"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that one way or another."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer
"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
- Admiral William Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Harry Truman
The destruction of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945 took science fiction from playful adolescence into a frightening, frightened adulthood.
Suddenly the question of what the future might hold, the question of "what if", gained a horrible new importance. Suddenly, instead of looking a thousand years ahead, Mankind was looking at the hands of the Doomsday Clock edging closer to midnight.
Until that morning, the word "atomic" had been nothing more than a convenient gimmick in science fiction, a buzzword that provided power for everything from cars to robots, from pistols to spaceships. Although Cleve Cartmill had mentioned a chain reaction-type atomic bomb in his 1944 science fiction story Deadline, which led to the FBI investigating him due to concern over a potential breach of security on the Manhattan Project, he and co-researcher John W. Campbell were in no way aware of what was to come.
Once the Bomb had been used, Campbell's editorial response in Astounding was actually one of near-glee in having apparently anticipated this scientific leap forward. However, in the years that followed, the greater number of authors treated the situation more in the manner of Leahy's comment.
Science fiction authors are almost unanimous in denying any role in predicting the future - as in my first post, the science fiction author begins with "What if..." rather than "When..." In the post-Hiroshima age, the spectres of the atomic "What if" in science fiction are innumerable, and rarely positive.
Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers has power-suited infantry blithely launching "pee-wee" atomic rockets as tactical weapons, but novels such as Nevil Shute's bleak masterpiece On the Beach with its inevitable creeping death by fallout is far more typical of the response to the atomic bomb and the Cold War which it created.
Science fiction had gained an awful new authority as prophets of the end of the world. Hand in hand with the immediate perils of thermonuclear Death, science fiction introduced the public to the other horsemen of the new Apocalypse: Fallout, Nuclear Winter, and Mutation.
The latter provided heady fare for the film makers of the 1950's, with screens filled with shambling monstrosities of every shape, size and species. Literary SF concentrated for the most part on the horrifying effects of radiation on human beings and the twisted parodies of humanity that might result. (Not all writers painted with such a large brush: Ray Bradbury's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" quietly describes the exquisitely detailed silhouettes of a family etched into the side of their home by the flare of a nuclear explosion.)
Over sixty years after the Enola Gay opened its bomb bay doors over Hiroshima, the thought of impending nuclear apocalypse no longer weighs as heavily. We live in a time of more subtle fears: terrorism, global warming, and AIDS. It would be ridiculous to claim that science fiction played any sort of real role in reducing the threat of death by "The Bomb", but the reality of that threat gave science fiction a relevance as a genre that it would never have achieved otherwise.
