A Fellow Just Isn't Safe ANYWHERE Anymore!: Jim Berryman on the underground A-test

A Washington Evening Star cartoon by Jim Berryman, dated 21 September 1957. A bandaged devil sits among falling rocks and atom symbols under the label "Underground A-Test," holding his head. Held in the Senate's Berryman collection at the National Archives (NAID 5743250).

What the cartoon shows

The underworld, after a blast. A horned devil with a bandage sits in a shower of rocks and atom symbols, clutching his head, his pitchfork set aside. The only words in the drawing are the label over the scene and the signature. The title carries the joke.

UNDERGROUND A-TEST

JIM BERRYMAN WASHINGTON STAR

Who drew it and where it is kept

Jim Berryman drew it for the Washington Evening Star. The original is in the Records of the U.S. Senate at the National Archives, and the archive's rights line records it as public domain. The newspaper was not a government office; the holding is.

How to read it

FRAME tags it fear appeal and then calls the fit weak, because the tone is comic. That is right. The cartoon makes a joke about scale: the tests have gone so deep that even the devil is hurt. It does not argue that testing should stop or go on. What it records is that by 1957 an atomic test was ordinary enough news for a Washington paper to play it for a laugh.

That is itself a fact about the period's messaging. The official sheets of these years tell readers to prepare for an attack or to welcome the peaceful atom. The cartoonists show the public absorbing the bomb into everyday talk. A year earlier Berryman had drawn "A test he can't abandon!", a candidate riding a bomb marked "H-bomb issue" during the 1956 campaign. The record leaves the candidate unnamed. In 1961 "Conversation Piece" listed "nuclear tests" first on the agenda between Kennedy and Macmillan.

A cartoon supplies no facts about the tests. The government's own messaging on the bomb is gathered on the civil defense and atomic age hub.