The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 9 | Issue 13 | Number 5 | Article ID 3505 | Mar 21, 2011

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Whole Earth or No Earth: The Origin of the Whole Earth Iconin the Ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki　　地球全体か地球全滅か−−ヒロシマ・ナガサキの灰燼より浮上した地球の全体図

Robert Jacobs

Whole Earth or No Earth: The Originof the Whole Earth Icon in the Ashesof Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Robert Jacobs

"Once a photograph of the Earth, taken fromoutside, is available - once the sheer isolation of

the Earth becomes known - a new idea aspowerful as any in history will be let loose."

--Fred Hoyle, 19501

The Whole Earth, taken by Apollo 17, Dec.7, 19722

Introduction

The image of the Whole Earth is one of themost ubiquitous visual icons of the latetwentieth century. It is everywhere, on books,

posters, advertisements, packaging, and allover the world-wide-web. It is the descendentof such essential early tools of humanimagining as the map and the globe, but theWhole Earth is a radical reformulation of thoseolder tools. It is a tool that opens humans to anew perspective about the relationship of theindividual to the planet, and to the othercreatures living on the planet, especially theother people.

The history of the modern visual image of theWhole Earth derives from photographs taken ofthe Earth from space. Much as the ability tosee deeply into space has completely revisedour ideas about the nature of the universearound us, the ability to see our home planetfrom space, has fundamentally revised ourconcepts of the nature of the planet on whichwe live.

Photographs of the Whole Earth enteredculture in the late 1960s as a result of thedevelopment of satellites and manned spacetravel. But in this article I will argue that thevisual content of the icon of the Whole Earthactually emerged several decades earlier.Before there were color photographs of theEarth from space, the visual image of the Earthas whole was first expressed in a manner wewould come to associate with this icon byeditorial cartoonists in direct and immediateresponse to the use of atomic bombs on theJapanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in1945.

These cartoonists grasped, as did others, thatthe threat posed to human civilization by the

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invention and manufacture of nuclear weaponsthreatened the people of the Earth in a holisticway-it threatened the very existence of life onEarth.

It was instantly clear to people who heard thenews of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki that something fundamental hadchanged in human warfare.3 Wars had longtaken the lives of the soldiers that fought them,and over time the tactics and weaponry of warhad evolved leading to the destruction of citiesand various scorched earth tactics. ThroughoutWorld War Two, people had fled cities to avoidthe destruction being wrought by aerialbombing and crude rockets. But in the atomicage, there was nowhere to flee to; as DavidBradley put it, there was "no place to hide."4

International law had established a distinctionbetween combatants and noncombatants. Oftenthat line had blurred as cities were attacked byinvading armies, and as technology made citiesthemselves targets. In the atomic age no onewas away from the battlefield: the battlefieldwas the Earth itself. The Cold War threat of aglobal thermonuclear war involving thousandsof weapons detonating in a brief window oftime was envisioned as the mechanism thatcould bring "the end of the world." Nuclearweapons were imagined to hold the collectivefate of the world in their hands.

Against this backdrop a new vision of the Earthemerged: the Earth as target, the Earth asvictim. In imaginings of a nuclear war, whatwould be killed was the planet as a whole, andall of its living creatures. While apocalypticmythologies worldwide had spoken of thepotential for global species death, this washitherto at the discretion of divine forces. Withthe advent of nuclear weaponry, this power wasnow in the hands of mundane and flawedhuman leaders. The future not only lookedgrim, it looked apocalyptic.

Many people immediately grasped thisnarrative after the news from Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. This study will examine the work ofWestern editorial cartoonists who not onlygrasped this idea, but were able to put it intovisual form and communicate it to a wideaudience, amazingly even in the first week ofthe atomic age. Their work depicted this TargetEarth and examined its dilemma at the hands ofthe new nuclear weaponry. I would argue thatthe work of these cartoonists was the very firstp lace where we can begin to see theemergence of the visual icon that would becalled the Whole Earth once it was renderedinto photographic form. The image of theWhole Earth is the photographic opposite of theimage of Target Earth: Target Earth depictedwhat would die-the Whole Earth depicted whatwas alive. They are negative images of eachother, and in that way, in the dark imaginingsof the days, weeks and months after the newsfrom Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we discernprimal awareness of the threat of nuclear warthat gave birth to the most life affirming visualicon of the twentieth century. While the imageof the Whole Earth had to wait for cameras tobe sent up into space on rockets, the content ofthe icon blew in on the wind along with thefallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Whole Earth Image Content

As a visual icon, the image of the Whole Earthas seen from space communicates a verycomplicated set of ideas in a very simple image.This iconography centers on the way in whichthe image simplifies many of the complexitiesof human society through the idea ofwholeness. Let's examine the most important ofthese iconographic statements.

