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In August 1957 a married couple, Elsie Marshall, a nurse, and Andrew Marshall, a felt weaver from Langho, near Blackburn in north-west England, gassed their three children and then, entering into a suicide pact, jumped into the sea after tying themselves together with a cord ‘as thick as a window sash’.Footnote 1 Their bodies were washed up on the beach at Blackpool. The coroner's report reached a conclusive verdict of manslaughter and death by suicide pact. There are no more details about the mental state of the couple, but the story was reported in the regional and national press.Footnote 2 An article published in the Daily Mirror on 16 August 1957, entitled ‘The family that feared tomorrow’, is of particular interest because of the focus on the suicide note left by the couple. According to the Mirror, part of the suicide note read, ‘in view of all the things that are happening in the world and the talk of new wars which will mean extermination of masses of people and especially children we decided we could not allow this to happen to our children’. Later in the note, Elsie expresses her wish that the Marshalls' coffee table be passed on to her mother, and makes detailed requests regarding flowers at their funeral.Footnote 3
The note reads as a calm and resolute explanation for their decision, with the immersion in domestic trivialities creating an unintended edge of pathos. Although the note made no direct mention of nuclear war, the report, along with an accompanying commentary by resident ‘agony aunt’ Mary Brown, made the assumption that the Marshalls had succumbed to the pressures of nuclear fear. The narrative constructed by the Mirror hinges on the tragic juxtaposition of quaint domestic concerns and fear of global nuclear war, appearing at once familiar and understandable to the contemporary reader. The treatment of the Langho story by the Mirror offers the historian a lens through which to understand a peculiarly British vision of life in 1957. This article will demonstrate how this event and its representation illustrate the way in which knowledge of nuclear danger shaped domestic, social and political narratives in the late 1950s.Footnote 4
These narratives also suggest that profound preoccupations with nuclear danger straddled class boundaries. Such preoccupations are reflected in contemporary newspapers, or in fiction and film. Autobiographies that dwell on this period can also help us understand the extent of nuclear anxiety, and the ways in which different nuclear narratives overlapped in everyday life. In his autobiography, Richard Hoggart remembers the impact Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach (1957) had on some of the people he knew:
it seems to have captured something in the mood of many people, especially families, whether normally middlebrow readers or not, of that first generation to be haunted by the thought that their children might have no future at all. A neighbour … once told us she had regular nightmares in which the bomb had been dropped and she could find neither her husband nor the children. We all have such nightmares, but it was very much of the time that such a woman, the wife of an academic and mother of four, should have these dreams; and should have read Shute. Middlebrow or not, he had touched a nerve, caught the sense of a moment.Footnote 5
Similarly to the Langho story, this brief but powerful description suggests that individuals, in different regional, social and domestic contexts, interacted in powerful and complex ways with the imagined threat of nuclear war. These interactions were shaped by national ‘real-world’ events and fictional narratives, and created a range of physical and emotional consequences. This combination of real and imagined threat takes on particular significance in the 1950s, a decade already defined by the trauma and memory of war.Footnote 6
One way to understand the divergent responses to nuclear technology in the 1950s is to identify similarities at the heart of such responses. By analysing journalistic discourse it emerges that British citizens had an implicit understanding of the negative aspects of nuclear technology. In turn, evidence suggests that these negative intellectual and emotional characteristics became a normalized aspect of individual experience in late 1950s Britain. This shifts the emphasis away from the idea of ‘nuclear-induced psychic numbing’ expounded by Lifton,Footnote 7 or the idea of an overriding ‘nuclear consciousness’ traced by Paul Boyer in his seminal work By the Bomb's Early Light,Footnote 8 and suggests a way in which we can begin to map the ‘emotional history of the atomic bomb’.Footnote 9 An alternative meaning of Gabrielle Hecht's term ‘nuclearity’ is proposed that explores the way in which knowledge of nuclear technology impacted on individual experience, thus reversing Hecht's use of the phrase as a definition of the ‘nuclear status’ of nation states in the global context.Footnote 10
