Historian J. Ronald Oakley has referred to the first half of the 1950s as “The Age of Fear and Suspicion.”49 Nuclear war and communism were the main fears. The atomic bomb was designed to be an American monopoly that would guarantee the nation’s safety for the foreseeable future. When President Truman announced in September 1949 that the Russians had unexpectedly developed the bomb too, fear spread. Then Mao and the Communists seized power in China, also in 1949.
