A plethora of newspapers and media sources have framed the issue of nuclear weapons in different lights. The most sensationalist dialogue about nuclear warfare came in the presence of op-ed articles that have and are still continuing to be printed about nuclear weapons. “When President Harry Truman introduced the atomic bomb to the world in 1945, he described it as a “God-given harnessing of "the basic power of the universe" Six days later, a New York Times editorial framed the dilemma of the new Atomic Age for its readers: “Here the long pilgrimage of man on Earth turns towards darkness or towards light.” This powerful quote holds a million interpretations to its readers; man has come a long way and developed a very powerful weapon and it can be harnessed for good or evil. Sounds almost like a science fiction flick, does it not? Nuclear journalism became incredibly prevalent throughout the ages and articles were being published all over the world focusing on the fear of the unknown and our conception of the future. What will this nuclear future bring us, we all wondered? On February 19th, 1951, an issue of Newsweek carried a strange image depicting an atomic explosion seventy-five miles away at the Nevada Test Site, but it shone as if it were from the future.
This was “taken by the light of an atomic flash.” These photos of atomic flashes began to appear gradually throughout weekly and daily newspapers and magazines. Journalism aimed to inform the public, but also to present a big, scary story to the American populous. Within days of the news from Hiroshima, even before World War II had formally ended, social commentators spoke of entering the “Atomic Age” and speculated with dread and wonder about the future. Political cartoonists filled the newspapers with depictions of the bomb confronting the world with unimagined new dangers. By the end of August 1945, Pocket Books had already published a paperback entitled The Atomic Age Opens. Writing just hours after the announcement of the detonation of the Hiroshima bomb, Norman Cousins, a 33 year old editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, declared that “Modern Man is obsolete.” Cousins worried, “Man stumbles fitfully into a new era of atomic energy for which he is as ill equipped to accept its potential blessings as he is to control its present dangers.” He warned that society was at a crossroads where a choice would be made between global destruction and social transformation, and he saw the battle for the life or death of society in the atomic age being fought on the battleground of the human self.
Most famously in recent times, former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn wrote A World Free of Nuclear Weapons, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, wherein the former Cold War nuclear warfare experts opined for the total abolition of nuclear weapons and declared “that reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” This 2007 op-ed is part of the powerful, bipartisan Nuclear Security Project, which includes a series of op-eds aimed toward the overall goal of creating a world free of nuclear weapons.
This was “taken by the light of an atomic flash.” These photos of atomic flashes began to appear gradually throughout weekly and daily newspapers and magazines. Journalism aimed to inform the public, but also to present a big, scary story to the American populous. Within days of the news from Hiroshima, even before World War II had formally ended, social commentators spoke of entering the “Atomic Age” and speculated with dread and wonder about the future. Political cartoonists filled the newspapers with depictions of the bomb confronting the world with unimagined new dangers. By the end of August 1945, Pocket Books had already published a paperback entitled The Atomic Age Opens. Writing just hours after the announcement of the detonation of the Hiroshima bomb, Norman Cousins, a 33 year old editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, declared that “Modern Man is obsolete.” Cousins worried, “Man stumbles fitfully into a new era of atomic energy for which he is as ill equipped to accept its potential blessings as he is to control its present dangers.” He warned that society was at a crossroads where a choice would be made between global destruction and social transformation, and he saw the battle for the life or death of society in the atomic age being fought on the battleground of the human self.
Most famously in recent times, former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn wrote A World Free of Nuclear Weapons, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, wherein the former Cold War nuclear warfare experts opined for the total abolition of nuclear weapons and declared “that reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” This 2007 op-ed is part of the powerful, bipartisan Nuclear Security Project, which includes a series of op-eds aimed toward the overall goal of creating a world free of nuclear weapons.
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