Not surprisingly, science fiction enjoyed a resurgence of popularity at this time. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface in 1969, for a few moments, the American people were united in their admiration for space and technology. Moreover, by looking out into space, Americans could look away from Vietnam. The race for the moon and beyond became an expression of American optimism, that it might be possible to spread the American way of life out into the galaxy. While it was a program born out of fear of Soviet domination, the program still captured the hearts and minds of Americans. space program grew rapidly during the 1960s. government put American schools on notice that they must prepare students in math and science in order to meet the Soviet threat of dominance in outer space. Early in the decade, President Kennedy vowed to put a man on the moon by the close of the decade in response to the 1957 Soviet launch of an unmanned satellite, Sputnik. Many Americans saw the war and the social crisis it precipitated as evidence that the United States was entering its last days.Ĭompetition with the former Soviet Union took on yet another face during the 1960s. The public unrest and upheaval, coupled with the high-tech military might unleashed on the Vietnamese and the evidence of Soviet and Chinese involvement with the North Vietnamese further contributed to the cultural anxiety noted above. In the United States, protest marches and the burning of draft cards came to be regular occurrences as many citizens doubted the morality and cost of U.S. By 1967, however, the American public was split in its opinion of the war. In the early 1960s, American participation in the war was sold to the public on the basis of the “domino theory”-if Vietnam fell to the communists, then all of Southeast Asia would fall, followed by the rest of the world. The war, however, was filled with ambiguity. By 1967, the date of the publication of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” American military involvement in Vietnam had mushroomed into a full-scale war. American presidents from Eisenhower to Nixon found themselves enmeshed in the struggle to avoid a communist Vietnam. The French defeat in the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam opened a vacuum of power in this southeast Asian country-a vacuum quickly filled by the communist nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh. Indeed, it appears that American fear of technology and nuclear war nearly equaled American fear of communism during the Cold War years.Īt the height of the Cold War and American fear of communism, a series of events took place that led to American involvement in the Vietnam War. The 1962 bestseller Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, and the subsequent 1964 movie version, described just such a war, as did the 1964 Stanley Kubrick black comedy, Dr. The greatest nightmare was that a computer gone amok would launch the world into World War III, a war no one would win. Indeed, computers controlled the American nuclear arsenal, a fact that created cultural anxiety as evidenced by the movies and best-sellers of the time. Further, the military began to rely on computers to help fly planes and control bombs. During the time this story was written, the physical size of computers began shrinking as the capacity of computers increased. This close call convinced many that Doomsday was at hand.Ĭoncurrently, the technology boom was in its infancy. Only at the last possible moment did the Soviets recall their ships and begin dismantling the missile site. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev played a high-stakes game, each waiting for the other to blink, their fingers poised above the nuclear triggers that would send the world into oblivion. When the Americans discovered that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, just ninety miles off the Florida coast, the world was thrown into near panic. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 did nothing to allay fears. Many young people growing up during this time were convinced that their world would end in a nuclear firestorm. Nevertheless, there was a great deal of posturing and mutual fear. Consequently, although there were many “brush fire” wars in remote corners of the globe, there was not a world war of the scope of either World War I or World War II. ![]() It was clear that if the weapons were ever unleashed, all life on Earth would end. During this time, both the United States and the former Soviet Union built up huge arsenals of nuclear weapons aimed at each other. From the end of World War II through the mid1980s, the world endured a period commonly known as “The Cold War,” a standoff between nuclear superpowers which constantly threatened each other with mutual destruction.
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