America formally ushered in the “nuclear age” on August 6, 1945 when it dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, to end the Second World War. Nuclear weaponry had been the American military’s long-sought goal during the war as the government devoted over 2 billion dollars to the top secret “Manhattan Project,” based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. At the bomb’s first test, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the controversial scientific director of the project, called upon Hindu writings and famously commented: “Now I am become death; destroyer of worlds.” This ominous sense of doom pervaded America’s and ultimately the world’s relationship to the new technology. Initially produced within a climate of warfare, nuclear energy never lost the trappings of awe and fear that surrounded its birth despite years of attempts to reshape public perceptions.

Initially, America held sole rights to the nuclear age and took advantage of its shortlived technological superiority to establish itself as an unchallenged international military power. When the Soviet Union successfully tested their own nuclear weapon in 1949, the arms race between what were now two superpowers began in earnest. Over the next forty years, America and the Soviet Union devoted an extraordinary amount of financial and political capital to building more, as well as more advanced, nuclear-weapons systems. In America, this arms race and the war games that detailed how such weapons might be used became the stuff of popular culture, with phrases like “first strike capability” and “MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction”—concepts that originated on the desks of military planners—entering the common vocabulary.

For many years, Americans maintained an absorbing political focus on nuclear weaponry. Generals and the public genuinely debated whether to use nuclear bombs in both the Korean War and in Vietnam. In the 1960 election John Kennedy falsely accused the Eisenhower administration of permitting a “missile gap” to arise which benefited the Soviets. As president, Kennedy himself engaged in nuclear brinkmanship with the Soviet Union over Cuba. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson implied in a famous television commercial that, if elected, Republican opponent Barry Goldwater would cause a nuclear war. The bomb-shelter craze that swept the country in the late 1950s/early 1960s reflected this public obsession, as did the regular “nuclear attack” drills held in schools which urged children to “duck and cover” should a bomb fall in the vicinity.

Although continuing to accelerate nuclear arms development and production, American political leaders simultaneously called for other countries—particularly the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China—to slow down and limit their nuclear arsenals. To that end, Kennedy for example, proposed a nuclear test-ban treaty in 1963.

During his first term, Richard Nixon focused on a policy of détente with the Soviet Union—an attempt to cool down Cold-War tensions—and negotiated the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) I accord. President Reagan reversed this course in the 1980s by denouncing the SALT II agreement negotiated under the Carter administration (although never ratified by the Senate) and extensively funding research into a new, highly speculative missile defense system set in the Earth’s orbit, known popularly as the “Star Wars” initiative.

Subsequent presidential administrations defunded this project, but the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world and the absence of genuine multilateral armslimitation agreements reflects the long-term impact of the fact that America abandoned nuclear disarmament (outside of the Russia-US arena) as an important policy goal.

Yet, nuclear weapons are but one aspect of America’s tormented relationship with the nuclear age. American policy-makers attempted to transform the public relationship with nuclear power from one of terror to one of affection. Public utilities saw the possibilities of a cheap energy source and began a campaign to convince Americans to welcome nuclear power plants. Initially the public relations efforts had some success and plants began to dot the American landscape in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, just as grassroots “Ban the Bomb” movements had helped reshape disarmament goals in the 1960s, so too did resistance to nuclear energy on environmental and safety grounds begin to take hold in the 1970s. Protestors challenging the image of a safe, benign nuclearenergy capability received the proof they needed in 1979 when a nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in western Pennsylvania experienced a serious nuclear accident and exposed millions to the risk of radiation poisoning. This was enough to convince many that their communities should remain “nuclear free” as a growing political movement in the 1980s argued.

Movies like China Syndrome (1979) and Silkwood (1983) reflected this growing opposition to nuclear energy.

In fact, the effects of the nuclear age have been a standard in American popular culture.

Not surprisingly the 1950s proved to be the high-water mark for cinematic representations of nuclear disaster. Countless B-movies showed the impact of radiation on the natural world. Although exposure to radiation usually produced massive and deadly growth (giant ants in Them and a giant woman in The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman), sometimes it led to diminution (The Incredible Shrinking Man). These now pleasurably “campy” films provide ample evidence of an American culture trying to come to terms with a new and frightening technology.

Although the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989 has freed some Americans from their longstanding anxiety over an imminent nuclear holocaust, others have pointed to the unchecked proliferation of nuclear weaponry by many smaller countries as an even greater source of concern. The longstanding American security policy of “Mutually Assured Destruction”—which argued that the United States and the Soviet Union could not risk a war because no one would be left at the end—is of no interest to many nations who currently have nuclear-weapons capability. Their conflicts are more local and the attraction of nuclear weaponry more tactically engaging. In the eyes of many the real “nuclear age” has only now just begun.