I hypothesize (well, speculate because I have no real evidence for this but it is a testable idea) that the atomic and hydrogen bomb to nuclear weapon “rebranding” wasn’t a concious political PR effort but came about in the nuclear weapons design labs as a consequence of weapons design.

Through the 1950s the design labs started to think about and design weapons that used mixture of fission and fusion in their operation. First this was the road to the “Super” by way of non-staged thermonuclear weapon designs like “Alarm Clock” then when they designed the first fusion-boosted fission bombs. Later they started to realize (in the later 1950s) that all of their designs would be “fission and fusion” devices to make them smaller, lighter and less vulnerable to pre-detonation). Even the simple “A-bombs” (i.e. single stage devices with 10 to 40kT yield) were now fusion boosted. So there was no meaningful distinction between fission and fusion weapons.

The bomb designers started calling them nuclear weapons and everyone else followed suit.

The other factor is related to Alex comment about the H-bomb being considered a new class of weapon in the 1950. That’s true because when the first H-bombs werey built it came in one (energetic … 40PJ and up) size XXL: almost 3 orders of magnitude larger than the typical A-bomb. But by the time the 1960s arrives (almost) all the devices are fission/fusion weapons and the quest is for a smaller yield two stage bomb that will fit on top of Polaris. That’s part of the range of bombs with yields from 10T (0.01kT) SADM (W54) up to the 25MT B41 (W53). The people who designed, built and made political descisions about these weapons wanted a single name to refer to all of the “non-conventional” weapons.

Amusingly, I found it at my local Whole Foods while looking for “American Bungalow” which does the same thing for “to homes of the early 20th century, the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement and the bungalow lifestyle.” Before all this atomic nonsense got going…

However it turns out that “hydrogen bomb” only a steady ramp in the Fifties and by 1960 it’s on the downturn. That it never exceeds “atomic bomb” or “atomic weapons” or “nuclear weapons” really suprises me and may be an interesting insight into how the public perceived this weapon.

BTW, “superbomb” hardly gets off the origin: poor old Teller he never really had the knack for naming things.

“Up and atom” (as the Radioactive Man parodies on The Simpsons said)

Eisenhower kicked off his Atoms for Peace program to spread ostensibly civilian nuclear energy with a UN speech at the end of 1953 as a specific attempt to dampen anxieties over the surging nuclear forces of the US. Just as that was getting off the ground, CASTLE BRAVO dropped fallout as a problem into Ike’s lap…

Cause and effect often get rather hazy in describing the origins and use of discourse, even when there’s a clearly apparent relationship. Is there a memo somewhere spelling this change out? Could be, but given the human tendency to dissemble about uncomfortable topics, oftentimes bureaucrats don’t need a specific request to pick up on ways to obfuscate and move away from language that becomes uncomfortable to use.

http://neutron.kth.se/courses/reactor_physics/LectureNotes/BORAX1.pdf

The BORAX 1 final test and the EBR-1 accident were followed by the SPERT series of purposeful destructive reactor tests among a host of other reactor safety tests aimed at making the peaceful atom possible.

http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/preTMI.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=ATkLIZ06YJQC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=borax-1++meltdown&source=bl&ots=ssr38lnn7P&sig=x0llKSgvMuvMteDU8brAQfkrSDE&sa=X&ei=GG40UOGkCsSP6gGU5oFA&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=borax-1%20%20meltdown&f=false

Atomic has certainly been rehabilitated. In fact, It’s a huge category on that popular auction site. Makes it kind of hard to find the gems, like the bottle above, when sorting among all the items that atomic seems to help sell these days.

Nuclear seems to have a far more negative connotation, but that’s the current context at work. People worry when you say someone is “about to go nuclear” on something. Tell them you’re about ready to”go atomic” and they will more likely smile knowingly about your amusing retro language.

(Sorry that comment took a few days to go up — my spam filter can be unpredictably aggressive at times, even though you’ve had many previously approved posts.)