Journalistic representations of a suicide pact in 1957 encapsulated wider popular assumptions on, and anxieties over, nuclear technology. Through an exploration of British nuclear culture in the late 1950s, this article suggests that knowledge of nuclear danger disrupted broader conceptions of self, nationhood and existence in British life. Building on Hecht's use of the term ‘nuclearity’, the article offers an alternative definition of the term whereby nuclearity is understood to mean the collection of assumptions held by individual citizens on the (...) dangers of nuclear technology: assumptions that were rooted firmly in context and which circulated in, and were shaped by, national discourse. The article will argue that nuclearity was an active component in the formation of British identity by the late 1950s. The article is intended as a starting point for extended reflections on the ways in which nuclearity can add to our understanding of individual experience, nuclear anxiety and Cold War culture in post-war Britain. (shrink)

Jacob Bronowski , on the basis of having examined the effects of the atomic bombing of Japan in late 1945, became one of Britain's most vocal and best-known scientific intellectuals engaged in the cultural politics of the early atomic era. Witnessing Hiroshima helped transform him from pure mathematician–poet to scientific administrator; from obscurity to fame on the BBC airwaves and in print; and, crucially, from literary intellectual who promoted the superior truthfulness of poetry and poets to scientific humanist insisting that (...) science and scientists were the standard-bearers of truth. A cornerstone of Bronowski's humanist ideology was that Hiroshima and the bomb had become symbols of the public's distrust of science, whereas, in reality, science was merely a scapegoat for society's loss of moral compass; more correctly, he stressed, science and scientists epitomized positive moral values. When discussing atomic energy, especially after 1949, Bronowski not only downplayed the bomb's significance but was deliberately vague regarding Britain's atomic weapon development programme; this lack of candour was compounded by Bronowski's evasiveness regarding his own prior involvement with wartime bombing. The net effect was a substantial contribution to British scientific intellectuals' influential yet frequently misleading accounts of the relations between science and war in the early atomic era. (shrink)

British popular newspapers were fascinated by the terrible power of the nuclear bomb, and they devoted countless articles, editorials and cartoons to it. In so doing, they played a significant role in shaping the nuclear culture of the post-war period. Yet scholars have given little sustained attention to this rich seam of material. This article makes a contribution to remedying this major gap by offering an overview of the coverage of nuclear weaponry in the two most popular newspapers in Britain, (...) theDaily Expressand theDaily Mirror, in the period from 1945 to the early 1960s. Although both papers supported British possession of the bomb, claiming that it was essential for the maintenance of great-power status, their reporting was more complex and critical than the existing scholarship has tended to assume. This article argues that sceptical voices in the press often disrupted official narratives and that journalists emphasized the potential dangers involved in the nuclear arms race. Newspapers frequently highlighted, rather than downplayed, the horrors of the bomb: it was repeatedly portrayed as a ‘monster’ threatening the world. (shrink)