“The crippled plane with its atomic bomb exploded in a blinding flash. A mile and a half away, the blast blew Ernie Bradshaw out of bed. He woke up on the floor. Half-dazed, he staggered to his feet.”
That’s probably not what most farmers were hoping to read when they flipped open the November 1950 issue of Farm Journal. They’d already worried about their sons being drafted and the possibility of price controls and rationing when the Korean Conflict started a few months earlier. And now, here was a fictional article by Richard Gerstell, “an atomic researcher and professional physiologist,” describing in lurid detail what an atomic explosion might do to their farms. It was a fairly common genre at the time—far more famous articles graphically described New York City in the aftermath of an atomic explosion—but I’ve not yet seen the agricultural version mentioned in a history book.
In 1950, atomic bombs were still relatively small, and these kinds of scenarios were based on a bomb the size of the one that hit Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The dangers of fallout were kept secret from the public at the time. “While radioactivity is by far the most feared, it is the blast, or shock wave, that is actually the bomb’s greatest hazard,” Gerstell reassured his readers. And even that could be survived with proper precautions.
Ed Miller’s house, a mere quarter-mile from ground zero, had of course been destroyed by the explosion. “The sole survivor of the whole farm was an old tabby cat that had probably been off hunting. Now he sat unconcerned upon the doorstep of an underground cellar. Inside the cellar, the long neat rows of canned fruits and vegetables remained untouched by blast of heat.” If the Millers had had enough warning to hide in their cellar, “the cement roof, with its covering of earth, would have completely shielded them from blast, heat, and radioactivity.”
In contrast, the Willards’ house—also only a quarter-mile away—had survived intact because it was shielded by a hill. A flock of mixed white Leghorn and New Hampshire red chickens a mile from ground zero had a mixed survival rate—the light-colored chickens reflected the heat rays from the bomb, while the red ones absorbed them and got fried. Moral to the reader—always wear loose, light-colored clothing outside if there’s any chance an atom bomb might explode in your neighborhood and you don’t have time to duck into the fruit cellar.
While a few of the survivors had lowered white blood cell counts after the blast, that really wasn’t anything to worry about. And they could get back to normal life right away (after attending the Millers’ funeral, I assume). “The ‘hot spot’ around ground zero was no ‘doomed area,’ Gerstell assured his readers. “In fact, when the surveyors dug down they found earthworms crawling around uninjured.” “All in all,” he concluded, “there is no reason for believing that the use of nuclear weapons—even those of improved design—necessarily means the end of all life on earth. Nevertheless, unless we maintain peace, those weapons will surely bring death and destruction on a scale now scarcely imaginable.”
Once the much larger and more destructive hydrogen bombs were deployed, these kind of semi-hopeful scenarios weren’t published anymore. But articles like this give a fascinating glimpse of what farmers were being told to worry about in the early Cold War.
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