Soul of the Future: The Atomic Monster Awakes

Earlier posts in this series can be found by clicking on the Soul of the Future label.

How is it possible that the imminent and greatest threat in human history to civilization and life on the entire planet Earth is not the focus of comprehensive efforts by humanity to address it?

How can it be that this climate emergency brought on by global heating has been the subject of scientific warnings for more than half a century, that scientific modelling has proven correct and predictions are coming true, and many public figures have acknowledged this for a generation, but much of society seems not to comprehend it, and a large segment--including a powerful US political party--continues to deny it, even while it is demonstrably happening?

How can news that supports this science, and represents real life information that emphasizes the dangers be relegated to the bottom of the news reporting?  How can the likely murder of a billion be treated with less importance than the murder of a single individual, or the fate of the planet for millennia be ignored in favor of a celebrity's momentary pique?  How can the erasure of the future not be the most important news of the day?

Some of the answers can be suggested by attitudes towards the previous apocalyptic threat of the recent past, the nuclear weapons that spread for a generation following the first atomic bomb explosion in 1945.

The first atomic bomb was detonated in secret, in the New Mexico desert.  The explosion was so bright that it was seen by a woman who was blind from birth and traveling in a car miles away. "A colony on Mars, had such a thing existed, could have seen the flash," writes Gerard J. DeGroot in The Bomb: A Life. "All living things within a mile were killed, including all insects."

Witnesses to this and later nuclear bomb detonations spoke of the brightest light, the largest explosions, the longest and deepest sound they had ever experienced. These bombs made their own windstorms and firestorms. They began in an explosive instant and kept growing, as if they might never end.

Over Nagasaki in a plane trailing the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb, journalist William Laurence watched the bomb explode upwards: “It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

An observer on a U.S. Navy ship 30 miles away watched the fireball of one of the first hydrogen bomb explosions rise and spread: “It looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some mad man would look like.”

Oppenheimer

So profound was the experience (or even the reports) that many fell back on extreme metaphysical and religious imagery. Robert Oppenheimer, chief scientist at Los Alamos, famously compared the first atomic bomb explosion to a Hindu god—Krishna, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” An Army General felt doomsday, and the blasphemy of humans tampering with such forces.

President Truman (who ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but only read reports on it) wondered if it fulfilled the Biblical prophesy of the fire next time. Winston Churchill called it “the Second Coming in Wrath.” For both those who had witnessed the first atomic detonation and those who had only heard about it, Spencer Weart writes in Nuclear Fear, “the explosion served less to introduce new ideas than to bring ancient thought of apocalypse to new and vivid life.”

Biblical illustration

The last book of the Bible is about the end of the world. In the Catholic Bible it is called "Apocalypse", but the Protestant translates the word from the Greek into English as "Revelations."   The Bomb was a revelation. But of what?

One conclusion was widely drawn. “If I were asked to name the most important date in the history and prehistory of the human race,” wrote author Arthur Koestler in 1978 in his final book, “I would answer without hesitation, 6 August 1945. The reason is simple. From the dawn of consciousness until 6 August 1945, men had to live with the prospect of his death as an individual; since the day when the first atomic bomb outshone the sun over Hiroshima, mankind as a whole has had to live with the prospect of its extinction as a species.”

According to sociologist Edward Shils, the atomic bomb brought the fear that the Biblical Apocalypse was at hand to society at large.

These would not be baseless fears.  By the mid 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were building arsenals of atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs, which were vastly more destructive by orders of magnitude.  By 1961 President Kennedy could assert in his Inaugural that the world contained enough nuclear weapons to destroy humankind seven times over, and not be contradicted.  The foreboding hung over everything in those Cold War years.

Admiral Ingram

The potential danger was immediately grasped after World War II, so much so that the need to control nuclear weapons by an international organization like the United Nations was universally obvious.  "No one questions the vulnerability of mankind to the destructive effects of this devastating new weapon of war," wrote recently retired Admiral Jonas H. Ingram, Commander-in-Chief of the US Atlantic Fleet during World War II, in the popular 1947 Collier Yearbook. "In fact it is such a destructive weapon that it should be outlawed in warfare, for the general use of it over any protracted period of time would spell the end of our civilization."

