We saw it, and prepared for it, the Impossible Thing, the oncoming of megakilll, or what Henry Adams called The Distinguished Thing, acknowledged and prepared and built ourselves a reserve of anti-fear for it. 

 Once the Soviets demonstrated their capacity to field and then deliver an atomic weapon in August 1949, the great race to Armageddon was underway, a zero-sum game of nuclear dimensions, where an canonical victor is mostly that in name once the million-megaton war was fought and over.

The best that could be done so far as the general American population was concerned was to stockpile foods, recognize the sounds and sights of an attack, pay attention to the EBS, and possibly prepare for the worst by digging a fallout shelter, or hide under your wooden desk at school, or wear an atom bomb suit, or build an atom bomb house.  Of course if you lived in the 100+ metro areas that were deemed targetable you could also plan your escape route; however,

 

since hundreds of thousands(and more) other drivers would be thinking the same thing, getting out of town might not be a possibility. (This was true even if you paid to one of the government-issue nuclear attack evac maps and stayed to the even/east odd/west as dictated by your car’s tags, there would still be an impossible mess.)

[Image source: Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future, by Joseph J. Corn, a slender and pretty book and very easy to underestimate–it is a wonderful work of real depth and reach, remarkable given its brevity.]

The Atom Bomb House, by Robert C. Scull and Jacques Martini, was designed and published in 1946, and for all intents and purposes supposed that the house and furnishing and all inside it would be safe from an atomic attack.  The blast walls around the house’s perimeter are a curious touch, and actually look pretty nice–I don’t know how much they would deflect the effects of an atomic bomb, though.  Still, it was a way around thinking about the impossible.

Making the next logical leap, I guess, the architect Paul Laszlo presented Atomville in 1954, which was a collection of dwellings and structures that were bomb-survival as part of a design-survivable community. 

{Image source: Mod2mod blog, here.]

And of course there was some thinking about making each person their own Atomville, with atomic bomb suits (which I wrote about earlier on this blog, here):

 

[Source: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, via Google Patents]

So for 15 or 20 years of getting ready for the Soviets to attack Americans were probably desensitized to what that attack actually meant–after hundreds or thousands of warnings and exposure to the possibility of war and nuclear holocaust, many people grew immune to what it all actually meant, swirling away in the mists of Mutually Assured Destruction like a bad song that you know by heart because you’ve heard it on the radio fifty times. 

Then there were those like Ed Teller who thought to spend the equivalent of many multiples of trillions of dollars in the hopes of spreading the country out so that there was an equal distribution of people and factories and such, making the U.S. impossible to attack because there were no centers of population and industry, meaning that the USSR would have to attack everything, everywhere. This would have involved building 20 million new homes and all of the infrastructure that goes along with that, as well as moving all business and relocating all of the means of production in the United States.  That was a towering idea that towered low, but it did represent another line of thinking on survivability that moved from the Atom Bomb House to Atomville to the seeming opposite of those, to AtomExUrbia.    (See here for the fuller story.)

[Image source:  LIFE magazine in (15 June) 1947]

So preparing for the worst, preparing for the thing that you really couldn’t prepare for, became an object of desire. 

It was as though people could not see the forest for the trees–which is quite ionic, because one piece of nuclear weapon test films that is no doubt very familiar to most anyone over 40 depicts a “forest” being blown apart by a blast.  The “forest” was actually a stand of trees constructed in the Nevada desert to see what would happen to flammable trees in a nuclear conflagration. (“…The U.S. Forest Service brought 145 ponderosa pines from a nearby canyon and cemented them into holes lined up in tidy rows in an area called Frenchman Flat, 6,500 feet from ground zero. Then the Department of Defense air-dropped a 27-kiloton bomb that exploded 2,423 feet above the model forest…” on May 8, 1953.¹) Not surprisingly, they were mostly destroyed, even using a tactical nuclear weapon. I guess that the issue was not if they would be destroyed but how destroyed they would be.  Still, looking at a forest and looking at a nuclear weapons test would leave little doubt that the forest would be pretty-well destroyed–it’s just the distance that the destruction would reach would be open to question. 

Notes

1. Check here for the atomic bomb test on the artificial forest in the Nevada desert (an article by Ann Finkbeiner in Slate).