MASTER MECHANICS & EVIL WIZARDS:

SCIENTISTS and the AMERICAN IMAGINATION

The America of the 1950s was indeed a nation of watchers. The paranoia which pervades nearly every discourse of that anxious decade has become something of a cultural cliché,just as the word ëMcCarthyism' has become so overdetermined as to stand in danger of loosing its power to instruct.Yet this widespread American fearfulness of the 1950s did not, as one might expect, coincide with the Russian acquisition of the A-bomb in 1949. In fact, the undercurrent of nervousness and dread begins several years before that, on the eve of our victory in the Pacific, appearing instantly and ubiquitously following our first use of the Atomic bomb against Japan.

Immediate reaction to the news of the A-bomb's use was a mixture of awe and apprehension. The New York Times reported on August 8, 1945, that the bomb had caused "an explosion in men's minds as shattering as the obliteration of Hiroshima."[1] However, what seemed most shattered was our own sense of security.A sampling of the mood from various periodicals yields largely a refrain of doom and gloom: "[The bomb had] cast a spell of dark foreboding over the spirit of humanity." Christian Century; "The entire city is pervaded by a kind of sense of oppression." New York Sun; "[There is a] curious new sense of insecurity, rather incongruous in the face of military victory." The New Republic..On the very night the bomb was dropped, H. V. Kaltenborn was already warning that "For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein!"

But why were we afraid? America was in every sense better off after the war than before it. Our economy had been re-built, our cities and countryside were untouched, our casualties were a fraction those of our allies and enemies. And above all else, we were the sole possessors of the most powerful weapon the world had ever known, the Atomic Bomb the very "terror weapon" the Germans had been frantically searching for in the closing days of the War. And yet, ironically, America seemed the one nation most terrorized.

The advent of the Security State is the authoritarian response of the State to its crisis. For years after WWI it existed as a crisis State putting out economic and political crisises through out the short 20th Century. Guerrilla war begins in earnest after WWII with the success of nationalist mobilization in the Pacific against Japanese Imperialism led quite naturally to a generalized anti-Imperialism against all masters; the United States, Britain, France, Holland, Portugal etc. 

Quintessentially the later half of the twentieth century was both a Cold War and lots of little hot ones. Terrorism and the State are old acquintences. The modern Police State or international State of policing originates in fin de sicle Europe and America in response to Anarchist bombers.

EP