Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508090022
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICK HAMPSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
She wrote this letter to Ladies Home Journal:
''I have hardly been able to smile, the future seems so utterly grim for our two little boys. Most of the time I have been in tears or near-tears; fleeting but torturing regrets that I have brought children into the world to face such a dreadful thing as this have shivered through me.
''It seems that it will be for them all their lives like living on a keg of dynamite which may go off at any moment, and which undoubtedly will go off before their lives have progressed very far.''
A keg of dynamite. Her metaphor, she knew, was pathetically out of date.
Even in 1945, a year that saw the death of Roosevelt and Hitler, the fall of Germany and Japan, the end of the Holocaust and the creation of the United Nations, the atomic bomb -- a ''harnessing of the basic power of the universe,'' the president said -- overshadowed all.
Never had such shocking news come so suddenly. It detonated ''an explosion in men's minds as shattering as the obliteration of Hiroshima,'' wrote a newspaper columnist.
There was joy the war was over, hope for peaceful uses of atomic power. And, from the very start, there was fear.
''I knew that the final crisis in human history had come,'' wrote John Haynes Holmes, a New York City minister. ''What the atomic bomb had done to Japan, it could do to us.''
Newspapers and magazines repeatedly subjected the nation's cities to hypothetical destruction. Illustrations for a Life article on a ''36-hour atomic war'' showed a mushroom cloud over Washington and the New York Public Library as radioactive rubble.
There was talk of moving factories underground, of dispersing cities to the country. A Boston economist who predicted the 1929 stock market crash moved his records to the safety of Eureka, Kan.
But more than America seemed endangered; man now had the power to end his own history. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized that the bomb may have ''signed the mammalian world's death warrant, and deeded an earth in ruins to the ants.''
To track the coming apocalypse, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put a ''Doomsday Clock'' on its cover. The hands started at seven minutes to midnight -- midnight being ...
Lying home in bed, struck by the contrast between new life and mass death, Patricia Munk wondered what the women of the world could do to stop war.
The following year, she was attracted to the fledgling world government movement, and became local secretary of the United World Federalists, headed by a young Yale graduate, Cord Meyer. ''One world or none,'' the Federalists warned.
Josef Stalin, however, was no fan of world government, or any government besides the one he ran from the Kremlin. By 1949, the Cold War was raging, the number of U.S. atomic bombs had risen to 300, and the World Federalists' membership was plummeting.
Cord Meyer resigned, and soon joined the CIA. He later explained why: ''I came to dislike the sound of my own voice as I promised a federalist salvation in which I no longer had any real confidence.''
The bomb was a fact of life. Then, suddenly, it became a necessity.
On the morning of Sept. 23, 1949, reporters were summoned to the office of Charles Ross, President Truman's press secretary. After ordering the doors locked, Ross passed out mimeographed sheets: The Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb.
''There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb,'' said Harold C. Urey, the Nobel Prize winning atomic researcher. ''That's two nations having it.'' The Doomsday Clock moved up four minutes, to 11:57.
Three months later, Truman announced plans to develop the hydrogen bomb, which would be hundreds of times more powerful than the one that shattered Hiroshima.
Now, said Albert Einstein, ''radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities.''
Compared to 1945, the public reaction was muted. It was a quiet born of impotence, frustration, desperation. For years hence, roughly half of the nation's adults would say they expected to die in a nuclear battle.
Some, however, started thinking the unthinkable - that nuclear war didn't have to be mutual suicide; there might be a winner, although that might mean losing 20 million people instead of 40 million.
Truman created the federal Civil Defense Administration, which flooded the nation with 16 million booklets offering tips for surviving nuclear attack, such as ''jump in any handy ditch or gutter.''
Americans drilled for Armageddon. Spokane, Wash., moved all 18,000 of its downtown business workers to assigned points for leaving town. A B-29 dropped bomb-shaped leaflets that said, ''This could be an atom bomb.'' In 1956, 10,000 Washington government workers scattered to secret relocation centers; President Eisenhower helicoptered to an underground command post at Camp David.
The superpowers' capacity for overkill kept growing, and the Cold War seemed ever more absurd, like the civil defense book that urged civilians to practice lying on the floor: ''Get off in your own room where you won't be laughed at and try it a few times.''
But not everyone was spurred by the bomb, or numbed by it. Some people learned to live with it.
Having failed to bring about world government, Patricia Munk concluded that peace might start closer to home. Having wondered if the world was good enough for her children, she now wondered if she was good enough to them.
She vowed to be a better mother and neighbor. She joined the Quakers, drawn by their belief that ''there is God in everyone, and each of us has an inner light we turn to.''
Slowly, she discovered the woman she wanted to be, ''a joyous mother, romping around with my children, enjoying simply being a human being.''
In 1952 - when the superpowers detonated their first hydrogen bombs and the Doomsday Clock crept to a precarious 11:58 - Patricia Munk, who seven years earlier had lamented having brought a child into the world, became a mother for the third time.