International control was was essentially US government policy at first, but not for long. And once the Soviet Union had the Bomb, any attempt to outlaw or control the Bomb was not only forgotten but came to be a virtually forbidden and unpatriotic concept.

Though atomic bomb tests were widely publicized, the US government enforced wartime secrecy and was caught lying about effects, particularly radiation.  Those lies were exposed in particular by two books, both best-sellers: John Hershey's Hiroshima and Dr. David Bradley's No Place to Hide, about the radiation effects of hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific.

“The fact that hydrogen bomb fallout could devastate entire territories was treated as a military secret, for it undercut prevailing ideas on nuclear war and civil defense,” writes Spencer Weart. “The government scarcely knew what to say to itself; let alone to the world public. In the absence of reliable facts, indeed with the world’s main source of atomic information largely discredited, anxieties could only continue to grow.”

For Americans, it often became unpatriotic to question military authorities or certainly the Bomb, and since the avowed Soviet enemy had their Bomb, it seemed futile and foolhardy. So few ordinary citizens said anything derogatory or doubtful in public—or said anything at all. Such sentiments might invite a charge of being a Communist in this contaminated atmosphere of McCarthyism, J. Edgar Hoover and the Blacklist, when not just those employed by government or Hollywood, but all kinds of people could suddenly lose their jobs, homes and families after such accusations.

Plus the immensity of it all was difficult to grasp consciously, and even more difficult to face. This became especially true when it seemed that invisible radiation effects could wound, poison, kill and deform from remote distances, and from forgotten or unknown events.  Everyone was vulnerable, and essentially helpless.

For these and other reasons, anxieties couldn’t be consciously accommodated for long, or directly expressed. They went underground, translated into the language of nightmare. They could be faced only as fantastic stories on a giant bright screen, watched in the dark.

But even by the mid-1950s--after Hiroshima, the 1946 Bikini atomic tests narrated on radio and shown in newsreels and television film, the hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, reports of Soviet tests and the resumption of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere above the American southwest--the big Hollywood studios mostly ignored the Bomb completely.  It took independent producers with small budgets to even mention it.

However, efforts to directly express what the Bomb might portend were inadequate. Instead, the first successful and popular films about the consequences of nuclear weapons did so with the symbolism of the monster.  Though it had its own fearsome icon--the mushroom cloud--the Bomb was not itself portrayed as the monster.  Its power and dangers were expressed through the monstrosities and the monsters it might create.  It was the monster maker.

Hollywood may not have understood the atom but they got monster movies, at least eventually. Tales of monsters were as old as literature, as old as myth and folk tales. The atomic monster storytellers absorbed many of the salient features of these tales and incorporated them, beginning in the US with The Beast From 20.000 Fathoms, released in the summer of 1953.

Independent producer Jack Deitz asked young animator Ray Harryhausen to create a fictional dinosaur for this low-budget movie inspired by a short story by Harryhausen's boyhood friend, Ray Bradbury.  The script was officially co-written by Fred Freiberger, later a Star Trek producer.

Released the year before the Japanese atomic monster film Gojira (later repackaged with new footage as the worldwide hit Godzilla) and one of its inspirations, The Beast...also began with a nuclear bomb test, though less specific or reality-based than in the Japanese film.  It occurs in the Arctic, where no Bomb was ever exploded, apparently to both further the plot of it waking a frozen dinosaur and possibly because of easily available avalanche footage.  (Playing military liaison Colonel Jack Evans, Kenneth Tobey was revisiting the Arctic of the 1951 s/f classic, The Thing From Another World.)

There's a fair amount of curious dialogue that plays with paradoxes and anxieties. The first exchange occurs just after the test as three scientists discuss the Bomb tests with Colonel Evans.  The chief nuclear scientist and main protagonist is Dr. Tom Nesbitt (played by Paul Hubschmid, billed here as Paul Christian, a Swiss actor with a slight accent who played in mostly German language films. Perhaps he was meant to suggest America's German rocket scientists as well atomic bomb physicists.)

Nesbitt observes somewhat wearily: ”What the cumulative effects of all these tests will be, only time can tell.”

A second scientist says, “You know, every time one of these things goes off, I feel as if we were helping to write the first chapter of the New Genesis.”

