Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age.

• Author: Cox, Stephen

By Margot A. Henriksen

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. 475. $34.95.

Dr. Strangelove's America tries to show that the invention of the atomic bomb had revolutionary political and cultural effects on American society. That thesis is not, in certain respects, a very demanding one. A number of the bomb's political repercussions are obvious enough. Its existence--in particular, its eventual possession by both the Soviet Union and the United States--was an important ingredient in the black magic that transformed America's traditional isolationism into its current global interventionism. While America extended its "nuclear umbrella" to countries all over the world, a corresponding effort to maintain domestic "security" increased the power and prestige of the state's control agencies.

Margot A. Henriksen finds it easy to argue along these lines. But the "cultural" effects of the bomb are somewhat harder to specify. She tries to capture them by positing the existence of two "cultures" in post-World War II America: a "culture of consensus" and a "culture of dissent." The first supported the government's policy of stability and security; the second persistently raised questions about "the corruption inherent in atomic power" and the "repressive" nature of "mainstream American society." Henriksen explains the postwar evolution of the American mentality as a protracted and pervasive contest between the two cultures, one of them insisting that America was and ought to be a "society of law and order," the other representing America as "a society of evil and chaos" (pp. xxii, 7, 409, 61).

The final result of this contest, Henriksen maintains, was the victory of dissent in the "cultural revolution that crystallized" in the 1960s (p. 309). And that, in her view, was a mighty good thing: "From the cultural chaos of the 1960s emerged the reshaped values and the revised patterns of cultural response that limited the potential of America's system of atomic arrogance" (p. 343).

It is conceivable, of course, that our New Age of atomic lethargy owes more to the collapse of the Soviet Union (something Henriksen never discusses) than to the New Thought of the 1960s (something she discusses at enormous length). This possibility does not interest Henriksen. She restricts her study to the aborted career of American "repression" and "arrogance." It is a significant topic, but there are limits to what you can say about it if you restrict yourself to absolute terms. You can keep on saying that American society was arrogant, corrupt, and repressive; but so, in its way, is every other society. Just how bad was America in the 1950s?

Some comparison with other times and places is in order. Henriksen, however, merely nods in that direction. Her clearest contrast is between the Cold War political regime and "the humanist and innovative...