that America was God's gift to humankind - Democracy Triumphant - and then ordered them to hide under their desks to prepare for nuclear war; a culture that was busy preparing with equal fervor for backyard barbecues and World War III; a culture in which Ike played 800 rounds of golf while his secretary of state threatened "massive retaliation."

Here Henrikson's work complements a richer, more probing analysis of the cold war, Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture (Basic Books, 1995). Engelhardt argues that nuclear weapons transformed American culture not only because they generated dissent, or fueled cultural madness, but because they made it impossible to tell convincing war stories about a wholly virtuous and victorious America. In a nuclear world, victors and vanquished were always threatening to merge. For Engelhardt, the cold war created a strangely "storyless" realm.

Despite her great catalogue of films and books about America's sorry "mental health," Henrikson too often pushes her materials through a kind of atomic strainer to separate out the radioactive isotopes. One example of this method appears in her analysis of the famous murder in Hitchcock's Psycho. To her, the scene "recalled the terms and language of the civil defense warnings attack, about avoiding the 'deadly shower' of radioactive fallout." Allow me to hazard an alternative interpretation. When I first watched Psycho as a teenager, I was pretty sure Janet Leigh was completely naked and nuclear fallout was the last danger I had in mind; Norman Bates was scary enough.

However much Henrikson exposes herself to the charge of atomic reductionism, she is also rather, well, disarming. For instance, she claims that film noir, sci-fi, and writers like J.D. Salinger and Allen Ginsberg urged people "to fight for their humanity and to feel the pain and panic appropriate to the nuclear age." But elsewhere she concedes that these promptings had little effect, that the 1950s was a time of general complacency and prosperity, a time when most Americans were much like the sleepy people of Schenectady, apparently unconcerned about the threat of nuclear war.

But this concedes too much. For a book so alert to the subversive potential of popular culture, it is surprisingly inattentive to the actual political dissent that preceded the 1960s. We aren't even told about those parents who sent their children's baby teeth to the dissident scientists at the Committee for Nuclear Information to help them document the presence of Strontium 90 in American milk (thus establishing additional grounds for opposition to nuclear testing).

Only with the '60s do we get a fuller treatment of political dissent. In perhaps the best chapter of the book we learn about the public rejection of the "bomb-shelter craze." In 1961, in the midst of the Berlin crisis, Kennedy called upon Americans to construct family fallout shelters. The public balked. Henrikson argues that public "apathy" toward civil defense, along with the "panic" dramatized by Rod Serling's drama, were galvanized into a political objection to shelters, nuclear brinksmanship, and atomic escalation. This dissent led Congress to slash the civil defense budget in 1962 (even after the Cuban missile crisis), and pushed Kennedy toward a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviets.

One further consideration should inform our efforts to interpret the meaning of nuclear weapons in cold war culture. For all the "limited wars" that were a continual product of the global conflict, along with the memory of 60 million dead in World War II, many Americans remained strikingly immune to the horror of war and secretly attracted to its real and imaged excitement. Henrikson does not sufficiently explore the degree to which Americans found fantasies of nuclear war thrilling as well as scary. As Walker Percy put it in a line she quotes from The Moviegoer: "What people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall." That, along with fear, anxiety, and apathy, is surely an important component of Dr. Strangelove's America.

Christian Appy teaches history at MIT and edits a book series on "Culture, Politics, and the Cold War" for the University of Massachusetts Press.