 “Let’s hope we don’t find ourselves writing the last chapter of the old one,” Nesbitt answers.

“You sound like a man whose scared, Tom,” says Colonel Evans.

“What makes you think I’m not,” Nesbitt says. And then weirdly all three men laugh.

But while checking a snowy outpost after the test, Nesbitt has seen the prehistoric monster.  No one--including the military psychiatrist-- believes him.  In their rationalistic skepticism, they are almost parodies.These no-nonsense technicians are without culture, without any sense of the past. (The psychiatrist even gets his reference to the Loch Ness Monster wrong.) Their blandness in the face of cosmic scale would recur more obviously and meaningfully in Kubrick’s 2001. For them, myth is only a pejorative.

Nesbitt's quest to get someone to believe him takes him to an unnamed university in New York, where he meets Professor Elson, a kindly and seemingly eccentric elder scientist (played by Cecil Kellaway), apparently the world's foremost paleontologist.  Elson doesn't believe him either, but Elson's young and attractive assistant, Lee Hunter, is more sympathetic.  (She is played by Paula Raymond, who after this film worked mostly as a guest actor in television.)  Eventually she invites him to her apartment to examine sketches of known prehistoric creatures. Their banter includes dialogue that indicates the pivotal point of the nuclear age in separating the past from the future, but also in a future returning to that past.

She has already quoted Prof. Elson's dictum:“ The future is a function of the past.” After she tells Nesbitt how she was Elson's student and became his assistant after she earned her degree, he observes, "You deal with the past, I with the future."

She seems worried, and says softly, “How uncomplicated the past was.”

"And how bright the future can be," he responds, with a romantic smile.  She notices this and reigns him in (for the moment.) "Let's get back to the present."

Eventually the professor is convinced, and theorizes that the creature is returning to its home grounds in the canyons deep beneath the Hudson River.  He goes down in a diving bell to find it.  Again, a bit of stray dialogue highlights this pivotal moment in time. “This is such a strange feeling," he says as he descends into the depths.   "I feel I am leaving of world of untold tomorrows for a world of countless yesterdays.”

He spots the monster and describes it in technical terms to Hunter. His last words, before the monster devours him (offscreen), are: “But the most astonishing thing is—“

So far the movie has been a somewhat ponderous and wandering search for the proof that then immediately presents itself, when the monster comes ashore at what looks like South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan.  The monster movie finally begins.  Here Harryhausen's innovations in stop-motion animation take over, as the monster smashes things, terrorizes New Yorkers, eats a policeman (who nevertheless seems to appear in a following scene), survives armed attack, and spreads an unspecified disease from its wounds.

Attempts to kill the monster with bullets and explosives would risk spreading this deadly disease, but Dr. Nesbitt has a solution: shooting a radioactive isotope into the existing wound, to kill the disease tissue and the monster with it.  (These were still early days of radiation therapy for cancers that were almost invariably fatal in the 1950s.)  The nuclear scientist using radioactivity to kill the monster awakened by a nuclear bomb is a paradox to be repeated in these movies: science created the Bomb and the military uses it, but only science and the military can save the world from the Bomb's consequences.

While Harryhausen's giant monster was clearly the appeal of the picture, the atomic bomb scenes weren't merely to provide an excuse.  There was a sense that what atomic scientists were doing was itself monstrous, that they were playing with forces beyond human ken and control.  This sense was especially evident in the publicity for the movie, particularly a long trailer, which asked, "Are we delving into mysteries we weren't meant to know?"

Besides Harryhausen's dinosaur animation, this movie is also remembered for the final scenes, where Nesbitt and a sharpshooter (played by the not yet famous Lee Van Cleef) attack the dinosaur from atop a Coney Island roller coaster.

Despite its inadequacies, this movie did very well at the box office.  After shooting it for a mere $200,000, producer sold it to Warner Brothers for twice that, and much to the studio's surprise, Warners made millions.

So Warners decided to jump into the monster business, with a big budget movie in color and 3-D about atomic mutant giant ants.  But the studio soon got cold feet, and opted for a less ambitious black and white feature.  The result nevertheless was a classic of the genre, and a very good movie by ordinary standards, called Them! 

....To be continued...