The Nuclear Nightmare of The Cold War 10 DVD-ROM boxed set

This is a 10 DVD-ROM disc set packaged in a shrink-wrapped hinged box. This unique collection depicts the issues that defined the years  from 1946 to 1990. Attractively packaged, this digital library makes an impressive gift as well as an educational aid and research resource for American history, political science, mass psychology, sociology and media studies.

 I am a member of the WWII baby boomer generation. We were the first generation to grow up under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation. This was nuclear terrorism before Osama Bin Laden was even a gleam in his father's eye! The government made certain we were constantly bombarded with messages about being prepared for the inevitability of a nuclear attack.

In first grade, the fall of 1953, we were instructed to take refuge underneath our desks in case of a nuclear attack. We saw films in school, like Bert the Turtle in the classic cold war film, Duck and Cover. Even as a six-year old, I knew this was stupid and that any nuclear blast close enough to require us taking shelter would likely kill all of us and in a terrible manner. We were in the north central Pennsylvania boonies. Were we in danger of being targeted by the Russians? We certainly thought we were, there was a Quaker State oil refinery three miles from our school and we were certain those godless communists had it targeted for nuclear obliteration!

The TV gave us lots of things to terrify us, like fallout shelters. In the narrations of programs on nuclear survival (an oxymoron if there ever was one!) it was a forgone conclusion that there was going to be a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Well, my family couldn't afford to build a fallout shelter, so we were obviously DOOMED! AAAAUUUGGGHHH!!!

Before spy satellites could perform proctological examinations from hundreds of miles above the earth, we had the DEW line, the Distant Early Warning system, spread across 3000 miles of the arctic to give us warning of Soviet missiles and bombers coming over the top of the world to kill us all. Walter Cronkite said it would give us about 20 minutes warning. Twenty minutes? I figured that if I was going to be smoked by nukes, it would be perfectly fine if it were a complete surprise. My mind went wild with the possibilities. What if I was at school and couldn't get home to see my mommy and daddy before the nukes struck? What a horror!

What would a nuclear blast be like? Somewhere I read that the fluid in your eyes would boil and your eyeballs would burst before you perished! The lucky ones would be those who were immediately vaporized leaving nothing but a shadow as we saw in the films we saw in school about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev said that if war came the living would envy the dead...no doubt!

I would wonder if the nuke that was ultimately going to roast me had been built yet, what was the person like who was building it, did they have a family they loved like I loved mine, did they know they were going to kill a little boy...lots of little boys and girls...and many many other innocents...my boyish imagination just went wild with all kinds of stuff.

Being a Catholic, the nuns who taught catechism made it clear that when (not if) the Russians came and took over - Sister Mary William was so certain this was an absolute inevitability - it would be our duty to be martyred for our faith. She told us there would be no limit, that we couldn't possibly even imagine the kinds of horrific things the commie Russians would do to get us to renounce our faith! So be certain your  immortal soul was in a state of sanctifying grace at all times because you never knew when the Russians would invade or drop the atomic bomb on us! We were only seven or eight years old!

 Naturally, my boyish imagination went wild with terrible scenarios. Would the dirty commie Russians threaten to shoot my mommy and daddy unless I renounced my faith? Would they shoot Grandma too? How about my little sister? And my dog? What should I do? Save the people I loved and end up in hell or watch them die and be assured of salvation? Would God understand if I lied about renouncing my faith to saved my lovrd ones? I hated the dirty godless communist Russians for the things I just knew they would do to get me to renounce the church so I would end up burning forever in hell right along with them! When they came into my house I would find a way to kill them, I was sure of that!

Tensions between the U.S. and USSR flared as tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. The Berlin Wall, a fitting symbol of the intractable monolith that was communism, went up.

Then along came the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was a sophomore in high school. We went to school that October morning on the day the not knowing if we were going to be reduced to incandescent gas by the afternoon. A quiet, numbing terror enveloped us. One of our teachers did some incredible psychological bullying by describing the terrible burns that would be suffered and how we would have to get used to seeing classmates and family injured and suffering in this horrible fashion. The girls in the class started crying. But no one said a word. The tension was palpable.

