Mass observing the atom bomb: the emotional politics of August 1945

Abstract

In August 1945 the social investigative organisation, Mass-Observation, asked its panel of volunteer writers to 'Describe in detail your own feelings and views about the atom bomb, and those of the people you meet.' This article uses the responses to explore the emotional politics of 'nuclearity' in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First it examines the impact that the atomic explosions had upon ways of narrating, and managing, the emotional self. Second it explores the influence of nuclear knowledge on felt social relations. The article argues that first use of the atom bomb had a profound impact upon British people's understandings of the past, the present and the political future; and that the responses of ordinary people in turn helped to shape a messy and contradictory popular nuclear culture within which feeling operated as a way of knowing, and intervening in, the world.

‘We have come to be destroyed’: The ‘extraordinary’ child in science fiction cinema in early Cold War Britain

“…Claire Langhamer’s work on Mass-Observers’ responses to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 indicate that this was already beginning to crystallise from the time the first bomb was dropped: a 32-year-old housewife reflected in her MO response that ‘I feel detached from it all though I feel my children cannot escape annihilation’, while one man wrote, ‘I have three children and we have all along planned to have four. My wife revived the question: I hesitated and thought of the future in terms of the atom bomb’ (Langhamer, 2019: 208–9, 220).…”