Getting to Know the Bomb - Essay Example

Getting to Know the Bomb In the preface to Margot Henrickson's book Dr. Strangelove's America, the bemoans the time it took for cultural change to react to the dynamic introduction of the atomic bomb. How was society to act America hardly knew the dangers of the super secret atomic program. Good citizens living right next door to a missile silo in Kansas were not told of its existence. This was not a technology like the printing press or microwave oven. This was world power poison that could kill you just by being in the same neighborhood.

Sometimes it takes awhile to discover the evil in our midst. Henrickson states in the preface that it was "Not until the 1980s, when there arose signs of an organized and widespread antinuclear activism in America". It can only be presumed that the author slept through the 1960s when the anti nuke people woke up from the brainwashing of the 1950s. If the Russians had not also had the bomb, the country would still be asleep at the switch. She further states that, "no such revolutionary change engulfed America".

She discounts the cultural revolution of the beatniks and hippies. They were reacting to a world gone mad with nuclear weaponry and rabid with military power.How many other technologies do we as a culture ignore out of fear that they are the only things between us and doomsday Is eavesdropping technology the government's new edge and the current paranoia Statesmen rule with leadership, governments with fear. Will we have to learn that Al Quieda is tapping our phone to bring attention to that new threat Like atomic weapons, it's hard to integrate them into our life like a microwave oven.

Works CitedHenrickson, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove's America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.