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Essay. The Blast is back. The demon is loose. The cover-up is on. Possibilities for human brilliance die daily in the flow of tears and blood that has run from New York City to Baghdad, from Madrid to London to Amman. The children watch, listen, think, learn absurdity. And from whom?

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The Blast Is Back
Essay for the Children's Sake
by Charles Strohmer

Life began for me the moment I stated to think—a great awakening I can pinpoint for you as if it were yesterday. Dateline: the mid-1950s. The unnerving years of the Federal Defense Administration, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the alarming A-Bomb and H-Bomb tests conducted by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Inside my comfortable home on Chalfonte in northwest Detroit, The Bomb as mushroom of doom had entered our living room. What was I, four, five, six? Instead of Disneyland, the threat of World War 3 stared back at me from our small black and white Zenith. Its ash grey shades of death appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Its dismal strains of meaning on everyone's lips. Previous wars would seem like fist fights among neighbors.

When the green grass should have been growing all around me, the adult world had suddenly become real, and very frightening. Voila! RADIATION. That ubiquitous spectral presence of my childhood had been born. And with it my brain switched on and the adults no longer seemed safe. I had begun to think, to live, even. But what an awakening! A child must now parry with this monolithic affront to its well-being, but a child, you see, is not delivered by the stork equipped with the psychology of the grown by which to cope with adult terror. Did anyone adult notice?

RADIATION. It would track you down like death itself, seep through the tiniest cracks, sizzle you like bacon frying in hot grease. Just let the Communists drop an A-Bomb on Detroit and you'd see. The highly industrialized region of southeast Michigan, home of America's Big Three automakers and the nation's steel industry, would be among the first regions of the country destroyed by A-Bombs, I learned, if the Communists attacked.

And so arose a primitive version of Homeland Security. Historians call it the era of Civil Defense. And that's some education they agve us! Primitive TV infomercials and government pamphlets read like morality tales: it's your own fault if you die in a blast, you didn't prepare yourself properly. Billboards and bus adverts proclaimed what to do If The Bomb Falls. Countless radio PSAs commanded everyone: "When you hear the three-minute ‘take cover' signal, turn your radio to a designated CONELRAD frequency," which everyone by then knew was located at 640 or 1240 on the AM dial. CONELRAD? It was a government radio frequency whose two functions were to thwart enemy bombers and provide civil defense information to the public in case of an attack. Right. We children learned that there was no defense, and to suspect attack anytime.

Not to worry. If the demon were summoned I would be given ample warning. For years every Saturday afternoon at precisely 1pm, the "take cover" siren screamed wildly for three minutes from loudspeakers that had been systematically placed throughout Detroit atop fire stations or tall telephone poles. I'm now a thinking person; I question the absolute regularity of this drill. Surely the Kremlin knows that American citizens no longer take 1pm Saturday as anything but a drill. And as they were the worst sort of devils, surely the Communists wouldn't drop the bomb on us in our sleep. That would be a mercy. No, I concluded, they would wait till 1pm some sunny Saturday. And so I waited. A blinding flash of light would precede the stench of death to epitomize the cruel irony of adult brilliance and insanity.

Three cheers, though. The government was on top of things, educating the public. Propaganda films of macabre experiments in the desert began circulating. Some showed us entire neighborhoods of streets chock-a-block with small A-frame homes that had been fabricated like movie sets. Fully equipped but sans real humans, these these faux neighborhoods were then subjected to "controlled" atomic blasts. What remained—appliances, porch swings, mannequins, car fenders—were examined and incredibly touted as "proof" that under some conditions some people would live on. 

CONELRAD "alert exercises" were conducted in cities across the nation to study feeding programs and communication systems, and panic. U.S. army personnel were trotted out to state publicly that they were no longer afraid of an atomic war. Traffic routing plans were developed to lead people by the quickest routes out of the cities. Atomic war insanity. Children watched, thought, learned absurdity.

