Postcards of Mushroom Clouds
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd.
Postcard, Marshall Islands, 1955
“Spectacular nuclear explosion” reads a caption on the back (or “verso,” as postcard geeks would say) of this card—released by “Ray Helberg’s Pacific Service”—of a test in the Marshall Islands. The disembodied cloud—a ferocious water funnel of water thrust upward, spreading into a toroid of vapor—recalls a Dutch sea painting with something new and alien in its center. “Quite a site [sic] to watch,” reads a laconic comment on the back. Outside the frame of the stylized blast cloud are its consequences. As Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberg write in Nuclear Family Vacation, “[F]or the people of the Marshall Islands, the consequences of atomic testing in the Pacific were extraordinary. Traditional communities were displaced by the tests; prolonged exposure to radiation created a legacy of illness and disease.”
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd.
Postcard, Oak Ridge, Tenn., 1959
One of the consequences of the atomic sublime is that the complexity of the technology involved, and the vastness of its effects, often renders people rather speechless with awe. And what can one say in the Twitter-length of the postcard? “Very interesting” is the verdict on Oak Ridge, the banality of the commentary matched only by the image, which reveals nothing, no nose-cones or split atoms or men in white suits. It could be a municipal substation flanked by a B-grade office park.
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd
Postcard message, 1964
In his book The Postcard Century, Tom Phillips notes that what people write on postcards “bumps into history as a ball on a pin-table hits or misses, by hazard.” So there’s something jarring about this postcard, presumably written by juvenile girl in the summer of 1964 (the year of China’s first nuclear detonation). What image did she choose to be the bearer of various minor tidings?
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd
Postcard, Tennessee fallout shelter, 1964
She chose a postcard depicting a lavish underground fallout shelter in Memphis, Tenn., and then said nothing about it. Was it a one-shot visual joke? An emblem of normalness? A must-see tourist stop? The shelter image itself drips with creepy basement-rec-room domesticity—the parquet floors, the Herman Miller-esque chairs, the endless games (to wait out the surface contamination, no doubt), and, curiously, the wall-mounted drinking fountain.
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd
Postcard collection, Nevada, after 1951
In 1950s America, atomic tourism was in full swing. This was the cover for a series of “ShiniColor” process cards, images of atomic test explosions that were giveaways to patrons of Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Club. Atomic blasts in those days were “dreaded,” yet eagerly visited— “the best thing to ever happen to Las Vegas,” as Lester Binion himself declared.
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd.
Postcard collection, Nevada, after 1951
Tourists flocked to witness explosions like these, featured in the Binion postcard set. One travel guide counseled that “the Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada Test program … has released a partial schedule, so that tourists interested in seeing a nuclear explosion can adjust their itineraries accordingly.” (I’m sorry, honey, we’ll have to skip the Grand Canyon —there’s a 10-megaton shot at Yucca Flats!)
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd.
Postcard, New Mexico, 1958
As Paul Boyer chronicles in By the Bomb’s Early Light, Americans, having absorbed the shock of the bomb, quickly enshrined it in popular culture. “By 1947,” he writes, “the Manhattan telephone book listed forty-five businesses that had appropriated the magic word, including the Atomic Undergarment Company.” This commercial postcard, from the Chamber of Commerce of Farmington, N.M., extolled the atomic demographics of this mining town (promising “sunshine every day”), even stapling, to the front of the card, a sample of something described on the back as “hy-grade” uranium ore, a quaint reminder of the days before mail-borne WMDs and pesky regulations.
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd.
Postcard, Three-Mile Island, circa 1981
“Messages on the backs of cards,” writes O’Brian, “are almost invariably positive, like the photographic images on the front of them, not excluding those picturing nuclear detonations.” Unfortunately, the verso to this card, depicting the “3-Mile Island nuclear generating station,” is not included in Atomic Postcards, so it’s impossible to know what positive words might have been summoned about the disaster (“dodged a bullet there!”). As Atomic Postcards shows, it was not merely the destructive side of atomic power that drew the attention of postcard-makers but the generative side, with any number of regional nuke plants issuing cards. (The most achingly boring card depicts the lobby to the Cook Nuclear Center in Bridgman, Mich.
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd
Postcard, Nagasaki, 1950
In Japan, atomic postcards were far less optimistic, and less banal. One common tactic was to focus on physical damage to the city rather than human suffering; it would be years, even within Japan, before images of the dead or the hibakusha (bomb survivors), were put into common circulation. This image, of Nagasaki’s Hachobori district, evokes that strand of photography; even though there is a stark, spectral quality to the figures walking on the street, suggesting death, there is too an air of normalness, the everyday bustle of the city, people going about their business in a city that, as the journalist Wilfred Burchett had noted of Hiroshima, looked as if “a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence.”
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CREDIT: Atomic Postcards © 2011 Intellect Ltd.
Postcard, China, 1980s
With its lurid, slightly otherwordly aspect (that too-close sun) evoking a 1970s sci-fi paperback, this postcard actually depicts, in four-color lithography, Chinese ground-to-ground medium range missiles, circa 1985. These, and a series of similar Chinese cards depicting everything from underwater test shots to missiles paraded down Beijing streets, were a signal of intent, saber-rattling by epistolary means. Unlike American cards, which O’Brian notes often carried, intentionally or otherwise, mixed messages (“pray for peace” postmarks or such slogans as “the world’s most powerful weapon for peace”), or Russian cards, which called strategic missiles “the main tools of deterrence against aggression, a secure shield defending the world socialist system,” the Chinese cards bore the simplest announcement of weapon category. The image was message enough.