Moving away from Hecht's governmental focus, I argue that ‘nuclearity’ – a shifting set 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 – was a powerful influence in the lives of British citizens. As such, nuclearity can prove a useful conceptual category for historians of British nuclear culture, as well as for historians of modern Britain generally. Through analysis of a variety of narratives, this article will demonstrate how actual and imagined encounters with nuclear weapons were made sense of through recognition of underlying assumptions on nuclear danger. As a way to think about the past, nuclearity helps us to understand the ways in which British nuclear policy was both collectively and individually experienced.Footnote 11 In terms of individual experience, nuclear culture shaped the British self-image in many different ways. In his work on post-war British masculinities, Frank Mort states,
Accounts of the making of the self – and of the relationship between selves – need to form part of the history of all periods. But they are especially important for the historiography of Britain in the postwar years. Analysis of this period has tended to become trapped in purely public histories. Stories that begin from the opposite starting point – from the interiority of the self – can form an important antidote to those obsessively social narratives.Footnote 12
If the emotional consequences of nuclear anxiety can be considered another ‘hidden history’ of the twentieth century, then Mort's insights can help unravel the complexities involved in uncovering such a history, and help us understand how individuals were reacting to or conforming to, shaping or rejecting, the concept of nuclearity. As I will argue, nuclearity is imbued with violence and power, and for some Britons the meaning of existence came to be informed by a deep-rooted understanding of the potential violence, unnaturalness or imminent impact of nuclear technologies. It is in this sense that historians can use nuclearity to make sense of how individuals in the post-war era made sense of the world, of life, of selfhood or nationhood in subtle and hidden ways.
In this sense, nuclearity is intended to be used as a conceptual tool in much the same way as a conceptual category such as masculinity can be used to make sense of individual experience in the past. Thus, by linking the insights of Mort and other gender historians to accepted histories of the nuclear age, this article aims to undertake a ‘delicate process of meshing, whereby the interior world of fantasy and emotional life is matched against the broader social narratives of the past’.Footnote 13 This approach makes a contribution to the historiography of the 1950s, and suggests a new way to conceptualize nuclear culture. Moving away from both the ‘general-survey’ approach to the 1950sFootnote 14 and the ‘top-down’ approaches that valuable recent work on civil defence perpetuates,Footnote 15 ‘nuclearity’ is presented as a lens through which fresh articulations of British life in the 1950s can be seen.
Rational anxieties
By the end of the 1950s every adult in Britain had some knowledge of atomic bombs. Individuals understood the instantaneous and lasting damage that atomic and thermonuclear weapons could inflict on themselves and their loved ones, and they knew that they had no control over this possibility. Britons watched nuclear nightmares unfurl on film in the knowledge that the British government was an active participant in the global nuclear arms race.Footnote 16 Worldwide nuclear tests conducted throughout the 1950s were well publicized and created anxiety in Britain, leading to the test ban debate. In British newspapers it was not unusual to see familiar Cold War motifs, such as concentric circles over urban centres, or mushroom clouds. Reinforcing the omnipotence of nuclear danger, journalistic narratives also stressed the importance of nuclear science and civil defence. Nuclear anxiety was reinforced by the detailed reporting of specific nuclear dangers such as the ‘unnatural’ and hideous consequences of nuclear fallout. These ambiguous nuclear narratives were at once apocalyptic and everyday, as nuclear anxieties bombarded the domestic space.Footnote 17
Caruth wrote that trauma can be considered to be ‘deeply tied to our own historical realities’.Footnote 18 While nuclear anxiety was purely imaginary for many, it could also be linked to direct experience, or indirectly shaped by the recent experience of war and the recollection of fear.Footnote 19 Nuclear anxiety could be localized for city-dwelling Britons who realized that ‘the present survival and flourishing of the city were simultaneously underwritten and radically threatened by its identity as a nuclear target’.Footnote 20 As a part of a discussion of Sontag's 1965 essay ‘The imagination of disaster’, a key early text on the imagery of mass violence on film, Saint-Amour writes,
certain traumatic responses to the use of nuclear weapons might not have been limited to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but rather shared by all who knew of nuclear weapons, their devastating effects, and the escalating likelihood of their use. In this, Sontag seems to have been among the first to posit what we might call the hysteron proteron of the nuclear condition: the literally preposterous phenomenon of traumatic symptoms – denial, dissociation, fragmentation, repression, the compulsive repetition of extreme violence – that exist not in the wake of a past event, but in the shadow of a future one.Footnote 21
This quote encapsulates the way in which imaginary projections are based on the rational realization of the possibility of future annihilation.
