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Duck and Cover and Bert the Turtle
As Americans, we learned in the 1950’s that it might not be a good idea to take life for granted. In particular, children were deeply affected by the threat of annihilation by a nuclear bomb. The Virginia Historical Society described that period in this way:
Air raid drills. Conelrad. Bomb shelters. Duck and cover. All of these were familiar terms to Americans in the Cold War culture of the 1950s. The future looked uncertain in the new Atomic Age, and there was growing tension between America and the Soviet Union. People lived with the threat of nuclear war as part of their daily lives.
President Harry Truman established the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) in 1950 after the outbreak of the Korean War. As part of the Alert America campaign, the FCDA flooded the public with some 400 million pieces of survival literature that attempted to educate and reassure people that simple civil defense procedures would protect them from a nuclear attack. People received maps showing evacuation routes, families were encouraged to build their own bomb shelters, and countless schoolchildren watched the movie “Duck and Cover” and practiced hiding under their desks when they “see the flash.”
As a child, I don’t remember being terrified. I didn’t read newspapers when I was young, and my parents didn’t discuss politics or world issues with us. Maybe we were accustomed to drills, since we had earthquake and fire drills in California, and “duck and cover” was just one more exercise for some of us. We know now that scampering under our desks for a nuclear explosion would have been a waste of time.
Many films were produced to aid the public in dealing with a nuclear bomb. One of the most well-known films, which I had never seen, was “Bert the Turtle.” I know that this 10-minute film was intended to reassure children that they could take action, but I found it frightening, even today.
In 1986, two psychologists wanted to develop a curriculum called “Choices: A Unit on Conflict and Nuclear War.” They said the program wasn’t intended to take a political position, but help students “understand what choices can be made to ensure a peaceful and secure future for the United States and the world.” They emphasized, however, “peace through strength” and treating the Soviet Union as an “intractable enemy” should be replaced with compromise, negotiation, and trust. It’s noteworthy that the original curriculum was published by the Union of Concerned Scientists in cooperation with the Massachusetts Teacher Association and the National Education Association.
According to some studies, the Cold War had a significant effect on children during that period:
One of those studies, published in 1986 in the journal Canadian Family Physician (and aptly titled “Psychological Effects of the Threat of Nuclear War”) found that those who were most affected by ‘threat of annihilation’ were, perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the most vulnerable members of society: children, teenagers, unemployed people, and caretakers. Among children, anxiety was very high; teens, on the other hand, were more likely to respond with cynicism . . . another study, published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry in 1982, found that the possibility of nuclear catastrophe was common knowledge among young people during the Cold War. Even without round-the-clock cable news coverage or a steady flow of information through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, kids of the time were readily exposed to (often horrifying) facts and speculation about nuclear tensions.
So the Cold War and the fears that accompanied it had serious consequences in the 1950s and into the 1960s. It raises a couple of questions for me, given our issues with Russia, North Korea, and Iran:
Were you affected by the rhetoric of the Cold War? If so, do you think the effects were lasting?
Second, are your children being exposed to information about nuclear dangers? In what way and by whom is it being communicated? How are you handling this information, or are you choosing not to discuss it with others or your own children?
If you teach children in school, are you discussing the issues?
For a comprehensive collection of Cold War propaganda, go here.
Published in Domestic Policy
THAT had to be so difficult to contemplate! Yes, the atmosphere nowadays is intensifying. Let’s hope it levels out–soon. Thanks, EHerring.
A practical and promising approach. But I’ll bring a bottle of Zinfandel, if you don’t mind. A little dry humor goes a long way to put things in perspective. Thanks, Mike.
I was born in the early 1950’s. I remember the drills, but we had fire drills, earthquake drills, and bomb drills, and none of them made me afraid that what we were drilling for was going to happen. I knew it was a possibility, but all of them seems equally unlikely. My favorite part about the bomb drills was that, if we got the warning early enough to go home before the bomb was likely to hit, we were supposed to cross the street in one long line, and not try to fit in the crosswalk.
Okay. I give up. What was that about? There must be a logic there I don’t see. Does it make you less likely to get hit by a bomb? ;-)
The idea was that we would not have to wait to cross the street in the crosswalk, since we were going to be in a big group. That way it would take us less time to get home. I’m not sure what we were supposed to do when we got across, since we wouldn’t all fit on the sidewalk. We just practiced the crossing the street part.