ATOMIC SUBLIME
The global crisis as a divine happening
Nutmeg (1958), 25.1 kt. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.”
Atomic explosions were unprecedented in their scale as human-instigated events. Those tasked with recording these events verbally struggled to find adequate terms to describe them, as did photographers tasked with recording nuclear tests on film. The “atomic sublime”—the notion that something like a nuclear explosion is so large that it can’t possibly be anything but divine—arose as a way to make sense of the new events.
The atomic sublime links the visual signs of nuclear technology with those of natural phenomena, like geysers erupting in Yellowstone National Park and brilliant sunsets in Yosemite Valley. This removes human responsibility from the destruction implicit in atomic catastrophes: since nuclear explosions take place on a massive scale, and since only natural forces can lead to catastrophes on such a scale, nuclear explosions can only be natural forces whose destructive effects are, for better or worse, out of humanity’s control.
Alan Jarlson, "Atomic Dawn, Many Times Noon’s Brightness, Greets a Nevada Family 20 Miles Away" (1953). National Geographic.
Alan Jarlson’s 1953 photograph of a Nevada family enjoying a nuclear test twenty miles away, printed and reprinted by newspapers across the country and by the National Geographic in 1953, is typical of the Atomic sublime. The family in the photograph (including even the family cat) watches in fascination as they might watch a beautiful sunrise; in fact, the image’s caption describes it as an “Atomic Dawn.” Jarlson’s image presents a curated vision of the atomic flash, drawing visual parallels with the grand nineteenth-century paintings of the American West, meant not only to document the country’s unexplored lands but also to present a distinctly optimistic view of mankind’s relationship to the natural world.
Albert Bierstadt, “Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail,” ca. 1873. Oil on canvas, 137 x 215 cm. Yale University Art Gallery (1931.389).
Perhaps fortuitously for the American government and its forthcoming involvement in the ideologically-driven Cold War, the tendency for witnesses of early atomic explosions to describe their experience in terms of natural phenomena provided a straightforward way to promote the atomic sublime. This served to hide the government’s responsibility for creating and deploying the most destructive weapons the world had ever seen. The United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) made an active effort to turn atomic bombs into tourist attractions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, going so far as to design its Nevada test schedule around the most popular tourist seasons. Tourists and families “interested in seeing a nuclear explosion can adjust their itineraries accordingly,” said one AEC pamphlet.
References
- Groves, Leslie. "Report on the Trinity Test by General Groves - 1945." Atomic Archive. AJ Software, 1998. Web. 10 Dec. 2016.
- Hales, Peter B. "The Atomic Sublime." American Studies Spring 31.3 (1991): 5-31. JSTOR. Web. 18 Nov. 2016.