Some intellectuals proved less willing to acknowledge nuclear anxiety as uniquely modern, but saw it as aligned with categories of fear somehow ‘inherent’ to mankind. In 1966 literary critic Frank Kermode wrote that ‘the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world’.Footnote 22 Even though he was clearly preoccupied with the threat of nuclear weapons, he wrote, ‘it would be childish to argue, in a discussion of how people behave under eschatological threat, that nuclear bombs are more real and make one experience more authentic crisis-feelings than armies in the sky’.Footnote 23 Arguing that nuclear anxiety was just another form of fear inherent to humankind, Kermode seemed to deny the uniquely modern predicament at the heart of nuclear danger, and instead insisted on ‘hard-wired’ responses to external threat. Kermode fails to realize that nuclear anxiety is uniquely modern in that it is a response to a man-made threat of unprecedented magnitude. The perspective of Anthony Giddens illuminates the ways in which large-scale developments in the ‘military industrial complex’ can shape the self-image of citizens:
Modernity reduces the overall riskiness of certain areas and modes of life, yet at the same time introduces new risk parameters largely or completely unknown to previous eras … the late modern world is apocalyptic, not because it is inevitably heading towards calamity, but because it introduces risks which previous generations have not had to face … In high modernity, the influence of distant happenings on proximate events, and on intimacies of the self, becomes more and more commonplace.Footnote 24
Modernity created dangerous possibilities for mankind. Nuclear anxiety was new, unique and defined partly by the failure of the modern project.Footnote 25 In the post-war period, the British people experienced a ‘changed imagination of infinitude’Footnote 26 as the structure of their present and future was altered irrevocably by the shadow of the bomb. Examples of tense human experience in the 1950s speak of the incapability of individual Britons to come to terms with the impact of nuclear anxiety. After outlining the context of the 1950s, a brief analysis of case studies found in the national press, culminating in the Langho story, will serve to demonstrate the potency of nuclearity in British culture.
Nuclear culture in the 1950s
British culture following 1945 must be defined, in part, by reference to the nuclear deterrent and international atomic diplomacy.Footnote 27 Impassioned nuclear debate arose in theological circles,Footnote 28 there were multitudes of individual responses to perceived nuclear danger,Footnote 29 and a growing array of fiction and film would exemplify maturing anti-nuclear arguments by the late 1950s. Of course, the groundswell of British anti-nuclear protest groups would come together under the banner of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1958.Footnote 30
By the 1950s, perceptions of nuclear technology were perceived on a highly personal basis, yet would be intricately tied to broader national concerns. Indeed, the escalating nuclear arms race, the government's decision to develop the H-bomb in 1955,Footnote 31 the Suez crisis of 1956, the royal opening of Calder Hall in 1956 and then the fire in 1957,Footnote 32 the megaton tests at Christmas Island in 1957 and 1958Footnote 33 and civil defence initiativesFootnote 34 would mould perceptions of Britain's place in a world shaped by the Cold War. Throughout the 1950s, there was largely cross-party support for nuclear deterrence, despite dissent from the left wing of the Labour Party.Footnote 35 The pro-deterrence line was largely echoed in the press, especially in the Daily Express, where British common sense was aligned firmly with the futility of abandoning bomb development.
