Unforgettable

The first year of the atomic age drew to a close amid a noisy bustle of Christmas shopping (most extravagant on record), of unrationed auto traffic, of holiday travel and partying such as the U.S. had never seen before.

The long lines in front of the annual Christmas week show at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall, the picket lines in Detroit, the lines of dazzling lights reappearing on the trees along Hollywood Boulevard--all these, in their own manner, offered proof that the U.S. was back to some kind of normalcy after four years of war. The uniforms were disappearing; the face of the land and the face of the people took on a prewar complexion.

Yet if the war was fading, its denouement was not. Opinion polls showed that the overriding subject of U.S. interest was still, as at any given moment since Hiroshima, the atom bomb. Never before since the pollsters set up shop had one topic evoked such continuous, prolonged, intense public concern. Nothing--not the homecoming of the heroes, not strikes nor reconversion, the Pearl Harbor investigation, the housing shortage nor this week's Big Three meeting, not even Santa Claus --had been able to drive the bomb from topmost place in the U.S. mind.

I Never Was. Interviewing the man-in-the-street, the pollsters found a deep and turbulent stream of consciousness to explore.

Said a Baltimore housewife: "I dread the thought that it was discovered. I was never enthusiastic about it, even when we knew it was ending the war. I'm glad no other country discovered it; I wish we could find some way of destroying the plans and the secret so no one would know about it, including us. ... The bomb is inhuman. ..."

A Brooklyn salesman: "I think the bomb should be kept secret. Even if other nations can find out, we should not tell them. Because right now we don't know what the future will bring. Like this, we have a chance. Let them find out for themselves. . . . But it's possible to prevent its use in future wars, if the nations in power prevent it. They can do this by organization. All nations, small and big, should get together. The thing that stands in the way is that some group may not like the idea. Russia, to tell the truth. She's the only one that I can think of...."

There Never Will Be. An Arkansas accountant: "There never will be a counter-weapon to eliminate the horrors and the devastation.There will be a defense to some extent, though; they'll find similar destructive devices to prevent aircraft from getting through. But we won't know if there's a defense until the next war. If one is invented it will be kept secret until there is a need for it. ... But we shouldn't share the bomb now; I mean we shouldn't share it with any nation at all. Because the next three or four years are very critical. There is a lot of dissension in China, and there is fighting going on in other places. In five years things will be more settled--closer to peace. Then the countries will be able to contemplate the economic and commercial uses of atomic energy, instead of the war uses. . . ."

A New Jerseyite: "Any power can get ideas of world domination. For the sake of our own security, we shouldn't tell the other countries about the bomb, even though they can find out for themselves. We aren't too sure we can have peace. Things are too chaotic. . . . There are still places that are foreign to our way of life and may cause trouble. Which country? It's hard to say; I don't want to be specific. . . ."

Everyman. Listening tothe people talk, the pollsters found awe, fear, cynicism, confusion, hope--but mostly confused fear and hopeful confusion. They found a substantial minority expectation that atomic experiments will end the world some day, a vague majority confidence that somehow everything would work out and that man would somehow be better off in the long run.

Significantly, there was one thing that the pollsters did not find: any American who advocated, even in the privacy of an anonymous dialogue, that the U.S. use its secret bombs as a Hitler or a Tojo would certainly have used them. Americans, precariously holding the bomb's precarious secret, were more afraid of it than any have-not nation had reason to be.

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