Most authors assumed that cities would be atomic bomb targets and that urban dwellers would likely perish. Officials at the FCDA stated that if people were educated and prepared for a nuclear attack, they could survive an atomic bomb and avoid the wholesale death and destruction that had occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Ītomic attack survival literature of the 1950s and early 1960s was written primarily for a suburban, middle-class audience. At the same time, teachers taught children atomic attack survival techniques at school, including the famous "duck and cover" maneuver. Instead, through the creation of the Federal Civil Defense Administration, it provided educational materials on how families could protect themselves. WHI 1941Įarly in the Atomic Age, the United States government concluded that it could not afford to shelter every American citizen from an atomic war. This image was used to illustrate a newspaper article on a Milwaukee firm that had gone into the business of building fallout shelters. A Wisconsin family inside their new bomb shelter. SAVING THE FAMILY!įamily Bomb Shelter, 1952. They also believed that a public confident of surviving an atomic war would support the federal government's decision to increase its own atomic arsenal, even though its existence could provoke a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. They continued, however, to disseminate somewhat dubious survival information, primarily to give the American public a sense of hope and control over their own lives.
The federal government created the Federal Civil Defense Administration (later called the Office of Civil Defense) to instruct the public about how to prepare for a nuclear assault.īy the late 1950s, officials of the Eisenhower administration, after having seen the results of numerous atomic bomb tests, had a fairly realistic idea of how difficult it would be to survive a nuclear bomb blast.
Entrance to the TAKE COVER! section of the exhibit.Īfter 1949, Americans felt threatened by the prospect of an atomic war with the Soviets and looked for ways to survive a nuclear attack.
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