In December 1957 Philip Toynbee asked members of the British intellectual elite to respond to his essay ‘Thoughts on nuclear warfare and a policy to avoid it’, and the responses were published in 1959. Members of Parliament, the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Chichester, Canon John Collins, A.J. Ayer, A.J.P. Taylor and E.M. Forster were among the respondents, and many disagreed with Toynbee's idealistic vision of a nuclear-free future which involved Britain taking the lead in dispensing with nuclear weapons.Footnote 36 Clearly, broader Cold War anxieties over the threat of communism still held sway for those with influence over nuclear policy. Indeed, Oxford professor Isaiah Berlin was not comfortable responding publicly to Toynbee's essay.Footnote 37
Aspects of British nuclear culture in the late 1950s were commercialized. In 1957, Kelloggs gave away ‘atomic submarines’ to British households, in packs of cornflakes.Footnote 38 Advertising such toys to children and parents in the national press suggests that popular discourse was already dependent on a range of assumptions over the excitement and awe surrounding nuclear technology. Elsewhere, households were asked to ‘Fit [an] Atomic weather-strip and banish draught for ever’.Footnote 39 On Wednesday 11 September 1957 a horse named Atomic Test ran in the 4.40 at the Doncaster St Leger.Footnote 40 Seemingly small-scale, these nuclear referents contribute to an understanding of how nuclear culture coloured day-to-day life in a variety of ways.
Nuclear-themed films, television dramas and fictional texts entered the mainstream as the 1950s progressed. The Quatermass Experiment, broadcast on television in 1953, then adapted to film in 1955, had expressed contamination and mutation as key anxieties, stressing the domestic setting beset by mysterious, unseen forces. Quatermass 2, broadcast on television in 1955, and put to film in 1957, again with Val Guest as director, has atomic science as a central theme. Other nuclear-themed stories that circulated in British culture included the novel On the Beach (1957), the British film X the Unknown (1956) and the US film The Day the World Ended (1955), as well as numerous science fiction short stories. The release of The Day the Earth Caught Fire in 1961 marked a certain maturity in British cultural responses to the threat of atomic warfare with its realistic and emotionally fraught depiction of nuclear-induced global warming.Footnote 41
J.B. Priestley's play Doomsday for Dyson was adapted for television and broadcast on ITV in March 1958. The television play dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war and included some distressingly violent scenes, culminating in a plea for nuclear disarmament. The message was that feelings of powerlessness could be overcome by political action. A televised debate on disarmament followed the transmission and, the following day, the Express sneered at the conclusion of the play, where ‘Dyson woke up to potter towards the kind of anti-bomb meeting Mr. Priestley has been organising lately. It was clear that Mr. Priestley was still dreaming himself’.Footnote 42 Other papers proved more sympathetic to the disarmament movement, but the Express took a familiarly hostile line on anti-nuclear sentiment.
April 1959 saw the television adaptation of Marghanita Laski's 1954 play The Offshore Island, a play that again dwelt on the consequences of nuclear war, more specifically nuclear fallout, playing on fears of sterilization and mutation. The play emphasized the direct physical consequences on the human body of radiation and, again, a sense of powerlessness pervades the story.Footnote 43 These brief examples show the divergent forms nuclear culture took, and hint at the ambiguous messages that the public received. Fictional narratives contributed to the concept of nuclearity by placing anxiety and powerlessness at the emotional core of assumed responses to nuclear threat.
‘An oil painting from hell’: nuclear discourse in the 1950s
Away from fictional narratives, the development of nuclearity was shaped by an official and institutional nuclear vocabulary that suffused the press in the 1950s. Because of the militarized and secretive nature of the bomb and nuclear power, the dissemination of information from government sources was always partial. This leads to the need to acknowledge the extent to which nuclearity was shaped by the control of knowledge and the government-manufactured ‘public’ face of nuclear policy.Footnote 44
In 1958 the Express ran a front-page story discussing the danger of planes carrying H-bombs crashing. The headline ‘H-bombers: new shock: atom dust could be scattered in crash’ was followed by official advice: ‘it is a good rule for the public to keep clear of an accident area’. Or, as a United States government spokesman was quoted as saying, ‘Either stop breathing or get the hell out.’Footnote 45 This type of language reads as a precursor to the tone set by Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,Footnote 46 but more importantly demonstrates the origins and reinforcement of uncertainty within the concept of nuclearity.
