Ceiling Zero: Jim Berryman's peace dove among the A-bomb headlines of June 1953

A Washington Evening Star cartoon by Jim Berryman, dated 9 June 1953. A dove marked "Peace" with an olive branch flies into a gale of newspaper headlines, one of them "U.S. running out of storage space for A-bombs." Held in the Senate's Berryman collection at the National Archives (NAID 5743178).

What the cartoon shows

One small bird and a sky full of paper. The dove, labelled, holds its olive branch and flies head-on into the wind. Every scrap blowing at it is a headline, lettered so the reader can read each one.

PEACE

EISENHOWER LETTER FALLS ON DEAF EARS

U.S. RUNNING OUT OF STORAGE SPACE FOR A-BOMBS

SYNGMAN RHEE REJECTS TRUCE

EXPLOSIONS ROCK SEOUL

AIR FORCE CONTROVERSY CONTINUES

RADFORD SAYS NAVY WILL NOT RELAX PACIFIC PATROLS

45 B-47's CROSS ATLANTC IN 5½ HOURS

Who drew it and where it is kept

Jim Berryman drew it for the Washington Evening Star, and the original is in the Records of the U.S. Senate at the National Archives. The archive's rights line records it as a public-domain government work. That describes where the drawing is held. Berryman drew for a privately owned newspaper, not for the government.

How to read it

FRAME tags it card stacking and fear appeal. The headlines are chosen to make one point, that peace was flying into weather, and each of them is about refusal, explosion, rivalry, or reach. Syngman Rhee rejecting a truce, explosions in Seoul, a letter from the President that went unheeded, forty-five B-47 bombers crossing the Atlantic in hours, and, in the middle, a stock of atomic bombs said to be outgrowing its storage.

That middle headline is the reason the cartoon belongs with the atomic-age material. In 1953 a cartoonist for a Washington evening paper could letter a headline saying the United States was running out of storage space for A-bombs and set it beside a dove without anyone's permission. The cartoon does not argue for or against the weapons. It says the news of that week made peace hard to see.

The cartoon does not say which letter, which controversy, or whose storage report, and neither does the FRAME record, so they stay unnamed here. For how the government itself presented the atom to the public in these years, see Survival Under Atomic Attack and the civil defense and atomic age hub.