The Berlin Wall came down. I never thought I would see that happen. Then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 and it was all over. And gradually it was revealed that it was all BS. There was never any "missile gap" with the Soviets as we were told. The Russian H-Bomb? Ha! Another fairy tale. The Soviets attempted to detonate a hydrogen bomb in Kazakhstan. It was a dud and killed thousands of Soviet citizens, and military. The Russians never had a deliverable H-bomb. The nuclear arms race was essentially over when the U.S. detonated an H-bomb on the Bikini atoll.

We were had, showed, buried under a never ending avalanche of pure absolute bulls*it designed to keep us scared while the defense industries we allowed to loot the economy with defense contracts for weapons systems that would never be needed. Even the paint and varnish industries got in on the act. In the film The House In The Middle we are led to believe that keeping our houses painted and cleaned up and free of trash on the out side (as well as neat and tidy on the inside) would improve the chances of it surviving a nuclear blast. They even "proved" it with films from nuclear tests! Messy places...like...slums...those disorderly places where poor people lived, had more trash laying around that would prove ignitable in a nuclear blast. Junk and trash is UN-American!! And the narrator's tone of voice is just so incredibly...judgmental.

So...paint your house with bright reflective paint and survive World War III! The mind boggles. Hint: if you are that close to the blast, you're screwed. Period. But, just like the hucksters in the bomb shelter business, the paint and varnish industry wanted their share of profits from nuclear paranoia.

There there are the handy dandy tips on how to keep your livestock safe from fallout, which looks about as effective as hidinhg under your school desk...

Much of the information in these films was pure red-white-and-blue proganda, propaganda being communications that is entered to for the benefit of the sender with no consideration the educational value or impact it will have on the reciever. More bulls*it. I mean, I can't believe that the persons responsible for creating this propaganda actually believed it. Any human being with any real intelligence higher than a daffodil would find it ridiculous. The objective was to keep the American public calm by telling them "hey, nuclear war isn't so bad!" And if war came, so what? Too late for the people to protest that they've been lied to when everyone not inside the secret government bunkers - where the makers of this stuff would no doubt be -  has been obliterated. 

There was also the inexorable drumbeat of anti-communism. I remember a Mad magazine issue that did a lampoon on the John Birch Society with a parody of the Battle Hymn of the Republic that went:

Mine eyes have seen the horror of the coming of the reds,
They are lurking in our closets they are underneath our beds.

Rock and roll was a communist conspiracy! Pornography was a communist conspiracy! Talking out of turn waqs a communist conspiracy! Everything that went counter to the standard American  lockstep buttoned-down-collar-with-a-broomstick-jammed-straight-up-the-butt attitude was a communist conspiracy! I remember my seventh grade science teacher - a foot ball coach - telling us that all the guys who were captured during Korea and went over to the reds were guys that didn't play sports in high school! Not playing sports in high school was a communist conspiracy!

People wonder why we baby boomers went completely wild in the mid 60s. The contents of these DVD-ROMs will tell you. We were raised to believe we had no future. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were good enough, what the hell, we could be nuked at any minute so...

screw like rabbits, smoke that dope, 

 turn up the music 'cause there ain't no hope!!!

lyric © Ellis D. Tripp, graphic © W.E.Johnson

Looking at these films now they seem ludicrous, even humorous. At the time it was all so very serious...and so very, very frightening.

This 2 disk set comes in a shrink-wrapped hinged box and will not play in a standard DVD player, it is meant to be used in a computer. The free downloadable VLC player works fine for playing these files.

All items on this disk are in the public domain.

(An interesting aside is in the cover graphic below the headline on the LA Examiner, "RUSS EXPLODES H-BOMB", a subhead reads "Mossadegh fate in doubt; 300 killed in Iran coup." This coup was pulled off by the CIA at the request of British petroleum interests because the legally and democratically elected Mossadegh government had nationalized all the oil resources to keep the profits in Iran. The CIA coup installed the Shah Reza Palahvi who terrorized, opressed, exploited and murdered his people until being deposed by the Ayatollah Khomeni in the late 70s  and leading to the present state of relations between Iran and the west.)