The Impact of the Atomic H-bomb in the Italian Media and Cultural Community

This speech wants to examine how the italian cultural community confronted, through the 1950s and the first part of the 1960s, the problem of the nuclear bomb and the technical innovations in the atomic field. The work, based on original e public documents, try to describes how the international military race aimed at building nuclear arsenals, and several dramatic events linked to scientific experimentation fostered in Italy a slowly but steadily growing counsciousness of the new problems posed by the atom. The idea is consider not only the role of Italian scientists following the lead of movements born abroad, participating in the debate about the use of nuclear energy, both peaceful and, overall, military. To study the impact of the atomic fears and hope in the italian public opinion is interesting analyse the presence in the media (press, books, exibihtions, theatre, cinema, television....) of intellectuals and artists that offered to the public their visions and interpretation of the nuclear age. Artists like Calvino, Buzzati, Zavattini, Guttuso, Jacovitti, only to name a few, played an interesting role in the mobilization of the italian counsciousness. The line of Emilio Sereni directing the filo-communist Partigiani della Pace was emblematic in this sense but not exclusive. This approach brings directly the investigation to analyse how this debate was received into the Italian political institutions and parties and interacted, among with the public imaginary, with wider arguments about Italy’s position in the world of the Cold war and it’s specific role in international organizations. Different and changing opinions on the prospect of a nuclear war wich grew within the catholic world, both in the Church, in the Christian Democratic Party and in the catholic intellectuals circles, are also taken into account. The relation between communist, socialist e catholic artists and intellectuals is an interesting elements to understand the impact of the modernization of war in the italian political and cultural contest, until the experiments of La Pira in Florence, with the Congresses for Peace e Christian civilization, and Capitini in Perugia, with the first Italian Peace March. Finally emerges how difficult was in Italy for the debate on nuclear energy to trascend the limits of party warfare, and charts the slow and painful growth of an indipendent, non-political pacifist movement.