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Tom Ryan
Humanities and Social Sciences Writer
Office of Public Affairs University of Illinois at Chicago
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World War II and the Cold War are over, yet the influence of "The Bomb" lives on.
When the Food and Drug Administration received approval to use irradiation to treat beef for possible contamination -- widely considered to be a safe procedure with virtually no risks -- millions of people heard the word "radiation" and instinctively reacted with skepticism and fear. More than 50 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, almost a decade after the demise of the USSR, Americans retain their uneasy fixation with the atomic bomb and all things nuclear.
That comes as no surprise to Peter Bacon Hales, professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has spent more than a decade studying the reasons why the bomb occupies such a central psychological spot in postwar American culture.
Hales has published the results of his research in a new book, "Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project" (University of Illinois Press). It tells the multifaceted story of the communities of men and women, civilian and military, who designed and built the A-bomb during World War II at the Manhattan Project's three main sites: Los Alamos, N.M.; Hanford, Wash.; and Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Hales drew on more than 500 boxes of previously classified government files and medical records, some not seen by anyone in decades, along with unpublished letters, diaries, photographs, tape recordings, interviews and other materials.
He says the Manhattan Project didn't just create the world's deadliest weapon of mass destruction, whose use he calls "the most morally ambiguous act of World War II." In the ways in which it created the bomb, Hales says, the project also "created a new form of American cultural landscape."
Much of "Atomic Spaces" deals with what Hales calls "the small details" -- just what was it like to live and work every day where our "atomic culture" was being born? The book also examines conflicts caused at the sites by the military's traditions of obedience and control and the civilian scientists' culture of equality and openness. And it tells how those conflicts were resolved in the Manhattan Project solidly in favor of the military, with long-term consequences for the project and the country.
Building the bomb set the stage for "what Eisenhower feared as the military-industrial complex," according to Hales, "a new and immensely powerful consortium of institutions ranging across the worlds of business, government and the military, devoted to self-perpetuation and eventual colonization of the American democracy."
"The Manhattan Project lies at the center of our mythology, whether we know it or not."
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