The image of the Whole Earth presents a worldwithout the political borders that have for solong defined the way most people envision theworld. This old model is of a world of divisions:divisions between countries, religions, racesand ethnicity, economic philosophies, andpolitical systems. In the image of the WholeEarth there are no visible borders on the

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landmasses. The only real division visible onthe Earth's surface is between land and sea. Itreinforces the idea that the borders we haveenvisioned between our societies are largelyartificial and of human construction. It tells astory about us all being from the same placeand living in a common space.

The other border that comes into sharp relief inthis image is the separation between thebeautiful blue planet and the cold darkness ofspace. This aspect of the image emphasizes thefragility of life on Earth. The Earth is seen as asmall outpost, a delicate planet enveloped by athin atmosphere in which all of life exists; thisis cast against the immensity and emptiness ofspace. It almost seems as if the iciness of spacecould swallow the Earth up if we are not lucky,and careful. Rather than an eternal sense oftimelessness, the Earth appears to beprecarious when cast against such emptiness,giving it a sense of vulnerability. Themaintenance of life on this planet would appearto take constant vigilance against powerfulforces. It suggests the need for the carefulbalancing of complex factors to assurecontinued life here.

A long view of the Earth against theemptiness of space

What these other values combine to ultimatelysuggest is that all of the creatures alive onEarth share a single common destiny. Apartfrom our individual destinies, when oneconsiders the long-term welfare of this fragileplanet in the darkness of space, either theplanet will survive, along with its inhabitants,or it will perish. This is perhaps the mostpowerful and profound aspect of theiconography of the Whole Earth. If a nuclearwar were to break out, the borders soimportant to humans, between the conflictingparties, and between combatant and non-combatants , would be i l lusory . Thecontamination of radioactive fallout would notstop at the borders that humans draw on maps:the planet as a whole would be affected. And inthis sense, the victims of nuclear war would beall of the inhabitants of Earth. The victim of anuclear war would be the Earth itself and all itsinhabitants.

Another significant thing to emerge out of sucha perspective is the sense of the Earth as asingle ecosystem. Whereas previously peoplemay have thought of themselves as living in themountains, or on an island, or on the plains,consideration of the Whole Earth makes onerealize that the problems that affect onesegment of the ecosystem may affect all theothers. An enlargement of the sense of selfaccompanies this realization-whereaspreviously one might identify as a citizen of acertain country, tribe or religion, looking at theimage of the Whole Earth can work to changeone's social calibration to a more globalperspective. Such a perspective is at the root ofthe debate about global warming. People areaware that their efforts to make changes willnot succeed if some countries work againstthose changes. The solutions must be holistic,systemic, and not restricted by the artificialborders of human map making, war making orvoting.

History of the Whole Earth as a Visual Icon

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The image of the Whole Earth is taken fromphotographs of the Earth as seen from space.Before that, our depictions of the Earth were inthe form of globes and maps. Topographicalglobes would show the world without politicalborders, but much more common have alwaysbeen the political globes which emphasized thedivisions between nations, and presumably,people. These globes have different colors fornations that border each other so that theborders stand more dramatically. There werealways bold black lines to define those borders,and in the case of globes made in the UnitedStates, thinner lines to divide the nation intostates, so that even minor political boundariesare highlighted.

This model of the Earth began to change withthe advent of rocket technology in the late1950s (the first crude rockets were created bythe Nazis in the mid-1940s). Not long afterhumans launched rockets into space, theybegan to attach cameras to them in order tophotograph the Earth. This was done primarilyto study weather patterns on Earth, and assistw e a t h e r p r e d i c t i o n a n d m i l i t a r yreconnaissance.

