Early in the atomic age the mushroom cloud also devolved into
kitsch. Government and industry promoted “our friend, the atom” with a
variety of molecular-looking trade characters and mascots. By 1947 there
were forty-five businesses listed in the Manhattan phone book alone that
used the word “atomic” in their name, and none had anything to do with
making bombs. In 1946 the cereal maker General Mills published an ad in
comic books that was illustrated with a mushroom cloud, offering children
an “Atomic ‘Bomb’ Ring” if they sent in a Kix cereal box top. The ring
featured a secret compartment and a concealed observation lens that
allowed the holder to look at flashes “caused by the released energy of
atoms splitting like crazy in the sealed warhead atom chamber.” A savvy
French bathing suit designer, Louis Reard, took the name “bikini” from the
Marshall Islands—where two American atom bombs were tested in 1946 —
because he thought that the name signified the explosive effect that the suit
would have on men. Another designer, Jacques Heim, created his own two-
piece bathing suit, called “The Atome,” which he described as “the world’s
smallest bathing suit.” Designers of everything from alarm clocks to
business logos soon adopted an “atomic style.”
Comic book publishers made hay out of mushroom mania.
Atomic blasts, like auto accidents, caught the eye of many comic readers
and horror aficionados. Just as real photos and films of atomic tests seduced
viewers, fantastic pictorial representations of doomsday bombs blowing up
large chunks of earth tweaked the imagination. The sheer enormity of these
fictional blasts, especially when seen on earth from space, raised the level of
terror many notches. Similarly, B-movies in the nuke genre, with all those
empty cities laid barren by radioactive poison, exploited the “what if ”
voyeurism that people still find so appealing. Books and magazine stories
covered a wide nuclear swath. Novels like Fail Safeand On the Beach(both
made into films) speculated on the aftermath of a nuclear attack and thus
triggered fear (and perhaps secretly promoted disarmament too). But to sell
these books, paintings of mushroom clouds were used in ridiculous ways.
The cover for On the Beach,for example, is absurdly prosaic, showing a
woman standing on a seaside cliff directly facing a mushroom cloud while
waiting for her lover to return from his submarine voyage to no man’s land.
By current standards—even for mass-market paperback covers—this is
dumb, yet effective.
An intelligent, though more frightening, mushroom cloud
display is the montage of nuclear blasts at the end of the satiric film Dr.
Strangelove,accompanied by the mournful lyrics, “We’ll meet again/
Don’t know where/Don’t know when.” In quick succession, a dozen or so
detonations, taken from real test film footage, flash by to illustrate a
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1