The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  Still, they were better than nothing and they did feature unclad women. I took them to the tree house where they were much prized in the absence of Mary O’Leary. When I returned them to their place ten days or so later, just before he came home from spring training, they were conspicuously well thumbed. Indeed, it was hard not to notice that they had been enjoyed by a wider audience. One was missing its cover and nearly all the pictorials now bore marginal comments and balloon captions, many of a candid nature, in a variety of young hands. Often in the years that followed I wondered what my father made of these spirited emendations, but somehow the moment never seemed right to ask.

  Chapter 7

  BOOM!

  MOBILE, ALA.—The Alabama Supreme Court yesterday upheld a death sentence imposed on a Negro handyman, Jimmy Wilson, 55, for robbing Mrs. Esteele Barker of $1.95 at her home last year. Mrs. Barker is white.

  Although robbery is a capital offense in Alabama, no one has been executed in the state before for a theft of less than $5. A court official suggested that the jury had been influenced by the fact that Mrs. Barker told the jury that Wilson had spoken to her in a disrespectful tone.

  A spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called the death sentence “a sad blot on the nation,” but said the organization is unable to aid the condemned man because it is barred in Alabama.

  —The Des Moines Register, August 23, 1958

  AT 7:15 IN THE MORNING local time on November 1, 1952, the United States exploded the first hydrogen bomb in the Eniwetok (or Enewetak or many other variants) atoll in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific, though it wasn’t really a bomb as it wasn’t in any sense portable. Unless an enemy would considerately stand by while we built an eighty-ton refrigeration unit to cool large volumes of liquid deuterium and tritium, ran in several miles of cabling, and attached scores of electric detonators, we didn’t have any way of blowing anyone up with it. Eleven thousand soldiers and civilians were needed to get the device to go off at Eniwetok, so this was hardly the sort of thing you could set up in Red Square without arousing suspicions. Properly, it was a “thermonuclear device.” Still, it was enormously potent.

  Since nothing like this had ever been tried before, nobody knew how big a bang it would make. Even the most conservative estimates, for a blast of five megatons, represented more destructive might than the total firepower used by all sides in World War II, and some nuclear physicists thought the explosion might go as high as one hundred megatons—a blast so off the scale that scientists could only guess the chain of consequences. One possibility was that it might ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Still, nothing ventured, nothing annihilated, as the Pentagon might have put it, and on the morning of November 1 somebody lit the fuse and, as I like to picture it, ran like hell.

  The blast came in at a little over ten megatons, comparatively manageable but still enough to wipe out a city a thousand times the size of Hiroshima, though of course Earth has no cities that big. A fireball five miles high and four miles across rose above Eniwetok within seconds, billowing into a mushroom cloud that hit the stratospheric ceiling thirty miles above the Earth and spread outward for more than a thousand miles in every direction, disgorging a darkening snowfall of dusty ash as it went, before slowly dissipating. It was the biggest thing of any type ever created by humans. Nine months later the Soviets surprised the Western powers by exploding a thermonuclear device of their own. The race to obliterate life was on—and how. Now we truly were become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

  So it is perhaps not surprising that as this happened I sat in Des Moines, Iowa, quietly shitting myself. I had little choice. I was ten months old.

  What was scary about the growth of the bomb wasn’t so much the growth of the bomb as the people in charge of the growth of the bomb. Within weeks of the Eniwetok test the big hats at the Pentagon were actively thinking of ways to put this baby to use. One idea, seriously considered, was to build a device somewhere near the front lines in Korea, induce large numbers of North Korean and Chinese troops to wander over to have a look, and then set it off.

  Representative James E. Van Zandt of Pennsylvania, a leading proponent of devastation, promised that soon we would have a device of at least a hundred megatons—the one that might consume all our breathable air. At the same time, Edward Teller, the semi-crazed Hungarian-born physicist who was one of the presiding geniuses behind the development of the H-bomb, was dreaming up exciting peacetime uses for nuclear devices. Teller and his acolytes at the Atomic Energy Commission envisioned using H-bombs to enable massive civil engineering projects on a scale never before conceived—to create huge open-pit mines where mountains had once stood, to alter the courses of rivers in our favor (ensuring that the Danube, for instance, served only capitalist countries), to blow away irksome impediments to commerce and shipping like the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Excitedly they reported that just twenty-six bombs placed in a chain across the Isthmus of Panama would excavate a bigger, better Panama Canal more or less at once, and provide a lovely show into the bargain. They even suggested that nuclear devices could be used to alter the Earth’s weather by adjusting the amount of dust in the atmosphere, forever banishing winters from the northern United States and sending them permanently to the Soviet Union instead. Almost in passing, Teller proposed that we might use the Moon as a giant target for testing warheads. The blasts would be visible through binoculars from Earth and would provide wholesome entertainment for millions. In short, the creators of the hydrogen bomb wished to wrap the world in unpredictable levels of radiation, obliterate whole ecosystems, despoil the face of the planet, and provoke and antagonize our enemies at every opportunity—and these were their peacetime dreams.

