Excavating the Madness

The madness of nuclear war was not always apparent to the public as a whole, or at least not articulated in that way. The first reactions to Hiroshima were of horror, and the need to control nuclear weapons. But once the arms race began, there was considerable pressure to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

The U.S. government worried about how the public was dealing psychologically with the atomic age. They waited for psychological studies, but none emerged, because the public didn’t seem to be feeling anything. Eventually, the government quietly sponsored research into why the public wasn't reacting. The theories ranged from "cognitive dissonance" to a kind of apathy later identified as "learned helplessness," to the simple but powerful psychological defense mechanism known as denial.

Denial was undeniably the national pastime of the 1950s, encouraged by the surface sunniness of suburbia and the patriotic repression of McCarthyism. But what ordinary people faced was that their ordinary life could be transformed in a split second into hellfire. No one could ever know how much the Bomb contributed to neuroses and psychoses, alcoholism and drug addiction, infidelity, domestic violence, and divorce, or to depressions that could be a crippling sense of pointlessness, or a lower-intensity, underlying sense of futility. But eventually there was public evidence of how the Bomb changed the psychological state of the times.

The pressure of MADness fueled an age of black humor and absurdism. Satire blossomed in the 1960s, with “Beyond the Fringe,” “That Was the Week That Was,” Firesign Theatre and edgier standup comedy by Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman and others.

There were also serious explorations of just how insane this society might be, by Eric Fromm (The Sane Society), Lewis Mumford (In the Name of Sanity) and others. Beat poets, absurdist playwrights and novelists explored similar themes.