Some of the earlier manned and unmannedspace rockets took photographs of the Earththat were published in popular magazines.Typically these were taken too close to theEarth to show the whole blue ball that isfamiliar to us now. Often these early pictureswould show the curvature of the Earth ingrainy black and white photographs. The imagebelow shows a still photograph from the veryfirst television pictures taken in space on April1, 1960 by a satellite for TIROS-1 (TelevisionInfrared Observation Satellite Program), anearly NASA effort to gauge the usefulness ofsatellite observations of the Earth.

TIROS-1 (April 1, 1960)5

Photography was an afterthought on the earlymanned space missions. John Glenn was thefirst American astronaut to bring a camera intospace on his historic first orbit of the Earth onMercury-6 (February 20, 1962). This was anAnsco Autoset 35mm camera (made by Minolta)that was purchased at a drug store near thelaunch site at Cape Canaveral in Florida notlong before take off.6

Subsequent to this, photos of the Earth fromspace became more common, yet tended tofocus on showing familiar landmasses fromspace. Such photographs might show the hornof Africa, or the Florida peninsula; featuresfamiliar to readers from a lifetime of seeingmaps and globes, now seen as actualphotographs from above. This perspectivetended to reinforce previously held imagesabout the nature of the Earth rather than tochallenge them, as Fred Hoyle's 1950statement in the opening quote encouraged.

Hoyle's idea sprouted one day in the mind of a

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counterculture visionary (though the Hoylequote was unknown to him at the time).Stewart Brand had been a member of thelegendary sixties crew the Merry Prankstersled by Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs. An organizerof the Trips Festivals, held in 1965-6. Brandrecounts that in February of 1966, he wasdoing LSD sitting on the roof of his apartmentbuilding in San Francisco's North Beach andlooking at the San Francisco skyline. Dwellingon a point made at a Buckminster Fuller lecturethat he had recently attended in Santa Fe, NewMexico, Brand noticed that the buildings werenot parallel, because the Earth beneath themwas curved. Brand remembered that Fullerclaimed that, "people perceived the Earth asflat and infinite, and that that was the root ofall their misbehavior. Now, from my altitude ofthree stories and one hundred mikes I couldsee that it was curved, think it, and finally feelit."7 Brand expanded his initial vision from thatseed-point, realizing that "the more altitude Igot, the more I would see that curvature untilthe curvature closed and you saw the wholething."8

Still tripping, Brand conceived of makingbuttons to promote this vision. At first hephrased his statement, "Take a photograph ofthe entire Earth." But this didn't feel right. Hedidn't like the word "entire." Then the phrasecame to him, "Why haven't we seen aphotograph of the whole Earth yet?" Thuscoining the term that would have almost asmuch cultural clout as the image it described.Brand had several hundred of the buttonsmanufactured and he put them on a sandwichboard and began to sell them at Sather Gate ofthe University of California at Berkeley. Hesent them to NASA administrators, members ofCongress, Soviet scientists and diplomats,Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and UNofficials. He eventually brought his sandwichboard to other college campuses, selling hisbuttons at Stanford, Harvard, Columbia andMIT.

Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Button, 19669

The very first photographs that show the WholeEarth as we now recognize it were takenduring the historic Apollo 8 mission inDecember of 1968. This was the first rocketthat circled the Moon and returned to Earth.When it passed behind the Moon, it was cut offfrom radio contact with the Earth for fourminutes, a tense time for NASA scientists andfor the huge television audience watching athome.

After the third revolution, a historic momentoccurred. It was early evening on ChristmasEve. The astronauts showed the televisionaudience what they could see from theirwindow, a half Earth rising above the lunarsurface. Then the three astronauts offered amemorable reading. "For all the people onEarth," stated astronaut William A. Anders,"the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we wouldlike to send you." The three astronauts thentook turns reading the first eight verses of thebook of Genesis, and when they had finished,crew commander Frank Borman concluded,"And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close withgood night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, andGod bless all of you - all of you on the good

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Earth."10

Poet Archibald MacLeish wrote about the colorimages coming back from Apollo 8 on the frontpage of the New York Times the next day,Christmas 1968, "To see the earth as it truly is:small and blue and beautiful in that eternalsilence where it floats, is to see ourselves asriders on the earth together, brothers on thatbright loveliness in the eternal cold. Brotherswho know they are truly brothers."11

Among the most widely reprinted photographsfrom that historic space mission was one knownas the "Earthrise" photograph taken with theMoon in the foreground. This was important,according to Brand, because it showed the"clearly living Earth over the edge of a clearlydead planet."12

"Earthrise" photo from Apollo 8, December1969

This image was virtually omnipresent forAmericans in the next few years as it wasreprinted on a US postage stamp, and forseveral years CBS news anchor Walter Cronkiteused it as the backdrop to his show.

