Atomic Age: A Strange Place

This was a new room, rich with hope, terrible with strange dangers. The door that slammed behind man at Hiroshima had locked. Life, as always, was irreversible. There was no choice but to grope ahead into the Atomic Age.

Pain and a price attended progress. The last great convulsion brought steam and electricity, and with them an age of confusion and mounting war. A dim folk memory had preserved the story of a greater advance: “the winged hound of Zeus” tearing from Prometheus’ liver the price of fire.

Was the world ready for the new step forward? It was never ready. It was, in fact, still fumbling for the answers to the age of steam and electricity. The kindly physicists handed plain people (like Harry Truman and Clement Attlee) the fissioned atom,.and said: You have to decide who owns it; who can kill whom with it, and under what circumstances. How fast is it to be developed? Certainly, it will change the world. You have to make laws to fit it.

And if plain people (like Harry Truman and Clement Attlee) did not understand and control it, who would?

They faced up to it. There wras no pretending Hiroshima had never happened; no ignoring a source of energy that might spin all the wheels ever cast.

Man had been tossed into the vestibule of another millennium. It was wonderful to think of what the Atomic Age might be, if man was strong and honest. But at first it was a strange place, full of weird symbols and the smell of death.