By the late 1950s the increasing visibility of nuclear culture led to a heightened sense of public awareness of existing and emerging nuclear threats. Sections of the press would stress the need for Britain to lead the way in the military application of nuclear physics whilst implicitly reinforcing the danger at the heart of nuclear science. This is especially true when considering the way in which the tabloids dealt with the H-bomb tests. An article by Chapman Pincher of the Express from March 1957 reads,
A highly organised campaign to stop the British H-bomb tests due to take place on Christmas Island soon is being waged by certain civilians, scientists and churchmen. If it succeeds, Britain will be reduced to the status of a country which will wield no influence in world affairs because it will wield no military power. Without a stockpile of H-bombs Britain will suffer the disgrace of being reduced to a satellite of America instead of being a fully-fledged ally with independent strength to deter aggression. And no H-bombs can be stockpiled until the Christmas Island tests have been completed.Footnote 47
A palpable sense of ‘Britishness under threat’ is activated by Pincher, who argues that for Britain to remain powerful, H-bomb tests are inevitable. The H-bomb tests are not imbued with aggression themselves, but are depicted as a deterrent, as fundamentally defensive and peaceful in the face of external threat. The article is printed next to a cartoon by Giles, itself accompanied by song lyrics styled as a parody of a Cy Grant calypso number. The lyrics poke fun at Macmillan's close relationship with America, making reference to the recent agreement that America would station intermediate-range ballistic missiles on British soil. The lyrics end,
The juxtaposition between the article and the lyrics illustrates a key aspect of nuclear culture by 1957. The Express promotes the British possession and continued testing of the H-bomb, while also implicitly demonstrating an awareness of public anxiety over the existence of thermonuclear weapons. Printing a parody that reinforces the presumed popular response to the threat of nuclear annihilation – fatalism laced with humour – illustrates the extent to which journalistic culture confirmed pre-existing assumptions over nuclear bombs. These common assumptions are at the core of nuclearity as a concept. While reinforcing ‘official’ nuclear vocabulary, newspapers also contained ‘counternarratives’ that reflected popular attitudes on nuclear technology.
The Express coverage of the H-bomb test in May 1957 was celebratory and patriotic, under the headline ‘Bang goes ours’.Footnote 48 In June, an article penned by Cassandra appeared in the Mirror. Headlined ‘Like an oil painting from Hell’, the piece describes the second British H-bomb test. Cassandra appeals to religious sentiment, placing the H-bomb at the centre of wider human concerns, and firmly in the foreground of an uncertain and unknowable future. The piece reinforces the idea that nuclear weapons will, in some way, shape or dictate a future over which the individual has no power:
on the 31st day of May in the Year of Our Lord 1957 [near] Christmas Island, … the British people exploded their second hydrogen bomb. IT WAS A DRESS REHEARSAL FOR THE DEATH OF THE WORLD … we, the observers, looked like grotesque mourners … We were thirty-five miles from where The Beast was due to explode after being spewed out from the bomber – quite near enough in view of the fact that the power of the bomb was equal to several million tons of TNT … Through closed eyes, through dark glasses and with my hands still covering my face, I saw the flash. Brighter than the sun, hotter than the sun, and ripped out of the secrets of the heart of the Universe … AND THERE IT HUNG BEFORE US, A BOILING RED AND YELLOW SUN LOW ABOVE THE HORIZON. IT WAS AN OIL PAINTING FROM HELL, BEAUTIFUL AND DREADFUL, MAGNIFICENT AND EVIL … We were watching something also connected with death on a prodigious scale – death, however, that does not lie in the past, but death that is waiting in the future. The vast shape, now increasing with size every moment, rose upward and turned white with a reddish glow in the interior. A thin, snakelike stem appeared at its base, as steam and water were sucked up from the sea below. The horrible pudding in the sky became a diseased cauliflower and then changed into the familiar mushroom.Footnote 49
On many levels, this piece of writing would have confirmed and reinforced assumptions at the core of nuclearity. Death and uncertainty, military and political power, Britishness and the self, nature and religion, and enormous scale all characterize the piece. The tone of the article compels readers to recognize themselves as part of a collective – the ‘British people’ have exploded this bomb – that is complicit in this unnatural and dangerous act that threatens the future of humanity. However, readers are also compelled to conceive the H-bomb as intricately linked to their own future, their own selves. The activation of both a nauseous self-image and a vivid conception of the future contribute to the concept of nuclearity.
