Science — From the “Bomb” to …?

American Notebook

In Alamogordo, New Mexico there is a crater covered with a glassy-green scurf of death and surrounded by high-tension wires and alarm systems-the site of the first atomic explosion. The neighboring Pueblo Indians take it for granted that every people has its forbidden holy places which only the chosen few may approach. In California, a naked boy, in a test laboratory, his forehead grotesquely pulled back, cheeks flattened by tremendous pressure, is fastened with nylon belts to an upholstered seat revolving at an ever wilder rpeed, until his entire body is compressed with gigantic force by centrifugal power. In Richland, Wash., site of the Hanford Plutonium Works, fear of radio-activity is so acute that parents warn their children not to pick up anything lying in the street, “or the White Man with the black rubber mask will come, take away your toys, tables, beds, everything you touched, scrape the paint from the walls, tear up the floors.” Thus opens a book about America in the Fifties, written by a Swiss journalist, Robert Jungk.* Provocative, episodic, angry, it has none of the philosophical detachment of a de Toqueville surveying an expanding democratic society as it evolves along orderly lines, nor does it carry the exaggerations of Simone de Beauvoir’s narcissistic portrait of the US. In fact, the author states at the outset that he views present trends in the U.S. as merely the most advanced expression of what is happening in all of contemporary society. Instead of the usual tour of American democratic institutions, he takes us to the secret atomic laboratories, the rocket installations, the aviation medicine testing grounds, the automatic brain factories, the cities struggling with radio-active refuse. The result is a disturbing revelation of hidden yet important realities.

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* TOMORROW IS ALREADY HERE. Simon and Schuster. $3.50

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The New Reservations: A new type of reservation has sprung up, reports Jungk: the laboratory town, the testing ground, the military reservation. These places are segregated geographically and more important, politically. To preserve secrecy and to increase administrative efficiency, to avoid disputes or time-consuming strikes, democratic rights are largely suspended and their administration assumes the form of at best enlightened absolutism. Their location is determined by bureaucratic fiat from Washington and existing population centers are, if necessary, razed by decree. A radio announcer informed the South Carolina townships of Ellenton, Dunbarton, Jackson and Meyers Hill that they would be razed within a stated period to make room for a new atomic factory site. (“Instead of the angel with the flaming sword, nowadays we receive the dispassionate telegram.”) A patient Representative in Washington showed great sympathy at a subsequent town meeting, but the decision itself was no longer subject to...