The height of Paranoia over Nuclear War breaking out in 1956. The atmosphere of mistrust, fear, propaganda and manufactured chaos was so extreme it caused many to lose sleep at night from worry that, any minute, any time, someone would launch a barrage of missiles and the planet would face doom.
There was a deluge of reports and suppositions that a nuclear war, any nuclear war, would mean the end of civilization – unless we were prepared.
Those preparations ran the gamut, from family bomb shelters to practice drills in schools and the workplace – the phrase “duck and cover” was imbedded in our lexicon of culture. We learned new words like Conelrad and all of these would define that period of the 1950s as truly unnerving for many.
It was only decades later, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist, that we found out the average Russian was just as terrified of we Americans as we were of them. Each thought the other just crazy enough to pull the trigger and we may never know how close we came to making that all a reality.
Of the many programs on Radio and TV devoted to this era of Cold War and impending annihilation, this one, from the weekly radio and TV series American Forum of The Air, focused on what was being done to prepare for a nuclear attack – were we in fact ready? Would we in fact survive?
It’s becoming harder to imagine the mental and emotional atmosphere surrounding those times, now coming up on 70 years ago – we tend to forget that we’ve always been just a little susceptible to the vagaries of paranoia and sensationalism – how we tend to believe things that are either slightly or patently untrue because we’re just those kinds of people.
With a panel consisting of California Senator Chet Holifield (D), joint member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Defense, Representative Clair Hoffman of Michigan (R), member of the House Education of Labor Committee and Val Peterson of the Federal Civil Defense Administration. Together they discuss the issue of Civil Defense, coinciding with the mass civilian Evacuation Project in Washington to see if the government could be operated from locations many miles from the nations capitol.
All that on June 19, 1955, part of the NBC Monitor weekend radio service.
Note: before the program starts there’s news from the National Open Golf Tournament playoffs and a report that Ben Hogan announced his retirement from competitive Golf.
And that was 1956.