  But of course the real ambition was to make a gigantically ferocious transportable bomb that we could drop on the heads of Russians and other like-minded irritants whenever it pleased us to do so. That dream became enchanting reality on March 1, 1954, when America detonated fifteen megatons of experimental bang over the Bikini atoll (a place so delightful that we named a lady’s swimsuit after it) in the Marshall Islands. The blast exceeded all hopes by a considerable margin. The flash was seen in Okinawa, twenty-six hundred miles away. It threw visible fallout over an area of some seven thousand square miles—all of it drifting in exactly the opposite direction than forecast. We were getting good not only at making really huge explosions but at creating consequences that were beyond our capabilities to deal with.

  One soldier, based on the island of Kwajalein, described in a letter home how he thought the blast would blow his barracks away. “All of a sudden the sky lighted up a bright orange and remained that way for what seemed like a couple of minutes…We heard very loud rumblings that sounded like thunder. Then the whole barracks began shaking, as if there had been an earthquake. This was followed by a very high wind,” which caused everyone present to grab on to something solid and hold tight. And this was at a place nearly two hundred miles from the blast site, so goodness knows what the experience was like for those who were even closer—and there were many, among them the unassuming native residents of the nearby island of Rongelap, who had been told to expect a bright flash and a loud bang just before 7 a.m., but had been given no other warnings, no hint that the bang itself might knock down their houses and leave them permanently deafened, and no instructions about dealing with the aftereffects. As radioactive ash rained down on them, the puzzled islanders tasted it to see what it was made of—salt, apparently—and brushed it out of their hair.

  Within minutes they weren’t feeling terribly well. No one exposed to the fallout had any appetite for breakfast that morning. Within hours many were severely nauseated and blistering prolifically wherever ash had touched bare skin. Over the next few days, their hair came out in clumps and some started hemorrhaging internally.

  Also caught in the fallout were twenty-three puzzled fishermen on a Japanese boat called, with a touch of irony that escaped n
o one, the Lucky Dragon. By the time they got back to Japan most of the crewmen were deeply unwell. The haul from their trip was unloaded by other hands and sent to market, where it vanished among the thousands of other catches landed in Japanese ports that day. Unable to tell which fish was contaminated and which was not, Japanese consumers shunned fish altogether for weeks, nearly wrecking the industry.

  As a nation, the Japanese were none too happy about any of this. In less than ten years they had achieved the unwelcome distinction of being the first victims of both the atom and hydrogen bombs, and naturally they were a touch upset and sought an apology. We declined to oblige. Instead Lewis Strauss, a former shoe salesman who had risen to become chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (it was that kind of age), responded by suggesting that the Japanese fishermen were in fact Soviet agents.

  Increasingly, the United States moved its tests to Nevada, where, as we have seen, people were a good deal more appreciative, though it wasn’t just the Marshall Islands and Nevada where we tested. We also set off nuclear bombs on Christmas Island and the Johnston atoll in the Pacific, above and below water in the South Atlantic Ocean, and in New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Alaska, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi (of all places), in the early years of testing. Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France detonated scores more.

  It turned out that children, with their trim little bodies and love of milk, were particularly adept at absorbing and holding on to strontium 90—the chief radioactive product of fallout. Such was our affinity for strontium that in 1958 the average child—which is to say me and thirty million other small people—was carrying ten times more strontium than he had only the year before. We were positively aglow with the stuff.

  So the tests were moved underground, but that didn’t always work terribly well either. In the summer of 1962, defense officials detonated a hydrogen bomb buried deep beneath the desert of Frenchman Flat, Nevada. The blast was so robust that the land around it rose by some three hundred feet and burst open like a very bad boil, leaving a crater eight hundred feet across. Blast debris went everywhere. “By four in the afternoon,” the historian Peter Goodchild has written, “the radioactive dust cloud was so thick in Ely, Nevada, two hundred miles from Ground Zero, that the street lights had to be turned on.” Visible fallout drifted down on six western states and two Canadian provinces—though no one officially acknowledged the fiasco and no public warnings were issued advising people not to touch fresh ash or let their children roll around in it. Indeed, all details of the incident remained secret for two decades until a curious journalist filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what had happened that day. *10

  While we waited for the politicians and military to give us an actual World War III, the comic books were pleased to provide an imaginary one. Monthly offerings with titles like Atomic War! and Atom-Age Combat began to appear and were avidly sought out by connoisseurs in the Kiddie Corral. Ingeniously, the visionary minds behind these comics took atomic weapons away from the generals and other top brass and put them in the hands of ordinary foot soldiers, allowing them to blow away inexhaustible hordes of advancing Chinese and Russian troops with atomic rockets, atomic cannons, atomic grenades, and even atomic rifles loaded with atomic bullets.

  Atomic bullets! What a concept! The carnage was thrilling. Until Asbestos Lady stole into my life, capturing my young heart and twitchy loins, atomic-war comics were the most satisfying form of distraction there was.

