Review of Jonathan Hogg’s “’The Family that Feared Tomorrow’: British Nuclear Culture and Individual Experience in the late 1950s”

摘要

Jonathan Hogg's examination of the impact of nuclear issues upon individual experience in Britain during the 1950s is a valuable piece of research into a period of Cold War history that has predominantly been considered through the American post- war suburban experience. Hogg begins by recalling an event in 1957 where Elsie and Andrew Marshall gassed their three children before entering into a suicide pact and jumping into the sea. Hogg then notes how a subsequent article in the Daily Mirror entitled "The family that feared tomorrow" outlined the contents of the suicide note, which cited the threat of human extermination as a key factor in the couples' actions. This incident, Hogg argues, provides a powerful example of how developing nuclear technologies produced a wide-range of cultural and personal responses while also demonstrating how "profound preoccupations with nuclear danger straddled class boundaries" (536). Hogg's article therefore utilises Gabrielle Hecht's (2006) use of the term 'nuclearity' (Hecht uses it to refer to the extent to which a nation is classed as 'nuclear') but re-appropriates it to reveal "the shifting set of assumptions held by individual citizens on the dangers of nuclear technology, assumptions that were rooted firmly in context and which circulated in, and were shaped by, national discourse" (537). 'Nuclearity' thus becomes a way of assessing the degree to which the nuclear referent was encoded within cultural activities