Among the first artists to use the image of theWhole Earth as a powerful visual iconic toolwas Stanley Kubrick in his 1968 masterpiece,2001: A Space Odyssey.13 This film, among the

most philosophically speculative and visuallystriking movies ever made, has several scenesthat feature the partial images of the WholeEarth that were available to Kubrick at the timeof production. For many of the viewers whosaw 2001 in the theaters, this was their firstexposure to this powerful visual icon.

The Star Child encounters the Whole Earthin 2001: A Space Odyssey

Kubrick uses the image of the Whole Earth as abackdrop to scenes set on the Moon early inthe movie, but the most dramatic use of theicon was in the film's conclusion.14 In thisscene, astronaut Dave Bowman has gonethrough the abstract series of moments thatfollow his attempts to land on the "monolith"which is orbiting Jupiter, and sending radiosignals to some unknown distant destination.Bowman's journey into the monolith takes himthrough a series of time and space distortingchanges, including a journey through his ownlife from infancy to old age and death. Bowmanis then reborn as the Star Child, which appearsto be the next step in the evolution of humanconsciousness. The Star Child is depicted as afetus floating in space in an amniotic sack. TheStar Child turns to consider the Whole Earthfloating in front of it, both glowing a brightblue-white. The two appear as newbornversions of Man and Earth, face-to-face, readyto be born into a future of unthinkablepossibilities.15

2001 was widely heralded as a film about "thefuture of humanity," and among the visual toolsthat informed viewers that they were looking at

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the future was the image of the Whole Earth asseen from space.

The Whole Earth Catalog (1968)

Also in 1968, Stewart Brand would publish hiscounterculture classic, The Whole EarthCata log . 1 6 Th is v i r tua l gu ide to thecounterculture lifestyle of the 1960s would gothrough several editions (eventually selling 2.5million copies), and win the National BookAward for its 1972 edition. In his 2005commencement speech at Stanford University,Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs said ofthe Whole Earth Catalog, "It was sort of likeGoogle in paperback form, 35 years beforeGoogle came along."17 The Whole Earth Catalogput a photograph taken by a satellite in 1967on its cover, and also put the phrase "WholeEarth" into public discourse. It began with thestatement, "We are as gods and might as wellget used to it."18

One of the immediate impacts of the entry ofthe image and concept of the Whole Earth intopopular culture was Earth Day. The first EarthDay was celebrated on April 22, 1970 in manydifferent cities in the United States and severalother countries. This was a day intended toheighten awareness of environmental issues inthe public mind, and also to "celebrate theEarth." Twenty million Americans took part inthe first Earth Day, on hundreds of collegecampuses, high schools and in city parks.19

Stewart Brand had gotten many of his ideas,and much of his inspiration for the Whole EarthCatalog from the work of Buckminster Fuller.Fuller was a technologist, and a visionary whoheld many patents, had invented the geodesicdome, and had a knack for reframingtraditional concepts. Fuller had spoken foryears of what he called "Spaceship Earth."British economist Barbara Ward paraphrasedFuller's ideas in her presentation at the sixthseries of the George B. Pegram Lectures atColumbia University in 1965. Ward titled herlecture series "Spaceship Earth," after Fuller'sphrase, and explained his perspective that:

T h e m o s t r a t i o n a l w a y o fconsidering the whole human racetoday is to see it as a ship's crew ofa single spaceship on which all ofus, with a remarkable combinationof security and vulnerability, aremaking our pilgrimage throughinfinity. Our planet is not muchmore than the capsule withinwhich we have to live as humanbeings if we are to survive the vastspace voyage upon which we havebeen engaged for hundreds ofmillennia - but without yet noticingour condition.20

Fuller added another critical perspective to thespaceship concept, "Spaceship Earth was soextraordinarily well invented and designed that

