Cold Paranoia

It was my last semester of Junior High School in 1953, the beginning of the Cold War. Our family was wealthy enough to afford a television, and I was glued to it for as much time as school and baseball allowed. My family and neighbors gathered together to watch Dwight D. Eisenhower be accepted into the Oval Office. We cheered as we watched Eisenhower promise a balanced budget, lower taxes, curbed inflation, and most importantly, heightening a national commitment to counter the spread of Soviet Communist influence.

My graduating class gathered to watch a strange educational video called “Duck and Cover" for the final time. This movie showed the proper way to protect oneself in case of a nuclear bomb attack: if you see a bright flash, duck down near a sturdy object and protect your head. Not only was the movie terribly boring, but it also made me feel like a young child. Yet, after seeing it almost every year I have been in school, I began to wonder: would the Soviets ever attack?

As a senior, four years later, I had enrolled in a chemistry class where at one point we learned the effects of an atomic bomb. I would like to think that ducking and covering would save me, but would it? Have we ever done testing with nuclear explosions on the human body before? I talked with my teacher, but he did not have any answers to my questions. How vulnerable were the American people, really, to nuclear explosions? I was beginning to get frightened at the question.

One day, on my way home, I saw a large propaganda poster by the Civil Defense. It showed a nuclear explosion, and explained that even if you are not caught in the blast, you could still be affected by radioactive fallout. As I walked down the street and into the house, I began to wonder if there was any way to stay safe not only from the explosion of an atomic bomb, but from the effects of radiation on the human body. Would our fallout shelter keep us safe? Or would that be as ineffective as ducking and covering? I entered the living room and frantically asked my dad these questions. He told me to follow him to our fallout shelter. There, he took a small book off of a shelf stacked with canned goods. It was by Chuck West, and it was called Fallout Shelter Handbook.

I forgot that television existed that night and dug into the book for information. It provided some clarification on what to do in making and maintaining a fallout shelter, but talked little about what I was initially interested in: the damage a nuclear bomb could cause and whether or not I had any chance of being completely safe from a nuclear attack. I was becoming more uneasy day by day, hoping that the Soviets would not attack until I at least got the information I needed.

Summer soon began, and I started doing community service before I went off to college. My work was to help my neighbors and community members store food, water, and medicine into their shelters. Sometimes I got paid, so I could say that it was my summer job. The largest amount of work I had to do in packing, though, was in the school. For those who could not afford or thought they did not need a fallout shelter, they would find hospitality in the basement of the school were a bomb to strike.

But were shelters even logical? How could you get oxygen into the shelter without letting radiation in as well? Could someone truly get from their house to the local school before radioactive fallout would reach and contaminate them? The nuclear attack sirens ensured that the public would be notified of an attack, but would that be enough? Even if a fallout shelter is stocked sufficiently, what was the proportion of radiation after the bomb to time you had to spend inside of a fallout shelter, if you were lucky enough to be in one? The more I thought about it, the more worried I got.

On my walk back from the school, instead of the previous fallout propaganda, I saw another poster. This one advertised a free course on how to protect oneself from radioactive fallout. I was excited, and wondered whether or not my questions would finally be answered.

Unfortunately, they were not. I went to the Civil Defense course and debated with the workers on the legitimacy of fallout shelters and duck-and-covering. They assured me that said tactics would be sufficient enough in protecting yourself, but did little to explain to me the specifics behind nuclear explosions. Instead, I was recommended a book by the workers, called Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack.

This book was similar to what the Civil Defense workers had already told me, discussing fallout shelters and safety maneuvers that could protect me. It provided more reassurance that things were going to be all right, if I followed the correct rules and regulations. Even though the book was published by the Civil Defense themselves, they knew more than anybody else I had talked to yet. Sooner or later I had finally found my information, but it was not what I wanted to know. When it came to atomic bombs, we would never be safe. I was thrust into a hatred towards Communism and an intense paranoia that soon led me to move from the city into a more rural area.

When the Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980’s with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, I had realized something. Precautions advertised by the Civil Defense were not effective ways to protect ones self, but instead, it was all psychological. These precautions were used to keep the threat of a nuclear attack high on the American mind while assuring us that there was a way to protect us from it. The story of this war was not a war story at all, but a story of the American mental state.