There ’s no city that Americans fictionally demolish more often than New York .
New York has been blown up , tucker out down and attacked in every medium conceivable throughout the 19th and 20th one C . From movies to novels to newsprint , there ’s just something so abominably revelatory in the American psyche that we must see our most populous city ’s demise over and over again .
Before WWII , these vision of New York ’s destruction contain the shape of tidal waves , fires orgiant imitator approach — but after the United States dropped two nuclear dud on Japan in Hiroshima and Nagaski , the atom was all of a sudden the Modern leveler of cities .
The August 5 , 1950 cover of Collier ’s cartridge holder ran an exemplification of a mushroom swarm over Manhattan , with the headline reading : “ Hiroshima , U.S.A. : Can Anything be Done About It ? ” write by John Lear , with paintings by Chesley Bonestell and Birney Lettick , Collier ’s veil New York through appal words and pictures . The first page of the article explains “ the story of this story ” :
For five years now the Earth has lived with the abominable knowledge that atomic war is possible . Since last September , when the President announced publicly that the Russians too had produced an atomic burst , this nation has endure face to confront with the terrifying realization that an onrush with nuclear weapons could be made against us .
But , until now , no responsible voice has judge the problem constructively , in words everybody can understand . This article performs that service . Collier ’s gives it more than customary space in the conviction that , when the danger is trace and the mean to combat it efficaciously is made clear , democracy will have an boundlessly stronger chance to last .
The illustrator who painted the cover was Chesley Bonestell and it is no doubt one of the most frightening images to ever grace the cover of a major American magazine . Opening up to the level within , we see a city aflame .
A form of telegram serve ticker tape runs across the top of the images inside the magazine :
BULLETIN NOTE TO EDITORS — ADVISORY ONLY — - NEWARK NJ — immense EXPLOSION REPORTED IN LOWER NEW YORK CITY . IMMEDIATE CONFIRMATION UNAVAILABLE . WIRE connection WITH MANHATTAN ARE DOWN . NEW YORK HAS ADVISED IT WILL FILE FROM HERE SHORTLY . . . BULLETIN — HOBOKEN NJ — DOCK WORKERS ON THE NEW JERSEY SIDE OF THE HUDSON RIVER THIS AFTERNOON describe A THUNDEROUS EXPLOSION IN THE DIRECTION OF NEW YORK CITY . THEY aver THEY SAW A TREMENDOUS BALL OF FIRE rise INTO THE SKY
The first few pages of the clause say the account of a typical Tuesday in New York City , with people work about their business . Suddenly a radiant rut is finger and a great flash engulfs the city . People in Coney Island err it for a lightning bolt . A housewife in the Bronx run to the kitchen windowpane to investigate where the light came from , only to have the window smash in front of her , get off thousands of “ slashing bits ” toward her torso . As Lear describe it , it does n’t take long for “ millions of people , scatter over thousands of Admiralty mile ” to chance upon what has taken place .
The wake is one of great scare with pinch fomite ineffective to move and masses hasten to get hold transportation . Collier ’s would meet on this stem of urban panic a few years later in theirAugust 21 , 1953issue . One of the many fictional character we follow in this story ( an Associated Press newsperson named John McKee ) somehow manages to hail a taxicab in all this madness . McKee finally gets to his office and get down read the bulletin :
( NR ) New York — ( AP ) — An A - bomb fell on the lower East Side of Manhattan Island at 5:13 P.M. ( edt ) today — across the East River from the Brooklyn Navy Yard .
The chronicle goes on to key out how news insurance coverage is largely lame by the fact that 16 telephone exchanges were out , leaving 200,000 telephones useless . Ham radios , naturally , come to the rescue in their power to spread hand brake messages .
The cover version ran almost 5 years to the day of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 , 1945 . The armed services was able to go in after the attempt and measure the extent of the devastation . The graphical record below , which run with the Collier ’s article , explicate what kind of shock would be mat up at various distances from ground zero .
The article explained that our understanding of what a atomic attack on New York would look like do straight from U.S. measurement in Japan :
The opening move account of an A - bombardment of Manhattan Island may seem extremely inventive . Actually , little of it is innovation . Incidents are related in context selfsame with or super faithful to those which really happened elsewhere in World War II . prop wrong is described as it occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki , with allowance for differences between Oriental and Hesperian standards of building . Death and injury were computed by correlating Census Bureau image on population or fussy sections of New York with Atomic Energy Commission and U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey data point on the two A - bombs that fell on Japan . Every office and name used is real .
This Collier ’s clause was n’t the first to warn of the crushing effect an atomic dud could have on New York . A four - part series persist in paper across the commonwealth in April of 1948 which also describe how awful a nuclear flack on New York could be . Written by S. Burton Heath , the first article in the serial publication ran with the newspaper headline , “ One A - Bomb Dropped In New York Would Take 800,000 Lives . ”
One nuclear dud , explode over New York ’s Times Square on a working Clarence Day , could be expected to kill several hundred thousand adult male , women and children .
No reputable atomic expert , in Washington or elsewhere , will estimate the accurate number . The New York fire department say 100,000 . On the base of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it would be more than 800,000 . The most reliable experts say the fire section ’s dead reckoning is absurdly low . They think the bigger figure is too high .
After the surreal desolation that we witness during the terrorist attacks upon New York on September 11 , 2001 , we have some idea of what true horror look like when inflicted upon a major American city . But a nuclear turkey is still something tout ensemble unlike . The level of death that would result from nuclear war rest an abstraction for many — until you switch through old magazines of the Cold War .
This post in the first place appeared atSmithsonian.com .
1950s
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