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to our knowledge humans have been on boardit for two million years not even knowing thatthey were on board a ship. And our spaceship isso superbly designed as to be able to keep liferegenera t ing on board desp i te thephenomenon, entropy, by which all localphysical systems lose energy."21

Here Fuller was foreshadowing the theory thatwould come to provide much of the intellectualframework for the ideas encoded in the contentof the Whole Earth icon; the "Gaia hypothesis"of James Lovelock. A consultant at the JetPropulsion Laboratories of the CaliforniaInstitute of Technology in Pasadena during theearly and mid 1960s, Lovelock was working onthe problem of formulating methods todetermine if there was life on Mars. Themethod that Lovelock and others designedinvolved the use of atmospheric analysis as ameans of life-detection. This theory was basedon the idea that a key outward sign of thepresence of life on a planet would be a localreduction of entropy:

The design of a universal life-detection experiment based onentropy reduction seemed at thist i m e t o b e a s o m e w h a tunpromising exercise. However,assuming that life on any planetwould be bound to use fluid media- oceans, atmosphere, or both - asconveyor belts for raw materialsand waste products, it occurred tome that some of the activityassociated with concentratedentropy reduction within a livingsystem might spill over into theconveyor belt regions and altertheir composition. The atmosphereof a life-bearing planet would thusbecome recognizably differentfrom that of a dead planet.22

Lovelock and his colleague Dian Hitchcock then

proceeded to use the Earth as a model to testthe theory. "Our results convinced us that theonly feasible explanation of the Earth's highlyimprobable atmosphere was that it was beingmanipulated on a day-to-day basis from thesurface, and the manipulator was life itself."23

Turning this technique to an analysis of Mars, itwas easy to conc lude f rom a s impleatmospheric analysis performed from Earth,that there was no life currently on Mars. Butwhat interested Lovelock was no longer Mars,but the Earth. Lovelock began to focus on thisproblem in 1966 while on a grant from ShellResearch Limited. Lovelock's work led him tothe:

development of the hypothesis thatthe entire range of living matter onEarth, from whales to viruses, andfrom oaks to algae, could beregarded as constituting a singlel i v i n g e n t i t y , c a p a b l e o fman ipu la t i ng the Ear th ' satmosphere to suit its overallneeds and endowed with facultiesand powers far beyond those of itsconstituent parts....that the Earth'satmosphere is actively maintainedand regulated by l i fe on thesurface, that is, by the biosphere.24

Lovelock felt that this single entity (life, thebiosphere) needed a name. His neighbor inWiltshire the Nobel Prize winning novelistWilliam Golding, "recommended that thecreature be called Gaia, after the Greek Earthgoddess also known as Ge, from which root thesciences of geography and geology derive theirnames....By now a planet-sized entity, albeithypothetical, had been born."25

Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis caught thefascination of the public during the 1980s, andby the 1990s it had become a common name inthe American environmental movement for the

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Earth. While few could cite the basis for thetheory, many could sum up its implications asdescribing "mother Earth," or the "Earthgoddess." The implications of the Gaiahypothesis gave seeming scientific groundingto the wholeness many had perceived inlooking at the image of the Whole Earth.Certainly, of the many books published eachyear with the word "Gaia" in the title, few donot have the image of the Whole Earth on theircover (although Lovelock's book did not).

The Cartoons

On Sunday August 12, 1945, the New YorkTimes published the following three editorialcartoons together, just as they are reprintedbelow.

New York Times, Sunday August 12, 194526

New York Times, Sunday August 12, 194527

All three cartoons, by three differentcartoonists, offer visions of the impact of thenew atomic bomb on human civilization. Thefirst is by Lute Pease, who would win thePulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons in 1949.Showing a devilish character named "FutureThreat of War" being restrained fromhammering the Earth by a hand named"Control of Atomic Power," the caption reads,"For a perfect earth." The point is that thefuture of war in the atomic era threatens theEarth as a whole, and only control of atomicpower can keep that threat in check.

The second is by Sir David Cecil Low, originallyof New Zealand, who worked in England. Hiscartoons were reprinted in the New York Timesfor almost a decade during the 1940s. Thiscartoon shows a man dressed as a scientiststanding astride the Earth. A paper in hispocket is t it led "The Atom," and he isaddressing a baby named "Humanity," andoffering the baby a ball named "Life or Death."He tempts the baby with the question, "Babyplay with nice ball?" The implication of thiscartoon is clear; playing with "the atom" is alife or death game for immature humanity.

