History of Fear: Science Fiction Images--the 1950's.

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  [Part of the History of the Future series.]

This cover of Amazing Stories is really very gripping, very cold in a Red Nightmare way, filled with fear and the possibility of mega-death.  The cover was made at the very beginning of the real fear of Soviet attack with nuclear weapons, made just months after the first hydrogen bomb detonation by the Soviet Union (a 400 kt device on 12 August 1953).  (The Soviets made their entrance into the nuclear endgame four years earlier, in 1949, years before most informed speculation had placed their weapon potential.)

Another face of fear in the same year (1953) in another sense of uncontrollable technology was the famous killer robot--the possibility of the breach of control of humans over the machine that they made to perform tasks that humans no longer wanted to perform. 

 And the classic image of the concern of the robot for this period must have been this dustjacket art for the first edition of Isaac Asimov's fictional history of robots in I, Robot, printed in 1950:

Classic fear and the alien, or the alien fear of more-advanced alien with superior power and the will to use it (1955): 

1958