Two articles from the Express in March 1958 offer another layer of understanding to the development of nuclearity. Over two days, Donald Edgar presented a series of brief interviews with members of the public. Oxford undergraduates comprised the first group to be interviewed, and workers from car factories surrounding the city were approached for the second set of interviews. The immediate context is the proposed referendum on nuclear disarmament at Oxford University amid anxiety over continuing atomic bomb tests worldwide. The coverage of nuclear issues in the Express is clear-cut, and damning towards the anti-nuclear protests, anti-nuclear plays and anti-nuclear personalities.Footnote 50
Much of the damnation lies in stressing the centrality of emotion to the anti-nuclear argument. In both articles, we are told of the emotional, even ‘hysterical’, pleas from the antinuclear activists. In response to such emotion, we are told that calmness and rationality pervades the undergraduate community at Oxford,Footnote 51 and that ‘instinctive common sense’ defines the workers in their approach to nuclear politics.Footnote 52 Edgar continues the narrative to the logical conclusion: there is an acceptable way to deal with the psychological pressures created by nuclear anxiety, and this should be articulated in a particular way in public discourse.
However, the narrative sits uneasily with words spoken by the female interviewees. Family, children and the future are constant themes across the articles. Echoing the Marshalls' anxieties the year before, one young lady interviewed in a ‘works canteen’ says, ‘when I read the effects of radiation on children I feel that it's no longer worth having a family’, but, she continues, ‘it's no use being cowardly and allowing the Russians to have their own way’. Another young lady in the canteen says, ‘I think the tests should be stopped for the sake of the children. There is too much radiation already’.Footnote 53 One female undergraduate says, ‘sometimes when I think about the bomb and realise that I shall probably have a family I feel like cutting and running to some island’. Another female undergraduate says, ‘I feel deeply about the bomb. It is not a political issue. Mine is a feminine point of view. There are worries for a woman – genetic worries – misshapen children.’Footnote 54
While Edgar denies that there is no overwhelming sense of anxiety, the snippets of interviews he chooses to include speak of a sense of powerlessness, resignation and a surprisingly unified understanding of nuclear danger. The biological self-image of these young women is shaped by knowledge of the alternative directions their lives could take. The women implicitly acknowledge that they have no control over this process, and profound anxieties were projected into the future. Edgar does not present these responses as ‘emotional’ because they are framed by a sense of resignation, powerlessness and fatalism. For Edgar, there is nothing noteworthy or unusual in the fact that women – in separate contexts – are framing their future with reference to an imagined set of nuclear consequences on their unborn children. It is in this sense that we see another assumption that helps us to define nuclearity by 1958. Bolstered by television plays such as Doomsday for Dyson, or a novel such as On the Beach, anxieties over the radioactive contamination of future generations seem to be anxieties that straddle classes and define individual responses to nuclear weapons.