New York Times, Sunday August 12, 194528

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In the third cartoon, a heavenly hand is strikingthe Earth with a lightning bolt named "AtomicPower." The caption reads, "A new era in man'sunderstanding." The cartoonist, DanielFitzpatrick had won the Pulitzer Prize foreditorial cartoons in 1926 and would win itagain the year that this cartoon was printed,1945.

New York Times, Sunday August 12, 194529

New York Times, August 12, 194531

Two pages further into that Sunday's New YorkTimes, the first Sunday issue after thebombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, isanother cartoon repr inted from ThePhiladelphia Record, drawn by cartoonist JerryDoyle, among the most prolific cartoonists ofthe New Deal era. Here we see the giant handnamed "Science" holding the Earth, which isnamed "The Future of Civilization." The captionreads, "In the palm of his hand." Much as in theiconography of the Whole Earth, the fate ofhuman civilization appears to be a collectiveone and here, science is the God that willdetermine the future of humanity.

While the specific focus of the cartoons differs,a striking common feature is their depiction ofthe Earth in all four cartoons. All of thecartoons show the Earth exhibiting visualcontent that perfectly foreshadows, albeit inblack and white, the later icon of the WholeEarth. The emphasis on the Earth as a place ofseparate nations is gone. In each cartoon, the

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Earth is present as a single entity that is forcedto deal with the advent of atomic weapons. It isclear that in each, the destiny of all the peoplein the world is a common destiny. Even in theone cartoon in which landforms are depicted,"Baby play with nice ball," the baby is notlocated in one specific country and there are nopolitical borders, only the division betweenland and sea. In all of the cartoons, the Earth isa whole planet with a grid, a traditional meansof establishing three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional image, but one that alsoemphasizes the continuity and equality of thedifferent locations.

In early October of 1945 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed another cartoon by DanielFitzpatrick, in which the Earth hangs in spacefacing an equally large, and menacing spherenamed "Atomic Bomb," each in the form of ahuman face. The worried Earth looks at theAtomic Bomb and asks, "Well__?" The Earth isseeking to determine its destiny at the hands ofthis new threat, which is as large and powerfulas the whole planet itself. Again the planet isshown as having a grid, no individual nations,and in this case, it is depicted as a single being.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 10, 194532

The Saturday Review of Literature, March30, 194633

As the world moved into the Atomic Age, suchdepictions became more common. This cartoonby Roy Justus, originally printed in theMinneapolis Star Journal, and reprinted herefrom a March 1946 review of the booklet OneWorld or None in The Saturday Review ofLiterature, depicts the world as a dog understress. This dog/world is named "WorldPolitics" and seems helplessly under the controlof its tail, named "Atomic Bomb." The captionadvises that, "The tail does wag the dog."

Again the world has a grid and no bordersbetween nations. It is a single being and thefate of world politics is clearly a collective one.

Perhaps no Cold War cartoonist went furtherwith this new visual construct of the world thandid Herbert Block, better known as Herblock ofthe Washington Post. In a cartoon from 1949, a

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bomb-shaped character that Block would userepeatedly (Atom), is seen as far bigger andmore powerful than the puny Earth. Atom isholding the Earth, which has four birthdaycandles on it to symbolize the number of yearssince the bombing of Hiroshima and isspeaking to an Everyman who hangs his headwhile holding a newspaper that reports that theUN has given up on atomic control. Atom has adownright menacing look on his face as he asksthe human, "Want to see me blow outeverything with one puff?" 3 4

Washington Post, August 194935

Washington Post, August 11, 1953

The theme of nuclear weapons holding theworld's collective fate in its hands was acontinual theme in Herblock's work. A 1953cartoon shows a hand, far bigger than theEarth, and far bigger than Atom's hands,named "H-bomb." This hand is tossing theworld up and down in its hand like a ball.Again, the Earth is a globe with a grid ratherthan nations, and it would be hard to imaginethat the fate of any part of it would be differentthan the fate of any other part in the face ofsuch a threat.36

There were political movements contemporaryto these cartoons that helped to inform andgive substance to their iconography. Not longafter the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,the World Government movement emerged as adirect response to the new weapons. Manysocial leaders, and especially scientific leadersbelieved that a single world government wasthe only way to avoid an arms race andeventual nuclear war between two or morecompeting nations. The United Nations Atomic

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Energy Commission began its first session everbeing lectured that its mission was to choosebetween "the quick and the dead."

