Survival Under Atomic Attack, the 1950 civil defense booklet cover

Survival Under Atomic Attack is a 1950 federal civil defense booklet from the Civil Defense Office of the National Security Resources Board, printed by the Government Printing Office. The cover sets a mushroom cloud over a burning city and calls the booklet the official U.S. government text.

What the cover prints

Content note: the cover is an illustration of a nuclear explosion over a city.

A black skyline sits at the bottom of the page. Above it a mushroom cloud climbs the full height of the cover, with fire and wreckage at its foot. The type is set large and plain.

SURVIVAL

UNDER

ATOMIC ATTACK

THE OFFICIAL U. S. GOVERNMENT BOOKLET

Who issued it

The record names the Civil Defense Office of the National Security Resources Board, then part of the Executive Office of the President, with printing by the Government Printing Office. The rights line calls it a public-domain government work under 17 U.S.C. 105, as the Commons file page states. The cover says outright who is speaking, and the archive classes the source as openly identified.

This page describes the cover only. The archive's record is of the cover image, and the advice inside the booklet is not transcribed there, so it is not summarized here.

How to read it

The archive tags the cover as a fear appeal, and the order of the design shows why. The worst case is drawn in full first, and the word "Survival" is offered over it as the promise of what the pages inside will teach. The phrase "official U.S. Government booklet" does a second job: it tells the reader that this advice, and not some other, carries federal authority.

The liberty reading

A government that tells its citizens to prepare for atomic attack owes them practical information, and a booklet is a fair way to provide it. The question a careful reader keeps open is the one the cover cannot answer: whether the protective advice inside matched what the government itself knew about the weapons. The cover asks for trust on the strength of the word "official." Trust of that kind is earned by the contents, and those have to be read and tested on their own.

For the early Cold War sheets the State Department sent abroad in the same years, see Kremlin's Words and Deeds and the 1952 germ-warfare rebuttal. The booklet's place among the period's atomic messaging, at home and abroad, is set out on the civil defense and atomic age hub.