Monday, Mar. 18, 1946
Why Talk about It?
Jesus Espinosa, a Mexican gardener of the city of San Antonio, Tex., was asked last week to venture an opinion on an important subject. What did he think of the atomic bomb?
Jesus stared, then shrugged his shoulders eloquently.
Should the U.S. give it to other nations?
"Why not?" said Jesus.
But what if the other nations started a war with it?
Jesus brightened. "More work, better pay," he said.
Did he and his friends discuss the possibilities of atomic energy?
Jesus gave his interviewer a long, pitying look and went back to shoveling dirt.
Citizens of the U.S. were talking about automobiles and nylons last week. Barbers had difficulty lathering around bitter discussions of strikes. People talked about weather, washing machines, colds, divorce, children's appetites, and at times, after a few drinks, about that fascinating postwar fiction, the frontless evening gown. But the atomic bomb, incomprehensible and unavoidable as taxes and death itself, entered the average citizen's conversation hardly at all.
Letters to newspapers seldom mentioned it. Those which did were mostly concerned with its subsidiary aspects. Some indignant citizens took pen in hand last week to protest the Navy's plan to expose a group of dogs and goats in the forthcoming tests at Bikini Atoll. A few jittery West Coast housewives made inquiries as to the possibility of the Bikini blast setting up 1) a high wind, 2) a tidal wave, 3) an earthquake. But almost nobody in the country seemed concerned about the chances of the world being atomized later on.
U.S. intellectuals still harangued, loud & long and with an air of responsibility, as tf they were intercepting some immediate attack by sheer power of verbiage. But few of them agreed on anything and few knew how the bombs looked, whether they hissed slightly before exploding, or whether they had to be kept in an ice box. Also it was a well-known fact that the same parties got excited about toe dancing.
The fact that most Americans did not discuss the bomb did not mean that they did not have their opinions about it. A great percentage of people interviewed by TIME correspondents in major and minor U.S. cities believed 1) that we'd better keep it away from the Russians, 2) that it was a terrible thing and we'd probably have been better off if it had never been invented, 3) that the Army, the Navy and the atomic scientists ought to know what they were doing with it and, if not, what could anybody else do?
Many thought it might get dropped on us, or that we'd have to drop one of the damned things on somebody else--and you know who--pretty soon. But if the atom bomb was admittedly a terrible thing, so were faceless men from outer space, microbes of all sizes and the possibility that the earth might hit a star, and they had all been in the American Weekly years ago. Whether you got killed by an atom bomb, an automobile, poison gas, poison whiskey, a blockbuster or a spear, you were dead and probably didn't know what hit you. So why talk about it, brother?
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