General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOld timers: Was all the crap that the government put out about nuclear war in the 50s
designed to freak people the hell out, keep people calm, neither, or both?
I bring this up because I just watched The Atomic Cafe.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/122397/atomic-cafe
For me, the idea that anyone would WANT to survive a nuclear war is laughable. But somehow the government made it sound like it wasn't no thing.
Why did they do this? What were they thinking?
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)Trying to juggle the twin agendas of ensuring that Americans were shitting themselves in fear of the "Ruskies" while trying to reassure those same Americans that we would inevitably "win" a nuclear war.
In other words, keeping the commies scary enough that Americans didn't say boo about what the US government was doing, but at the same time trying to keep Americans from thinking too hard about the consequences.
The modern equivalent would be george Dubya's approach; "Be afraid of terrorists! Be very, very afraid! but not so scared you don't go shopping y'all"
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts)This may provide an alternative :
In response to your question - yes, crap sums it up quite nicely.
liberal N proud
(60,334 posts)Once that fear was gone, the came up with terror, starting with Iran in 1980 and the Afghanistan.
Cooley Hurd
(26,877 posts)...but did little to stem the tide.
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)As a former general, he knew how to read between the lines of Pentagon bullshit. Not once did Ike ever give the brass all the money they wanted and he knew BS when he saw it.
HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x107823
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen
All roads dealing with "the Cold War" lead to this guy. His intelligence overestimated the Soviet threat (on purpose) and America took him at his word, tossing the whole kit and caboodle to the Pentasewer and scaring the living shit out of the population when we really didn't have to.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)Or other strategic regions. Given that, they were going to try to have somebody left to govern in the aftermath. Plus it was an excellent way to keep people under control.
I'm pretty sure that kneeling in the hall of my elementary school with my head down by my knees and pushed up against the wall made me and my classmates safe from THE BOMB.
CBGLuthier
(12,723 posts)Oilwellian
(12,647 posts)to walk toward the light in the event of a nuclear attack. They scoffed at the idea that my school desk would somehow save me.
MicaelS
(8,747 posts)Remember, when the Bolsheviks took power, the resulting Civil War killed as many as 20,000,000 people. Anyone who had property, lost said property. Plus the Communists were officially Atheist, and that was seen as consummate evil in itself.
Read what Eisenhower said. Remember this was the man seen by many as the one who "won" the War in Europe.
http://hnn.us/articles/47326.html
Early on, he noted in his diary what he later said in public: nuclear weapons would now be treated just as another weapon in the arsenal. We have got to be in a position to use that weapon, he insisted to Dulles. That became official policy in NSC 5810/1, which declared the U.S. intention to treat nuclear weapons as conventional weapons; and to use them whenever required to achieve national objectives. By early 1957, Eisenhower told the NSC that there could be no conventional battles any more: The only sensible thing for us to do was to put all our resources into our SAC capability and into hydrogen bombs. He found it frustrating not to have plans to use nuclear weapons generally accepted.
His whole reason for fighting was to prevent the communists from imposing a totalitarian state in America. He had long recognized the irony that nuclear war would lead to the very totalitarianism he abhorred. But he confessed to the Cabinet that he saw no way to avoid it: He was coming more and more to the conclusion that we would have to run this country as one big campseverely regimented. After reading plans for placing the nation under martial law, giving the president power to requisition all of the nations resourceshuman and material, he pronounced them sound.
It is hard to give up the man of peace that peace activists have come to admire. And perhaps its not fair to give him up. After all, we can never know what another person truly believes. But the record of the other Eisenhower is so consistent and so extensive (Ive offered only a sampling here) that it is hard to ignore. More importantly, it is dangerous to ignore, because the other Eisenhower was the one who made actual policy. It was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would push whole stack of chips into the pot and hit em with everything in the bucket; a man who would shoot your enemy before he shoots you and hit the guy fast with all youve got; a man who believed that the U.S. could pick itself up from the floor and win the war, even though everybody is going crazy, as long as only 25 or 30 American cities got shellacked and nobody got too hysterical.
HopeHoops
(47,675 posts)I don't want to linger in pain and wait for death to come in a few days or weeks - just vaporize me, dammit.