Them!

When I was about ten, we dropped two atom bombs on Japan, and  we rejoiced. It meant World War II was over. The Axis had been defeated. Our troops could come home. Clark Gable could come home. Glenn Miller would not be coming home.

The Nazis had raced us to get nuclear weapons first, and they had lost, thanks in part to European scientists who had joined our team. Japan had started two separate programs to develop nuclear  weapons, and both had lost

Soon it occurred to Americans in general that nuclear weapons might not be something to celebrate. For one thing, the USSR also had nukes. We also felt guilt. We didn't talk about the children in Germany and Japan who had died as a result of our policy of deliberately bombing residential areas. We still don't talk about that policy. We felt (vaguely) that by splitting the atom we might have enraged Mother Nature. Last night I rewatched one of the key movies built on that theme, THEM!, produced in 1956. 

In THEM! the first test of an atomic device in New Mexico irradiated a colony of ants, who immediately grew to the size of Ford cargo vans. Gigantic ants reached the sewer system of Los Angeles. THEM! was a major movie, starring James Whitmore (who was supposed to be the next Spencer Tracey), Fess Parker, James Arness, Joan Weldon and Edmund Gwenn,  

We brooded for years about the possibility that if we offended Mother Nature, she might,  in revenge, hand us a dead planet. I never bought into that argument. My view was that Mother Nature, indifferent to us, simply preferred dead planets. She had made a lot of them.