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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
In the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a majority of Japanese people came to see nuclear power as safe and productive even as there were misgivings about nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower's attempts in the 1950s to convince people about the potential of peaceful nuclear power were quite successful and, especially compared to carbon fuels, nuclear energy was considered a relatively inexpensive and environmentally friendly way for Japan to achieve energy self-sufficiency. Robert Jacobs’ essay reminds us of the important distinction between responses to nuclear energy, and to nuclear weapons, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bombings left room for optimism about the future of nuclear energy, but they also reinforced pessimism about the future of nuclear weapons. Jacobs examines how Western editorial cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s that responded to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave birth to the visual icon of the whole earth. Well before photographs of the whole earth became a part of the cultural lexicon in the late 1960s, these cartoon renderings shaped how the earth came to be viewed and understood as a target and victim of nuclear weapons and war. Jacobs stresses the importance of the visual in environmental history, and underscores themes interwoven through many of these essays including the interconnectedness between present debates and battles over the past, and the multi-national or transnational nature of many environmental issues.
1 Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950).
2 Nasa website.
3 See, Robert Jacobs, ”Dodging Dystopia: The Role of Nuclear Narratives in Averting Global Thermonuclear Warfare, ” in, Antony Adolf, ed., Nonkilling History: Shaping Policy with Lessons_from the Past (Honolulu: The Center for Global Nonviolence, 2010) 219-236.
4 David Bradley, No Place to Hide (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948).
5 Nasa website.
6 Gary H. Kitmacher, “Astronaut Still Photography During Apollo,” August 2004. See also, Neil Maher, “Shooting the Moon,” Environmental History 9:3 (July 2004): 526-31.
7 Stewart Brand, “‘Why Haven't We Seen the Whole Earth Yet?” in, Lynda Obst, ed., The Sixties: The Decade Remembered Now, By the People Who Lived It Then (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1977), 168.
8 Author interview, Stewart Brand, Sausalito, California, March 2006.
9 From “Whole Earth Button,” on Stewart Brand's website.
10 “Orbiting the Moon Christmas Eve,” Apollo Expeditions to the Moon.
11 Archibald MacLeish, “Bubble of Blue Air,” New York Times, December 25, 1968, 1.
12 Author interview, Stewart Brand, Sausalito, California, March 2006.
13 Stanley Kubrick, director, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 (MGM). The film premiered in Washington D.C. on April 2, 1968, two days before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
14 Kubrick obtained photographs of the partial Earth from the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. See, Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (New York: New American Library, 1970), 321.
15 In the novelized version of the film, Arthur Clarke includes a sequence at this point in which nuclear weapons are launched from the Earth, but the Star Child simply eliminates them, thus presenting the new human as able to transcend the nuclear dilemma. See, Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1968).
16 Stewart Brand, ed., Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park: The Portola Institute, 1968). See, also, Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
17 Steve Jobs, “You've Got to Find What You Love,” Stanford University Commencement Speech, June 15, 2005.
18 Whole Earth Catalog, 1.
19 Jack Lewis, “The Birth of the EPA,” originally printed in the EPA Journal in November 1985, reprinted at EPA.gov.
20 Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 15. See also, Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1972).
21 Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 50.
22 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 6
23 Ibid., 6.
24 Ibid., 9.
25 Ibid., 10. Golding would win the Nobel Prize in 1983.
26 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E. They are reprinted by the Times from three different newspapers, the first from The Newark Evening News, the second from the New York Times itself, and the third from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
27 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E.
28 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E. They are reprinted there from three different newspapers, the first from The Newark Evening News, the second from the New York Times itself, and the third from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
29 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E.
30 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 6E.
31 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 6E.
32 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 10, 1945, 2C.
33 The Saturday Review of Literature, March 30, 1946, 8.
34 Reprinted in, Herbert Block, The Herblock Book (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 33.
35 Washington Post, August 1945.
36 Reprinted in, Herbert Block, Herblock's Here and Now (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 193.
37 Dexter Masters and Katharine Way, eds., One World or None (New York: Whittlesey House/McGraw Hill Book Co., 1946), 25.
38 Albert Einstein, “The War Is Won But Peace Is Not,” Essays in Humanism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 65-8. This is reprinted from an address originally presented at the Fifth Nobel Anniversary Dinner at the Astor Hotel, New York City, December 10, 1945.
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