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‘The monster’? The British popular press and nuclear culture, 1945–early 1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2013

ADRIAN BINGHAM
ADRIAN BINGHAM*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Sheffield, Jessop West, 1 Upper Hanover Street, Sheffield, S3 7RA. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

British popular newspapers were fascinated by the terrible power of the nuclear bomb, and they devoted countless articles, editorials and cartoons to it. In so doing, they played a significant role in shaping the nuclear culture of the post-war period. Yet scholars have given little sustained attention to this rich seam of material. This article makes a contribution to remedying this major gap by offering an overview of the coverage of nuclear weaponry in the two most popular newspapers in Britain, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, in the period from 1945 to the early 1960s. Although both papers supported British possession of the bomb, claiming that it was essential for the maintenance of great-power status, their reporting was more complex and critical than the existing scholarship has tended to assume. This article argues that sceptical voices in the press often disrupted official narratives and that journalists emphasized the potential dangers involved in the nuclear arms race. Newspapers frequently highlighted, rather than downplayed, the horrors of the bomb: it was repeatedly portrayed as a ‘monster’ threatening the world.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 45 , Issue 4: Special Issue: British Nuclear Culture , December 2012 , pp. 609 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2013

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References

1 Daily Express, 7 August 1945, pp. 1, 4.

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24 Cameron resigned from the Beaverbrook press in 1950 when the Evening Standard (unjustifiably) accused John Strachey, the minister of defence, of having connections with the ‘atom spy’ Klaus Fuchs; see Greenslade, op. cit. (8), p. 49. On Pincher see Chapman Pincher, ‘Reflections on a lifetime of reporting on intelligence affairs’, in Robert Dover and Michael Goodman (eds.), Spinning Intelligence: Why Intelligence Needs the Media, Why the Media Needs Intelligence, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 149–164.

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26 Daily Mirror, 28 September 1946, p. 4.

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29 Daily Mirror, 6 April 1954, p. 9.

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34 Daily Express, 17 September 1952, p. 1.

35 Daily Mirror, 18 January 1955, p. 8.

36 Daily Express, 2 April 1954, pp. 1–2.

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47 See Andrew, op. cit. (40).

48 Daily Express, 24 October 1950, p. 4.

49 Daily Express, 13 May 1950, p. 1; 25 May 1950, p. 4.

50 Daily Express, 1 December 1950, p. 1.

51 Daily Express, 14 March 1955, pp. 1, 4.

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56 Daily Express, 2 December 1958, p. 8.

57 Daily Express, 13 March 1958, p. 5.

58 Daily Express, 4 February 1966, p. 7; 23 January 1968, p. 1; 20 August 1968, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 23 January 1968, p. 1.

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63 Daily Express, 2 August 1950, p. 4; see also 26 September 1949, p. 4; 19 December 1949, p. 4.

64 Daily Express, 4 October 1952, p. 1.

65 Daily Mirror, 4 October 1952, p. 1.

66 Daily Express, 15 October 1953, p. 4; 27 August 1956, p. 4.

67 Daily Express, 8 October 1956, p. 1; 18 October 1956, p. 11.

68 For example, Daily Express, 25 March 1957, p. 6; 28 March 1957, p. 6.

69 Daily Mirror, 4 March 1958, p. 1.

70 Daily Express, 29 October 1962, p. 8.

71 Daily Express, 10 December 1962, p. 6.

72 Daily Mirror, 18 December 1964, p. 1.

73 Salisbury, op. cit. (7), pp. 166–167.

74 On the close relationship between the BBC and the security establishment see Michael Goodman, ‘British intelligence and British Broadcasting Corporation: portrait of a happy marriage’, in Dover and Goodman, op. cit. (24). Even under the supposedly liberal regime of Hugh Greene, the BBC was famously reluctant to broadcast The War Game, Peter Watkins's 1965 drama-documentary portraying the aftermath of an nuclear strike on Britain. Chapman, James, ‘The BBC and the censorship of The War Game (1965)’, Journal of Contemporary History (2006) 41, pp. 75–94Google Scholar.

75 Daily Express, 16 July 1952, p. 4.