An example of this advocacy can be seen in the1946 booklet, One World or None. This booklet,published through the Federation of AmericanScientists, includes contributions from HaroldShapley, Einstein, Leo Szilard and many otherswho had become well known following theatomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Part of the piece written by the "Father of theAtomic Bomb," J. Robert Oppenheimer, amplyillustrates the arguments of the book:

The vastly increased powers ofdestruction that atomic weaponsgive us have brought with them aprofound change in the balancebetween national and internationalinterests. The common interest ofall in the prevention of atomicwarfare would seem immensely toovershadow any purely nationalinterest, whether of welfare or ofsecurity. At the same time it wouldseem of most doubtful value in anylong term to re ly on purelynational methods of defense forinsuring security,...The truesecurity of this nation, as of anyother will be found, if at all, only inthe collective efforts of all.37

However, having completed their work on theatomic bomb, the US government was notparticularly interested in the political opinionsof Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan

Project scientists. The United States pursued asecurity policy of national rather thaninternational welfare and embraced nuclearweaponry as a key to American empire anddominance. They adhered to the traditionalglobe-based view of the world as divided bythick black lines drawn along national borders.The only scientists who were to be continuallywelcomed into the world of political advisingwere those (like Lawrence and Teller) whoadvocated conceptions of national securitybased in the Cold War logic of increasedarmaments and an expansive military ratherthan one based in considering the welfare ofthe "collective" planet and global society.

Conclusions: Target Earth

I have collected dozens of such editorialcartoons printed between August of 1945 and1963, all of them predating even the oldest ofthe photographs of the Earth from space. Inthese cartoons, the Earth is depicted, not as theWhole Earth we would recognize, with all of itsattributes of life: the "blue bubble of air" thatArchibald MacLeish spoke of on the front pageof the New York Times on Christmas Day of1968, the mythical goddess Gaia that wouldcome to be associated with the stunningphotographs of the Whole Earth from space.What we see in these political cartoons isTarget Earth, the Earth as the target of nuclearwar. Here lies the true origin of the icon wehave come to know as the Whole Earth as thefeared victim of nuclear weapons. The threat ofnuclear war created a narrative of global death,of collective death, of a death that wouldencircle the globe, oblivious to the politicalborders we humans had imagined as so real,indeed, for which we had fought and died.

Considering the challenges of the new AtomicAge, Albert Einstein advised in 1945 that, "Thesituation calls for a courageous effort, for aradical change in our whole attitude, in theentire political concept...Otherwise humancivilization will be doomed."38 The second half

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of the twentieth century, dominated by thelogics and funding demands of the Cold Warseemed to reinforce Einstein's warning thatonly doom lay ahead. But a counter-narrativealso was born in 1945-a narrative of the Earthas a s ingle being, whose dest iny wasinseparable from those of all its inhabitants.This icon, soon to be seen in photographs andgiven a name, articulated the idea of one worldin a visual image that could be embraced bypeople of any culture.

This icon had no strength by itself to counterthe brutal destructiveness of nationalist-drivenwar, only people do. Relocating our sense ofidentity from that of members of a nation tothat of beings of a single planet, however, is anecessary step that can empower us tocontinue to take more steps.

This is a revised, expanded and fully illustratedversion of a chapter that appeared in, RobertJacobs, ed. Filling the Hole in the NuclearFuture: Art and Popular Culture Respond to theBomb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).

Robert Jacobs is an associate professor at theHiroshima Peace Institute at Hiroshima CityUniversity. He is the author of The Dragon'sTai l : Americans Face the Atomic Age(University of Massachusetts Press, 2010) andnumerous articles on nuclear history andculture.

Recommended Citation: Robert Jacobs, "WholeEarth or No Earth: The Origin of the WholeEarth Icon in the Ashes of Hiroshima andNagasaki," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue13 No 5, March 28, 2011.

Notes

1 Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe(Oxford: Blackwell, 1950).

