By the Bomb's Early Light

by Paul S. Boyer

Book Overview

Originally published in 1985, By the Bomb's Early Light is the first book to explore the cultural "fallout" in America during the early years of the atomic age. The book is based on a wide range of sources, including cartoons, opinion polls, radio programs, movies, literature, song lyrics, slang, and interviews with leading opinion-makers of the time. Through these materials, Boyer shows the surprising and profoundly disturbing ways in which the bomb...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394528786
• ISBN13: 9780394528786
• Release Date: October 1985
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Dawn of a New Age: The Atomic Age

Paul Boyer understands historical shifts in culture as not revolutionary event, but more or less a spiral change. Boyer writes, "History never repeats itself mechanically, like a struck record. There are always novel twists..." (Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light 366). I could not say for sure that Boyer employs Kuhn's paradigm theory, but he is keen to show his readers the usefulness of the paradigm theory to understand history. Moreover, one could read By the Bomb's Early Light with an eye towards understanding this new "dawning" in the early light as a bundle of narratives (or a discourse) as if Boyer is employing Foucault notion thereof. Boyer examines the way people interpreted the dropping of the Atom Bomb (and the Bomb itself) and show the interpretation "shift" suddenly with political climate and other factors. While books like Barton Bernstein's Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues, Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy, and John Hershey's Hiroshima deal with the pre-bombing issues and destruction respectively, Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light is the first book to examine the cultural reactions in America during the early years after the dropping of the Atomic Bomb. Boyer argues that the major repercussion of the bomb was fear and anxiety causing a long-running debate about nuclear armament and disarmament. Boyer also points out that the need for a global solution to the threat of nuclear destruction caused the debate to shift to one of a united world (Boyer By the Bomb's Early Light 33-45). One of the more curious questions is: Why did the public lose interest? Boyer gives a 5 fold answer: First, he argues there was the illusion of diminished risk; Second, there was a perceived loss of immediacy; Third, the `60 and `70 promised a world transformation by using atomic energy; Fourth, what he calls the "Big Sleep" was caused by the complexity and comfort of the deterrence theory; and Finally, the attention paid to the Vietnam War took the wind out of the sails of the antinuclear movement (Boyer 357-358). He does wax optimistic when he argues that prior to the `80s the movement picked up again with such movies as Jane Fonda's China Syndrome (Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light 360). The past, however, is no indication of the future. Boyer argues that, "Of course the past influences the future, even if it does not determine it absolutely; yet even the fact offers cause for hope as well as pessimism" (Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light 366). The book, I argue, is a discourse analysis based on a wide range of sources, including cartoons, opinion polls, radio programs, movies, literature, song lyrics, slang, and interviews with leading opinion-makers of the era. Boyer, through this broad spectrum and discourse analysis shows the shift in the worldview surprising way the Atomic Bomb rapidly and completely made its way into the very core of American life. The debate was varied and rich including the prophecies of Lewis Mumford and Reinhold Neibuhr. Althou

An outstanding work of cultural history

Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford Nuclear Age Series) In this deftly-written, well-researched, and sometimes amusing book, Paul Boyer -- one of the preeminent historians of U.S. ideas and culture -- has provided a careful examination of the early American response to the atomic bomb. It sets the stage for the ongoing controversy over nuclear weapons among Americans in subsequent decades.

The world may be very different outside...

This work is a survey of American attitudes toward nuclear power immediately after WWII, as reflected in journalism and advocacy work. The book covers the immediate post-war years, 1945 - 1950. It describes how people overcame their fear of the bomb by developing a willful ignorance, aided in no small part by the strenuous propaganda efforts of the government. There are interesting tidbits- how scientists went from objects of esteem to objects of ridicule, the ties between the bomb and sex, and the willingness of our government to mount domestic misinformation campaigns. But what most struck me was the initial public reaction to the bomb, and how similar it was to 9/11. People were shocked and terrified by the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite the fact that it was us who dropped the bombs. At the conclusion of WWII people thought another world war in which atomic bombs would be used against American cities was inevitable. Radical ideas abounded, with some calling for a global government, others for the deconstruction of cities in favor of low density dispersed settlements (suburbs). Everywhere there was fear, and a pervasive belief that the way of life people knew from before the war was gone forever. Everything changed with the bomb. Sound familiar? The threat of mass destruction is not new to America, it wasn't invented on 9/11. It was invented by us generations ago. Our parents learned to cope with it then, this book gives a look at how they did it.

