The atomic bomb, or something like it, had been a regular presence in popular entertainment for three decades before the act of imagining it suddenly came to be perceived as a threat to national security. In June 1943, Byron Price, director of the United States Office of Censorship, sent a confidential memorandum to thousands of publications and radio stations, instructing them to avoid any mention of atomic fission, atom smashing, radium, uranium or anything else that might inadvertently point to the fact that tens of thousands of people were secretly engaged in the Manhattan Project, a crash program to design and build an atomic bomb.
But Price failed to consider that in the rapidly proliferating pages of America’s science fiction magazines, the knowledge that a bomb could be built using a uranium isotope was no secret at all. As early as May 1941, Robert Heinlein’s “Solution Unsatisfactory” had described a top-secret project to build a bomb from uranium-235.
The censors were slow to act until Astounding Science Fiction published Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline” in March 1944. “Have you heard of U-235?” asks one character. “Who hasn’t?” another sniffs.
Cartmill got the idea from John W. Campbell Jr, the MIT-educated editor of Astounding, a magazine with many avid subscribers inside the Manhattan Project. After “Deadline,” the Army ordered Campbell to publish no more stories on the subject but he countered that readers were by then so accustomed to stories with titles such as “Atomic Fire” and “The Atom Smasher” that their sudden disappearance would raise suspicions.
Children, meanwhile, were already au fait with the devastating power of the atom via the comic-strip adventures of Flash Gordon, Mickey Mouse and Buck Rogers. Created by Philip Francis Nowlan in 1928, Buck’s first adventure, “Armageddon 2419 AD,” dropped the time-torn astronaut into the aftermath of an obliviating war involving “disintegrator rays,” rays being more popular than bombs at the time.
Nowlan’s hero became the most ubiquitous ambassador for the future since H.G. Wells. “The use of atomic energy seems a Buck Rogers idea,” The New York Times reflected in 1944, “but this is a Buck Rogers war.” Even Leslie Groves, the leader of the Manhattan Project, initially thought that the atomic bomb was “a crazy Buck Rogers project.”
Superhero fans were no less familiar with atomic weaponry. In 1944, the FBI forced the postponement of a story in which Superman’s arch-enemy Lex Luthor invents an atomic bomb, yet Batman had already foiled a Japanese spy who used radium to build an “atom disintegrator,” a weapon “more destructive than anything man ever dreamed of.” Though the censors were far too slow to consider fiction, that did nothing to hinder their zeal.