A year earlier, in 1957, the Windscale fire gave another reason for families to worry about the health and future of their children. National symbolism was prominent in the coverage of the accident in the Mirror. The front-page article, headlined ‘Threat to children?’ in reference to the contaminated Cumbrian milk, was placed below a piece on the queen's state visit to Canada.Footnote 55 Just as the royal opening of Calder Hall a year earlier was presented as an event of national significance, the national failure that the fire represented is reinforced by the article's proximity to an image of the head of state. The journalistic representation of the silent and invisible danger of radiation from the reactor accident led to another layer of anxiety for British households.
Although scholarly work has suggested that the incident did have a powerful and lasting impact on the local community,Footnote 56 the accident did not lead to significant panic or anxiety about the role of nuclear energy in British society. The discursive power of the vocabulary employed by journalists, with discussion of atom dust, radioactive milk and near-catastrophe, may have had more impact in its implicit reinforcement of central aspects of nuclearity rather than did anxiety over the incident itself.
The incident shows that understandings of nuclearity would have been developed in a number of ways. The relative passivity shown by the national public may indicate the level of trust still existent towards official explanations of the fire, but also acts as part of the foundation for broader anti-nuclear sentiment by reinforcing the idea of nuclear science on a knife-edge. The Penney Enquiry of 1957 seemed to confirm that a certain amount of luck and uncertainty defined the way in which the technicians dealt with the crisis.Footnote 57 Also, it is clear that if ‘Cockcroft's Folly’ had not been belatedly added to the huge cooling chimney during the construction of the power station, the radioactive leakage would have been more severe. The fire at Windscale generated a nuclear assumption that would become increasingly powerful: that nuclear science was unpredictable and uncontrollable. Not only did powerlessness in the face of nuclear attack become an existential and political issue for many Britons; powerlessness felt in the face of state-controlled use of nuclear fuel also led to an implicit understanding that the individual had little democratic voice in response to government policy on energy. Thus nuclearity can be viewed as a set of understandings defined by the limits of democracy and the fragility of the modern project.
‘The family that feared tomorrow’: nuclearity and individual experience
Returning finally to individual experience and nuclear culture, the Langho suicides and their representation are a powerful indicator of the diverse responses to the knowledge of nuclear danger. The reference in the suicide note to the fear of ‘extermination of masses of people and especially children’ is an articulation of a self-image where no bearable future existed. For the Marshalls, the assumption that a nuclear war would represent the end of existence itself was informed by conventional assumptions at the core of nuclearity. That the nuclear threat appears both imminent and inevitable is a familiar Cold War motif.
However, rather than overprivileging the role of nuclear anxiety in the Marshalls' own lives, it is more fruitful to turn to the presentation of the story in the Mirror because it is the public presentation of the story that contributes to the concept of nuclearity. In an accompanying piece, Mary Brown dwelt on the fact that the Marshalls ‘couldn't face bringing up their children in a world they thought threatened by war … a father and mother feared the nuclear bomb – not for themselves, but for their children’.Footnote 58 The tone of the piece becomes subtly condemnatory, expressing the wish that Elsie had come to her with her anxieties. She says, ‘they saw the future as a dark abyss, and this vision blotted out all the small endearing day-to-day compensations for living’. Brown goes on to say, ‘only last week I talked to a young mother, who said: “I wish I hadn't had my children. What future is there for them?”’.Footnote 59 Brown concludes on a hopeful note, stating that ‘love is stronger than fear’. Here, domestic tranquillity is mobilized against the dark abyss, and simple, honest, common-sense reassurances attempt to stave off the perceived threat of the nuclear bomb.
