“The further you get into the government
literature, the wackier the propaganda gets,”
Susan Roy says. “I think it’s
simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.”
government published detailed plans
that encouraged them to do just that).
Expensive to build and dreary to contemplate, they remained a tough sell
even when nuclear confrontation
seemed most imminent.
“The further you get into the govern-
ment literature, the wackier the propa-
ganda gets,” says Roy, who started the
project as a student at Columbia Uni-
versity and eventually amassed a large
collection of Cold War ephemera that
forms the heart of the book. “The spe-
cificity of it was so strange. It started
out kind of vague, but as time went on,
it got more and more specific.”
So what are we to make, today, of the
Henderson house or the 1960 Chicago
Daily Tribune article titled “Meals for
Two Days in Fallout Shelter” (beef stew
was on the menu)? “I think it’s simulta-
neously hilarious and terrifying,” Roy
says, mirroring the reaction audiences
had during screenings of the deadpan
1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe.
Laughter, of course, is the easy out.
And it’s easier still to dismiss the material in the book—the civil-defense
posters, radiation-exposure charts,
fallout-shelter plans, and lavish and
spooky Henderson photos—as a form
of kitsch. But that misses a larger point
and ducks a very uncomfortable question: Are we really any safer today?
“These same persuasion and propaganda techniques still exist, and we
should be able to recognize them,” Roy
says. “They are much easier to recognize
in the material from the fifties and sixties,
because they were so unsophisticated
and ham-handed. But every time I go
through airport security, I think, What
is this about?” Roy calls it “security
theater”—when the government goes to
elaborate extremes to convince people
that something is being to done to make
them safe, when, in fact, she says, “what
they’re doing is virtually useless.”
Below: The cover of a 1956 survival
manual (right) and a page from
United States Civil Defense, a
government publication from 1950
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