The summer of 1961 was the scariest since '45. With the Soviets walling off West Berlin, President Kennedy went on television to call for fallout shelter construction and promise ''to let every citizen know what steps can be taken to protect his family in case of attack.''
Soon, black and yellow shelter signs with the fan-shaped radiation symbol began appearing on buildings, such as the Cowtown Bowling Palace in Fort Worth, Texas.
Many were stocked with enough food and water for two weeks, after which Americans were supposed to dust themselves off and get on with their lives.
Schoolchildren learned to duck under their desks and cover their heads. ''Remember what to do, friends,'' said Bert the Turtle, star of a civil defense film. ''What are you supposed to do when you see the flash?''
''Duck and cover!'' everyone chanted.
The poet Robert Lowell wrote:
``All autumn, the chafe and jar of nuclear war;
We have talked our extinction to death.''
We did more than talk. We started digging.
In the Chicago suburb of Flossmoor, optometrist Lawrence Greenspan built a bunker in the corner of his basement. When neighbors came by for a look, they noticed the gun hanging from a nail near the shelter door.
Next to it was a sign: ''This bomb shelter was built for a family of five for two weeks. Trespassers will be shot.''
The neighbors laughed it off; Greenspan's son wasn't so sure his father was kidding.
Downstate, in Pekin, civil defense officials sought volunteers to spend a week inside a new 11-by-13 foot shelter.
Gene Fitzgerald, a steelworker recovering from a broken leg, stepped forward - and brought along his wife and three daughters, aged 3, 2 and 9 months.
Over the next week, the Fitzgeralds ate canned food, read by candlelight and broadcast daily reports to the outside world. Father kept busy taking blood pressures and temperatures and checking the air supply. The 2-year-old turned 3, and the baby cut a tooth.
Over in Normal, a young minister named Jim Pruyne didn't think talk like ''Better Dead than Red!'' was very Christian. So, one Sunday, he took the pulpit at the First Presbyterian Church to advocate shelter construction, insisting that ''it is our responsibility to live. So therefore, go forth and build a fallout shelter.''
Then he built one in his own basement.
Between 100,000 to 200,000 Americans built home fallout shelters. Most did not, partly because there was no good answer to the question that occurred to Patricia Munk as she watched a family on her street build a shelter: What about your neighbors who didn't have one?
The alternative was a system of public shelters, but Eisenhower had rejected that in 1957; construction would cost $25 billion, and the nation couldn't afford it.
Not and build bombs, too.
One of the strangest things about the great bomb scare was how it ended - right after the greatest crisis of the Atomic Age.
In 1962, the United States discovered the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba. Kennedy told Nikita Khrushchev to take them out, or else.
The Soviets backed down, but the civil defense craze already had peaked. Americans had worried too long about an attack that never came, and soon the nation began a decadelong lurch from assassination to riot to scandal to Vietnam.
By 1970, polls did not even rank nuclear war as one of the country's top 10 problems. The Doomsday Clock turned back to 11:50.
In the early '80s, as relations between the superpowers soured, the bomb scare made a brief comeback. But in 1983, President Reagan announced a nuclear defense shield known as Star Wars that the Soviets could ill-afford to duplicate. A few years later, Mikhail Gorbachev unilaterally ended the arms race.
Today, several smaller, unstable nations have nuclear weapons programs, but they are regional rather than global threats. No one has exploded an atomic weapon in anger since 1945, and no significant power has joined the nuclear club since China more than 30 years ago. The world remains dangerous, but not suicidal.
The Doomsday Clock stands at 17 minutes to midnight, the safest time in the atomic age. Nuclear fear is giving way to nuclear nostalgia.
This summer, visitors to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History pass curiously by a family fallout shelter uprooted from a lawn in Fort Wayne, Ind. Some note the inside locks on the hatches.
The government has not updated its census of public fallout shelters since 1992, when there were 536,225, including the Cowtown Bowling Palace. The signs are faded, the supplies long ago given away or thrown away.
Family shelters have been beaten into wine cellars and playrooms. One bomb shelter is a mom shelter. In Flossmoor, night nurse Sheryllee Lowe sleeps by day in the shelter constructed 34 years ago by Greenspan, the house's previous owner.
Lowe, coincidentally, was a member of the Ribbon Project, a campaign to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima by tying a ribbon around the Pentagon. Her basement was state headquarters for the effort, and hundreds of peace banners were stored there.
The Rev. Pruyne, who practiced what he preached, chuckles at the memory: ''I wish I had the money I spent to have it built, so I could afford to have it taken out.''
Patricia Munk is now 71, and a grandmother 10 times. Her son Richard, the boy born in the shadow of Hiroshima, is a pediatric orthopedist in Toledo, Ohio, and has raised three children of his own.
Unable to do anything about war between nations, his mother stopped the war within herself, and found peace in a time of madness.
"Although I was agitated by the bomb, underlying it all was the sense that there was something about life that was all right,'' she says.
Hiroshima seems like a long time ago; when you read Patricia Munk the words she wrote that summer 50 years ago she can only murmur, ''Oh my. ... Wow.''
She made it. Her little boys made it. We all made it.
by CNB