A preface to the "How to Survive a
Nuclear War" World Wide Web Site.

In order to explain why I chose this text, there is some background on the Atomic Bomb and the Cold War that needs to be brought to the viewers attention.

In the 1950s, nuclear wars were portrayed in government propaganda as natural events. Families could plan for them, build their houses around them, bond during them. Civil Defense pamphlets, many distributed in the millions, urged families to take steps to prepare to survive nuclear war which could just as easily have been steps to prepare for the arrival of a photographer from Better Homes and Gardens. The 1951 Civil Defense pamphlet Atomic Blast Creates Fire gave the advice that "A Clean Building Seldom Burns." Aimed at America's housewives, and charged with preparing them to fight the inevitable fires created by a nuclear explosion, the pamphlet asserted that "Good, Clean, Housekeeping Is Civil Defense Housekeeping."

Preparing to fight fires in the aftermath of a nuclear war, while an important goal for civil defense planners, hardly offered the protection it promised. In the1957 version of the classic AEC book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the concept of cleanliness as an aspect of nuclear war survivability is absent from the chapter titled "Thermal Radiation and Its Effects." The relation of blast and fire are reduced to considerations of material and distance: a clean house will burn just as sure as a dirty house will if both are made of the same material and located the same distance from ground zero. Falsehoods such as the ones advocated in Atomic Blast Creates Fire carried the sub-textual message that maybe there weren't any real steps one could take to prepare to survive nuclear war.

Instructing his family after a nuclear explosion that it was time to help clean up, the father (in a propaganda clip in The Atomic Cafe), showed the same kind of businesslike management of nuclear war evident in the pamphlets. The calm reassuring voice of Dad in the film clip or of the government experts in the civil defense pamphlets, telling us that all it takes to come through a nuclear war is a little elbow grease and a little common sense looked ridiculous after three decades of heavy nuclear arming. The American civil defense program, criticized throughout the Cold War for its failure to equal Soviet civil defense programs, might have commanded more public attention had it scared the public to death with fears of a Soviet attack. Instead, FCDA public relations seemed to placate the American public to the awesome destructive power of these weapons, describing them as easily survivable

The purpose of thisn web site, showing people how to survive a nuclear attack, might seem odd or ubsurd considering the topic, and the state of the nuclear powers of the world today. But, alas, this is not meant to be taking 100% serious, but is actually more of a tongue in cheek look at the type of national civil defnse methods that were implemented during the cold war era. The Irony is, of course, that they're still just as relevant today. The atomic bomb hasn't gone away, people are still building them, the French are starting to test them again, and there's always the possibility, given all of that, that someone will decide to use one.

What WAS ubsurd about the cold war era was not just the iminent threat of nuclear destruction, but the sence of normalcy with which nuclear war was presented to the American people, and espically to their children. This site was created to change the beliefs and feelings of its audience. It is meant to encourage its viewers to know when they were being lied to, especially about nuclear weapons. By showing viewers the propaganda of the fifties, it can encourage them to build up defenses against the propaganda of today. The saber rattling of the late Cold War, with talk of nuclear war as winnable and survivable, framed against the images from the fifties of cleanliness as a nuclear-war preparation, or radiation as harmless, painted the new propaganda as absurd, prompting memories like that of Musil, the fear that our elder(s)-statesmen were still insane.

The nuclear war that Ronald Reagan joked about in his off-hand way in 1981, was potentially so big as to make the fears of the 1950s seem puny. Herein lies the activist nature of this site. It is meant as a foil against the propaganda of the present as much as it is an expose of the propaganda of the past, and in its use of dark comedy to wake up the American citizenry to the absurdity of nuclear war propaganda and planning,

I wanted the layout to mirror that of a cold war civil defense newsletter. I did not intend for this site to be confrontational. It is meant to be seen as art, not politics. By putting this information on-line, I hope it will give viewers somthing humerous and visually intersting to look at. (back to page 1)