A Shuddering Dawn Religious Studies and the Nuclear Age Edited by Ira Chernus and Edward Tabor LinenthalWith a Foreword by Ninian Smart State University of New York PressIRA CHERNUS Chapter I Nuclear Images in the Popular Press: The Age of Apocalypse The many rituals and myths that surround nuclear weapons remind us that these weapons are much more than mere physical objects: they are perhaps the richest and most emotionally charged symbolic realities in America's public life. When we speak or even think of such immensely powerful weapons, we cannot avoid speaking and thinking in symbolic images. Abstract concepts can never express our deepest responses to the Bomb. When historians of religion address the nuclear issue, they therefore find themselves on familiar ground, for their principal concern is the interpretation of symbolic images and the myths, rituals, and cultural contexts in which those images occur. Historians of religion trace the changing configurations of images, hoping to uncover clues to the changing patterns of human experience. At the same time, they inevitably discover enduring constants in the experience of communities, nations, and perhaps even humanity as a whole. In modern America, nuclear imagery forms a chaotic collage of beliefs, fears, hopes, hunches, and fantasies. While all of us have our own unique kaleidoscope of images, there are common threads running through the national experience. How can we find these unifying threads? We have no sacred scripture, no official body of doctrine or myth to articulate them. Yet we do have a widely shared store of public imagery-the popular media. An unending stream of films, stories, TV shows, comic books, and the like has depicted nuclear themes since 1945 (and even earlier). These are important and instructive for understanding nuclear imagery, but they are usually written off3Ira Chernus The Age of Apocalypse 5 as mere entertainment. Our more serious images occur in the news media, both in current news reports and in feature stories and editorials offering deeper background to the news. A study of these sources using the methods of the historian of religions can illuminate aspects of the nuclear age that might otherwise remain obscure. There is, as yet, little systematic study of the images of nuclear weapons and nuclear war that appear in the popular media. As a first step toward such a study, this article offers a preliminary survey of the most widely read national magazines treating the subject during the first two decades of the nuclear age: Life and Reader's Digest. The themes that recur in these sources suggest, among other things, that the power of the Bomb touches deep recesses of the psyche, recesses that are the breeding ground of religious symbols, myths, and rituals. Images of damnation and salvation, omniscience and omnipotence, faith and infinitude, transformation and rebirth, and many other familiar religious motifs abound in this material. There are recurring allusions to traditional apocalyptic imagery; that is, imagery of a violent cataclysm in which the forces of good permanently vanquish the forces of evil, ending the present era of existence and inaugurating a radically new world situation. The "numinous" quality that James Aho defines in his essay in this book (Chapter 4) is as pervasive in the popular news magazines as it is among atomic scientists. And there are new forms of religious symbolism spawned by the Bomb and its numinous aura. Readers can judge for themselves whether the themes and images described here are indeed the nation's common heritage and basic vision of the nuclear issue. When Life reported to its readers the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it added a lengthy editorial on the true meaning of "The Atomic Age."1 This editorial prefigured many of the basic motifs that would dominate popular perception of the nuclear issue at least until 1963. The great atomic "bang," readers learned, signals the birth of a radically new age. It is as if the world has awakened from a long sleep into "a strange new land ... an entirely different country." The Bomb is clearly a numinous power; "this uncontrol-lable new secret [is] the miracle" that certifies "the inherent mystery of things." Although we properly feel like ants, "in awe before the harnessed infinite," the crucial point is that the infinite has indeed been harnessed. Invoking the image of Prometheus, the cunning hero of Greek legend who gave fire and hence civilization to humankind, the article asserts that "no limits are set to our Promethean ingenuity." America, with sole possession of this unlimited weapon, is "the most powerful nation perhaps in all history."It may seem, the editorial admits, that this new age is one of moral chaos. We have emerged from World War 11 "with radically different practices and standards of permissible behavior." Atomic science itself has proven that everything, including morality, is relative. Thus there is "the very real danger of a reversion to barbarism. "Our bulwark against barbarism is firm adherence to traditional moral values. President Truman himself said that, as always, "the basic proposition of the worth and dignity of man is the strongest, most creative force now present in the world." This means the dignity of the individual who can choose the right and the good: "The individual conscience against the atomic bomb? Yes. There is no other way." Just as scientists have harnessed the infinite, individual conscience can harness the nation's "Jovian impulse," its urge to emulate the unfettered power of the ancient Romans' supreme deity. If omnipotent America can restrain itself, it "can abolish warfare, and mitigate man's inhumanity to man." The whole editorial is riddled with contradictions: All things are new yet little has changed; we are gods and ants; the Bomb is harnessed yet uncontrollable; moral standards are abolished yet they endure unimpaired. The subliminal message may be the incomprehensibility of the new weapon and the new age it brings. What is the best response to our bewilderment? The editorial's true message may be buried in its recurring imagery of being underground. We have "emerged from the tunnel," but "the really terrifying questions are not under the bed but in the cellar." The lesson of the ants is that despite endless warfare the species survives: "Constructing beautiful urban palaces and galleries, many ants have long lived underground in entire