  Anyway, people had many other far worse things to worry about in the 1950s than nuclear annihilation. They had to worry about polio. They had to worry about keeping up with the Joneses. They had to worry that Negroes might move into the neighborhood. They had to worry about UFOs. Above all, they had to worry about teenagers. That’s right. Teenagers became the number-one fear of American citizens in the 1950s.

  There had of course been obnoxious, partly grown human beings with bad complexions since time immemorial, but as a social phenomenon teenagehood was a brand-new thing. (The word teenager had only been coined in 1941.) So when teens began to appear visibly on the scene, rather like mutant creatures in one of the decade’s many outstanding science-fiction movies, grown-ups grew uneasy. Teenagers smoked and talked back and petted in the backs of cars. They used disrespectful terms to their elders like “pops” and “daddy-o.” They smirked. They drove in endless circuits around any convenient business district. They spent up to fourteen hours a day combing their hair. They listened to rock ’n’ roll, a type of charged music clearly designed to get youngsters in the mood to fornicate and smoke hemp. “We know that many platter-spinners are hop-heads,” wrote the authors of the popular book USA Confidential, showing a proud grasp of street patois. “Many others are Reds, left-wingers or hecklers of social convention.”

  Movies like The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, High School Confidential!, Teen-Age Crime Wave, Reform School Girl, and (if I may be allowed a personal favorite) Teenagers from Outer Space made it seem that the youth of the nation was everywhere on some kind of dark, disturbed rampage. The Saturday Evening Post called juvenile crime “the Shame of America.” Time and Newsweek both ran cover stories on the country’s new young hoodlums. Under Estes Kefauver the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency launched a series of emotive hearings on the rise of street gangs and associated misbehavior.

  In point of fact, young people had never been so good or so devotedly conservative. More than half of them, according to J. Ronald Oakley in God’s Country: America in the Fifties, were shown by surveys to believe that masturbation was sinful, that women should stay at home, and that the theory of evolution was not to be trusted—views that many of their elders would have warmly applauded. Teenagers also worked hard, and contributed significantly to the nation’s well-being with weekend and after-school jobs. By 1955, the typical American teenager had as much disposable income as the average family of four had enjoyed fifteen years earlier. Collectively they were worth $10 billion a year to the national balance sheet. So teenagers weren’t bad by any measure. Still it’s true, when you look at them now, there’s no question that they should have been put down.

  ONLY ONE THING CAME CLOSE to matching the fear of teenagers in the 1950s and that was of course Communism. Worrying about Communism was an exhaustingly demanding business in the 1950s. Red danger lurked everywhere—in books and magazines, in government departments, in the teachings of schools, at every place of work. The film industry was especially suspect.

  “Large numbers of moving pictures that come out of Hollywood carry the Communist line,” Congressman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, gravely intoned to approving nods in 1947, though on reflection no one could actually think of any Hollywood movie that seemed even slightly sympathetic to Marxist thought. Parnell never did specify which movies he had in mind, but then he didn’t have much chance to for soon afterward he was convicted of embezzling large sums from the government in the form of salaries for imaginary employees. He was sentenced to eighteen months in a prison in Connecticut where he had the unexpected pleasure of serving alongside two of the people, Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr., whom his committee had put away for refusing to testify.

  Not to be outdone, Walt Disney claimed in testimony to HUAC that the cartoonists’ guild in Hollywood—run by committed Reds and their fellow travelers, he reported—tried to take over his studio during a strike in 1941 with the intention of making Mickey Mouse a Communist. He never produced any evidence either, though he did identify one of his former employees as a Communist because he didn’t go to church and had once studied art in Moscow.

  It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron. Billy James Hargis, a chubby, kick-ass evangelist from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, warned the
nation in weekly sweat-spattered sermons that Communists had insinuated themselves into, and effectively taken over, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Education, the National Council of Churches, and nearly every other organization of national standing one could name. His pronouncements were carried on five hundred radio stations and two hundred and fifty television stations and attracted a huge following, as did his many books, which had titles like Communism: The Total Lie and Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?

  Although he had no qualifications (he had flunked out of Ozark Bible College—a rare distinction, one would suppose), Hargis founded several educational establishments, including the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University. (I would love to have heard the school song.) When asked what was taught at his schools, he replied “anti-Communism, anti-Socialism, anti–welfare state, anti-Russia, anti-China, a literal interpretation of the Bible and states’ rights.” Hargis eventually came undone when it was revealed that he had had sex with several of his students, male and female alike, during moments of lordly fervor. One couple, according to The Economist, made the discovery when they blushingly confessed the misdeed to each other on their wedding night.

  At the peak of the Red Scare, thirty-two of the forty-eight states had loyalty oaths of one kind or another. In New York, Oakley notes, it was necessary to swear a loyalty oath to gain a fishing permit. In Indiana loyalty oaths were administered to professional wrestlers. The Communist Control Act of 1954 made it a federal offense to communicate any Communist thoughts by any means, including by semaphore. In Connecticut it became illegal to criticize the government, or to speak ill of the army or the American flag. In Texas you could be sent to prison for twenty years for being a Communist. In Birmingham, Alabama, it was illegal merely to be seen conversing with a Communist.