American Notebook: Science — From the “Bomb” to …?

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 speed, 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. Inst...