OPINION: Poor Little Superman

"When I think of contemporary America striving for mastery over nature," writes German-born Robert Jungk in a book* just published in Britain, "[I think] of a young man . . . looking at me out of cavernous eyes with a vague, nearly distracted gaze. And I must return his glance, see again the compressed lips from which the teeth stand out as a caricature. How the skull structure has pushed forward against the flesh of the cheeks which are flattened by a tremendous pressure, the skin of the forehead pulled back, the flesh of the chin sagging . . . Poor little superman."

Author Jungk found this particular superman in an aviation medical-research laboratory in California, whirling around in a centrifuge in an experiment actually calculated to save the lives of jet pilots under stress of heavy-gravity .pull. But Jungk likes the symbol far better than the simple fact. A onetime anti-Nazi German journalist, Jungk covered the U.S. for Swiss newspapers from 1947 to 1953, patiently stalking U.S. science and industry to find poor little superman in a hundred compromising poses. The total provides dazzling new evidence for old-world prejudices about the U.S.—prejudices which most European novelists are content to confirm with a trip to Wall Street, the Bowery, the Deep South and Hollywood. Jungk found other hunting grounds.

Electric Eyes. He made his way to Los Alamos, the atomic-weapons laboratory atop an isolated mesa in New Mexico. "It is as though the country without castles, moats and drawbridges were making up for its lack of middle ages; a town of 10,000 inhabitants behind a wall protected by electric eyes." He notes that the children of Los Alamos play a kind of hopscotch over chalked squares identified as "radioactive" or "contaminated." At the Hanford Plutonium Works in Richland, Wash., he seeks out the red-staked " 'burial grounds' in which radioactive refuse is interred," adding quite correctly that such cemeteries will be an ever-growing hazard to mankind through succeeding generations. He stops at Ellenton, S.C. to shed a tear over the disappearance of the tumbledown little town, which is being removed to make way for the Atomic Energy Commission's Savannah River Project.

All along the way, he turns up quotable but anonymous sources. Says "a scientist" of life in the atomic wilds: "Our experiments have grown so dangerous that we've had to withdraw into regions once inhabited by outlaws. Who knows whether we shan't come to the same sort of end? Captured, lynched, hanged—perhaps society will want to make us the scapegoat for all this damage ..."

Aerial Parades. As Jungk enters Omaha's Offutt Air Force Base, headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, he duly notes beside the gate the Latin motto, Mors Ab Alto—"Death from on high." In place of the real story of SAC's courage and foresight, he sifts out another kind of conclusion. "The heavens," he writes, "have become a vast parade ground on which a general gives his orders with the bark of a sergeant-major."