2 Nasa website.

3 See, Robert Jacobs, "Dodging Dystopia: The

Role of Nuclear Narratives in Averting GlobalThermonuclear Warfare," in, Antony Adolf, ed.,Nonkilling History: Shaping Policy withLessons from the Past (Honolulu: The Centerfor Global Nonviolence, 2010) 219-236.

4 David Bradley, No Place to Hide (Boston:Little, Brown and Company, 1948).

5 Nasa website.

6 Gary H. Kitmacher, "Astronaut Sti l lPhotography During Apollo," August 2004. Seealso, Neil Maher, "Shooting the Moon,"Environmental History 9:3 (July 2004): 526-31.

7 Stewart Brand, "'Why Haven't We Seen theWhole Earth Yet?" in, Lynda Obst, ed., TheSixties: The Decade Remembered Now, By thePeople Who Lived It Then (New York: RandomHouse/Rolling Stone Press, 1977), 168.

8 Author interview, Stewart Brand, Sausalito,California, March 2006.

9 From "Whole Earth Button," on StewartBrand's website.

10 "Orbiting the Moon Christmas Eve," ApolloExpeditions to the Moon.

11 Archibald MacLeish, "Bubble of Blue Air,"New York Times, December 25, 1968, 1.

12 Author interview, Stewart Brand, Sausalito,California, March 2006.

13 Stanley Kubrick, director, 2001: A SpaceOdyssey, 1968 (MGM). The film premiered inWashington D.C. on April 2, 1968, two daysbefore the assassination of Martin Luther King,Jr.

14 Kubrick obtained photographs of the partialEarth from the Air Force Cambridge ResearchLaboratories. See, Jerome Agel, ed., TheMaking of Kubrick's 2001 (New York: NewAmerican Library, 1970), 321.

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15 In the novelized version of the film, ArthurClarke includes a sequence at this point inwhich nuclear weapons are launched from theEarth, but the Star Child simply eliminatesthem, thus presenting the new human as ableto transcend the nuclear dilemma. See, ArthurC. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York:New American Library, 1968).

16 Stewart Brand, ed., Whole Earth Catalog(Menlo Park: The Portola Institute, 1968). See,also, Fred Turner, From Counterculture toCyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole EarthNetwork, and the Rise of Digital Utopia(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

17 Steve Jobs, "You've Got to Find What YouLove," Stanford University CommencementSpeech, June 15, 2005.

18 Whole Earth Catalog, 1.

19 Jack Lewis, "The Birth of the EPA," originallyprinted in the EPA Journal in November 1985,reprinted at EPA.gov.

20 Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth (New York:Columbia University Press, 1966), 15. See also,Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, Only OneEarth: The Care and Maintenance of a SmallPlanet (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1972).

21 Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual forSpaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern IllinoisUniversity Press, 1969), 50.

22 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life onEarth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979),6

23 Ibid., 6.

24 Ibid., 9.

25 Ibid., 10. Golding would win the Nobel Prizein 1983.

26 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E.They are reprinted by the Times from threedifferent newspapers, the first from TheNewark Evening News, the second from theNew York Times itself, and the third from theSt. Louis Post-Dispatch.

27 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E.

28 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E.They are reprinted there from three differentnewspapers, the first from The NewarkEvening News, the second from the New YorkTimes itself, and the third from the St. LouisPost-Dispatch.

29 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E.

30 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 6E.

31 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 6E.

32 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 10, 1945, 2C.

33 The Saturday Review of Literature, March 30,1946, 8.

34 Reprinted in, Herbert Block, The HerblockBook (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 33.

35 Washington Post, August 1945.

36 Reprinted in, Herbert Block, Herblock's Hereand Now (New York: Simon and Schuster,1955), 193.

37 Dexter Masters and Katharine Way, eds., OneWorld or None (New York: WhittleseyHouse/McGraw Hill Book Co., 1946), 25.

38 Albert Einstein, "The War Is Won But PeaceIs Not," Essays in Humanism (New York:Philosophical Library, 1950), 65-8. This isreprinted from an address originally presentedat the Fifth Nobel Anniversary Dinner at theAstor Hotel, New York City, December 10,1945.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.htmlhttp://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.htmlhttp://epa.gov/35thanniversary/topics/epa/15c.htm

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