Excellent overview of the first 5 years of nuclear culture

Paul Boyer is well known as a scholar of American millenialism, both religious and secular, from his book "When Time Shall Be No More", but gathering slightly less attention is his impressive volume "By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age." Boyer is a cultural historian, and grew up a pacifist, so its no surprise that he frames the years 1945 to 1950 as years of fierce contention over the role of nuclear weapons and energy in American society. His overarching thesis, is precisely that---the years of 1945-1950 showed a sharp swing from grave concern and fear over nuclear energy to visions of nuclear promise and technological utopias, promulgated by the U.S. government and the Atomic Energy Agency, with vocal, dissenting minorities present at each pendulum swing. Boyer speculates that this may form a model for subsequent generations' relationship with nuclear energy, from care to indifference and back again. Boyer's method is to examine evidence of public thought and conversations during these five years, from "letters to the editor" of newspapers, to intellectual journals of thought, to cartoonists, to the literary world of William Faulkner and Gertrude Stein, to religious organizational bulletins. He makes skillful use of primary sources, demonstrating that while majority opinions could be clearly demonstrated to have existed, undercurrents of contention and dissention remained at each step. Boyer also makes it understandable that as Americans' expectations of another war increased (59% in October 1945 to 77% in late 1947, page 335) Americans sought not to curtail the development of nuclear energy, but rather trust in technological superiority and civil defense to survive the "inevitable " war, a concomitant response to civil defense campaigns, visions of technological utopia, and simply atomic fatigue---even a subject like nuclear war could only generate a certain sustained interest over a period of time if not directly confronting daily life in the U.S. However, Boyer also suggests that a drop-off in interest in nuclear issues may have been due to deep-seated horror rather than complacency (as noted by Elaine Tyler May) This may belong to the more speculate aspects of his study, given that in the late 40's and 50's open counternarratives to nuclear utopia were building, such as in the literary and poetic work of the Beats. But in general I find "By The Bomb's Early Light" an excellent, accessible account of the major movements in a fascinating period of cultural history, one clearly marked by ideological conflicts and disagreement rather than consensus.

How America Learned to Love the Bomb

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, discourse on the threat of nuclear arms has all but vanished, relegated to a relatively quiet resurgence of the Star Wars debate and to a few footnotes on the developmental history of the internet. Despite this current hiatus in nuclear consciousness, every American living today has at least a passing acquaintance with the concept of atomic annihilation; sitcoms, government press releases, popular films, and news media are inconstant but persistent reminders of the nuclear threat. Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light traces these media as they shaped and reflected American consciousness at the birth of the atomic age.Despite Boyer's professed pacifism and his personal views regarding the ultimately menacing nature of the atomic bomb, the various events, opinions, and artifacts cited are evenly presented. This objectivity, however, makes for rather dry reading, especially when Boyer's connective tissue is compared with the lofty literary attempts to come to terms with the inconceivable he quotes throughout. This work might be more effective if it gave itself over completely to the format it seems to yearn for: an assemblage of excerpts and passages from the original works with Boyer's commentary confined to sidebars and brief introductory essays. Of course, Boyer's goal was to produce a comprehensive volume of reference material drawing from a myriad of venues and disciplines, not a coffee table book about atomic kitsch of the 1940's. While not as entertaining as the latter and by no means a cover-to-cover page-turner, By The Bomb's Early Light serves as an excellent resource and starting point for further research.