The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [83]
However, the only people who knew this in the 1950s were space scientists, and they weren’t going to tell anybody because then we wouldn’t give them money to develop their ambitious programs. So magazines and Sunday supplements ran these breathless accounts of peril from above, because their reporters didn’t know any better, or didn’t wish to know any better, and because they had all these fantastic drawings by Chesley Bonestell that were such a pleasure to look at and just had to be seen.
So earthly devastation became both a constant threat and a happy preoccupation of that curiously bifurcated decade. Public service films showed us how private fallout shelters could not only be protective but fun, with Mom and Dad and Chip and Skip bunking down together underground, possibly for years on end. And why not? They had lots of dehydrated food and a whole stack of board games. “And Mom and Dad need never worry about the lights running low with this handy pedal generator and two strong young volunteers to provide plenty of muscle power!” And no school! This was a lifestyle worth thinking about.
For those who didn’t care to retreat underground, the Portland Cement Association offered a range of heavy-duty “Houses for the Atomic Age!”—special “all-concrete blast-resistant houses” designed to let the owners survive “blast pressures expected at distances as close as 3,600 feet from ground zero of a bomb with an explosive force equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT.” So the Russians could drop a bomb right in your own neighborhood and you could sit in comfort at home reading the evening newspaper and hardly know there was a war on. Can you imagine erecting such a house and not wanting to see how well it withstood a nuclear challenge? Of course not. Let those suckers drop! We’re ready!
And it wasn’t just nuclear devastation that enthralled and excited us. The film world reminded us that we might equally be attacked by flying saucers or stiff-limbed aliens with metallic voices and deathly ray guns, and introduced us to the stimulating possibilities for mayhem inherent in giant mutated insects, blundering mega-crabs, bestirred dinosaurs, monsters from the deep, and one seriously pissed-off fifty-foot woman. I don’t imagine that many people, even those who now faithfully vote Republican, believed that any of that would actually happen, but certain parts of it—the UFOs, for instance—were far more plausible then than now. This was an age, don’t forget, in which it was still widely believed that there might be civilizations on Mars or Venus. Almost anything was possible.
And even the more serious magazines like Life and Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Time, and Newsweek found ample space for articles on interesting ways the world might end. There was almost no limit to what might go wrong, according to various theories. The Sun could blow up or abruptly wink out. We might be bathed in murderous radiation as Earth passed through the twinkly glitter of a comet’s tail. We might have a new ice age. Or Earth might somehow become detached from its faithful orbit and drift out of the solar system, like a lost balloon, moving ever deeper into some cold, lightless corner of the universe. Much of the notion behind space travel was to get away from these irremediable risks and start up new lives with more interestingly padded shoulders inside some distant galactic dome.
Were people seriously worried about any of this? Who knows? Who knows what anyone in the 1950s was thinking about anything, or even if they were thinking at all. All I know is that any perusal of popular publications