I wondered why the adult world had created a device by which to destroy itself. The heck with them, and the traffic. When no one was around I spent time riding my magic carpet, a small Persian rug in our hallway. But neither propaganda nor the magic has been invented to convince children that they can escape The Blast. This dogged me. I found maps of the city and poured over them to figure out escape routes on my Schwinn past traffic snarls. A dead end. No one can cycle fast enough to escape RADIATION. I might not even have the chance to reach my bike. What in the world had the adults gotten me into? And what if the dreaded air raid siren screamed midweek while I was in school? Bases covered, said the adults. No problem, said the teachers as they drilled us on how to hide swiftly under our school desks from The Blast. I'm not joking. And if I were walking home from school? Hey, just run like mad to one of those buildings that displays a brown and yellow Fallout Shelter sign. These ugly triangular signs were fastened to the outside of certain municipal buildings and churches to denote a public bomb shelter. Right.

Preparations at home capped for me. In answer to a question I
asked about why we never drank from the huge glass jugs of water stored in the basement, I heard: "It's for us to drink if radiation contaminates the water supply." But I had been learning math. Two plus two was on my mind. I knew that those jugs would only last our large family for several days. RADIATION and its euphemistic lethal sister FALLOUT stuck around for years. Denial, the father of false hope. Adults had to believe they could survive the angel of atomic death. Children knew better.

Not to be outdone by the government, Hollywood gave us a whole genre of atomic imagery in film—futile attempts to wrench the narrative from incredulity to hope. I remember one movie in particular. It began with the tag line THE END appearing on the screen. I've got to admit, that was kind of catchy. Then I wonder if the film projector has blown it, has got the reels reversed. But then a large group of terrified adults appears. They are yanking on their children's arms and scrambling up a small mountainside to escape a mushroom cloud that thunders and sparks behind them far away. Finally reaching the other side, some now dead from the effects of RADIATION, they settle in a valley shielded from the worst of it and out of danger. I'm not joking. The storyline then takes you through their trials and tribulations adjusting to life without electricity, cars, stores, food, clothing. At the end of the film several families, its now months later, slowly make their way out of the valley back toward the mountain. Hopeful expressions of a brighter future on their faces. THE BEGINNING. It flashes up on the screen and remains there as they climb. What really awaited their return. Hollywood told us that, too, with films like "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" whose mutant monsters rampaged the countryside.

Looking back, I realize that the adults were still stunned by the hells of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was only ten years after. Could we expect very much from this lot? Not even Oppenheimer or Einstein had provided adequate product-warning labels. So how could my fears be set other than on edge? The Bomb was too recent, too horrific, too almighty, and if not for the twisted I-beams and charred bodies in Japan, too unbelievable. The adults, I thought, should have done us better. Something seemed terribly wrong with them and their world.

Looking ahead, something remains terribly wrong. Adults. Any wiser sixty years on? The global sigh of relief heard at the end of the Cold War era has become the constant rustle of edgy global tensions with the Terror War. The adult in me recalls the child and wonders if we know that the children have come alive and are thinking. Knowing that the adults have no answers and will only pooh-pooh their further questions on the subject, they turn inward, keep their thoughts to themselves. In the silence, the haunting. What have you done to our world? Are you crazy? What will prevent a worse 9/11? What will keep suicide bombers from my town? What will stop a dirty bomb blast here? Nothing adult, it seems. Do we adults even care what the children are coming alive to?

From Washington and from their parents, let children learn a way wiser than war. Cancel that. Give them government incompetency and parental denial. Give them indoctrination with a false sense of security as primitive today as it was in the 1950s. Give them a  fabrication that takes them on a train full-steam ahead to Nowhere. The Blast is back. The demon is loose. The cover-up is on. Possibilities for human brilliance die daily in the flow of tears and blood that has run from New York City to Baghdad, from Madrid to London to Amman. The President of the United States plays nuclear chicken with the Iran. The television educates them. The children watch, listen, think, learn absurdity. And from whom?

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