This particular vocabulary evokes not only a threatened way of life, but threatened morality and spirituality. The individual is told to stand firm. While Brown acknowledges the ‘weight’ and power of nuclear anxiety, she tells us that we must consciously choose love over fear to ensure the survival of the family unit and the domestic idyll. An idealized vision of Britain comes to the surface, as a Britain populated by reflective moral citizens who shun fear and anxiety by falling back on Christian doctrine and common sense. The reaction of Mr and Mrs Marshall is presented as understandable, yet futile and somewhat pathetic. Interestingly, the Mirror constructs a direct link between nuclear anxiety and the suicide pact, and Brown suggests that high levels of anxiety are natural, yet manageable and survivable by citizens who follow a simplistic doctrine of ‘how to live’. This emphasis, combined with the Langho case study as a whole, tells us about the power of the nuclear imagination, and the implicit acknowledgement of the reality of nuclear anxiety. Crucially, this anxiety is not explained or elaborated upon in the Mirror. It is assumed that the reader has an implicit understanding of the negative aspects of nuclear culture, suggesting that these negative intellectual and emotional characteristics had become a normalized component of British individual experience in the late 1950s.
Furthermore, the representation of the Langho suicides suggests that departures from idyllic or conventional forms of British family life were uneasily received in the post-war era. Similarly to Edgar, Brown presents the dark heart of nuclearity as part of the Cold War that could be defeated in the home. In his work on Englishness and landscape, Matless discusses how images of the family unit produced in the post-war era contributed to a particular, idealized sense of domestic tranquillity.Footnote 60 Aspects of nuclear culture that emerged in the 1950s contributed to the disruption of this idealized sense of Britishness. Writing in 1968, Jeff Nuttall suggested that the advent of the bomb had led to pervasive and powerful social forces in British society:
the people who had passed puberty at the time of the bomb [1945] found that they were incapable of conceiving life without a future. Their patterns of habit had formed, the steady job, the pension, the mortgage … all the paraphernalia of constructive, secure family life … To acknowledge the truth of their predicament would be to abandon the whole pattern of their lives. They would therefore have to pretend … In any case, to look the danger in the eye might wreck the chances of that ultimate total security their deepest selves had contrived, death by H-bomb … The people who had not yet reached puberty at the time of the bomb were incapable of conceiving life with a future. They might not have had any direct preoccupation with the bomb … But they never knew a sense of future … They pretended too, but they did not enter the pretence at all cheerfully. In fact they entered the pretence reluctantly, in pain and confusion, in hostility which they increasingly showed.Footnote 61
If Nuttall is accurate in his analysis, he points to individual experience and selfhood in the 1950s being irrevocably shaped by the realization of possible nuclear annihilation. Maybe it became impossible for certain people in certain circumstances to ‘pretend’. In the Mirror, Mary Brown asked people to pretend, and it seems that the women Edgar interviewed for the Express were in the habit of pretending. It is hoped that identification of the nuclear assumptions that influenced everyday life and individual experience can offer a detailed explanation of the powerful impact of nuclear anxiety.
Conclusions
British nuclear culture in the 1950s was characterized by a fusion of ambiguous attitudes towards the nuclear bomb and nuclear power. This article has suggested that the concept of nuclearity can help us understand the ways in which this fusion of ideas was discursively transmitted to a variety of audiences through cultural and political means. There were some similarities in the responses to perceived nuclear threat and, in the 1950s, there was the emergence of an uneasy British identity that was formed in response to common nuclear assumptions.
The Langho incident shows us how imagined annihilation, with its assumed imminence and inevitability, became discursively linked to extreme forms of human behaviour, including suicide, in the British press. Viewed as a mental breakdown from one or both parents that led to private and then public expressions of confusion and violence, the public representation and rationalization of the act itself points toward deep-rooted and powerful assumptions which, I argue, can be viewed as components of the concept of nuclearity.
Understandings of Britishness in the 1950s must take into account the complex ways in which nuclear anxiety impacted upon everyday life. Foucault highlighted one of the central paradoxes of the Cold War when he wrote, ‘the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence’.Footnote 62 Analysis of British nuclear culture in the 1950s leads to the suggestion that the powerlessness, uncertainty, anxiety, ambiguity and hidden assertions of resistance that nuclear culture represented would disrupt broader conceptions of self, nationhood, and existence in British life. The hidden human dramas at the heart of nuclear culture compel us to think further about the extent to which nuclearity shaped the lives of British citizens in the post-war era.
