5 become increasingly bitter rivals for ideological and geopolitical influence. The rivalry had intensified by 1951, when in a speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, novelist William Faulkner articulated the view that the central fact of modern life was death and that the fact was now so commonplace that it had pushed out human-scale concerns as the subject for art:
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? (Faulkner, 1973, p. 7).
No one had to be a nuclear scientist to understand that kind of language. Scientific extermination of 6 million Jews and 6 million Gentiles, more or less, was on the historical record, which meant that the prospect of state-sponsored mass murder could not only be contemplated but also implemented. The science of atomic weaponry, which had obliterated two cities in two dark instants, now enabled contemplation of mass obliteration of the whole of human experience--especially as, over the succeeding decades, more nations pursued proprietary development of atomic weapons. If the Holocaust had been shocking, what was the other?
The context for the emergence of a culture of pervaded by shock, despair, and fear was the Cold War. The term had become an artifact of popular imagination in a way that might be expected in the 20th century, through state-of-the-art mass media. It was first voiced in a speech by Bernard M. Baruch, who in 1946-47 was the US representative on the newly formed United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, where he had witnessed multiple Soviet rejections of international control of atomic energy. The language of these rejections was ideological, referring to "war-mongering capitalist piracy" or "barbarous American imperialism" (Goldman, 1960, pp. 58). If such utterances from the perspective of AD 2000 have about them ...