Mushroom CloudsSpectators described the first atomic bomb blast
on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Site in Jornada
del Muerto, New Mexico, as “unprecedented,”
“terrifying,” “magnificent,” “brutal,” “beautiful,”
and “stupendous.” Yet such ordinary words
failed to truly convey the spectacle because, as
Thomas F. Farrell, an official of the Los
Alamos Laboratory, later explained to the press,
“It is that beauty the great poets dream about
but describe most poorly and inadequately.”
What the inarticulate scientists and
military personnel in attendance had witnessed
was an unparalleled event: a thermal flash of
blinding light visible for more than 250 miles
from ground zero; a blast wave of bone-melting
heat; and the formation of a huge ball of
swirling flame and mushrooming smoke
majestically climbing toward the heavens. While
the world had known staggering volcanic
eruptions and devastating manmade explosions, and often throughout history
similar menacing shapes have risen into the sky from catastrophes below, this
mushroom cloud was a demonic plume that soon became civilization’s most
foul and awesome visual symbol—the logo of annihilation.
The mushroom cloud was nightmarishly ubiquitous, especially
for children growing up during the late 1940 s and throughout the 1950 s,
the relentless testing period of the nuclear age when the U.S. and the
USSR ran their arms race on deserted atolls and in underground caverns.
Newsreel accounts of Pacific ocean test sites and Cold War films warning
of atomic attacks were not the only sources of trepidation. The U.S.
government issued scores of official cautionary pamphlets, and the mass
media published countless histrionic paperbacks, pulp magazines, comic
books, and other periodicals that fanned the flames of thermonuclear
anxiety. For this child of the atomic era, who was never totally accustomed
to the frequent Conelrad (emergency network) warnings on TV and duck-
and-cover drills at school, mushroom cloud patterns wallpapered my
dreams for an excessive number of impressionable years.
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