# Civil defense and the atomic age in US messaging, 1945–1969

From the front pages of 7 August 1945 to a 1969 poster on "Atoms for Peace and Progress," this hub follows what Americans were told about the bomb at home, what their government told the world about the peaceful atom, and what a newspaper cartoonist and a presidential campaign made of both. Every page rests on a FRAME archive record.

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  Civil defense and the atomic age in US messaging, 1945–1969
  From the front pages of 7 August 1945 to a 1969 poster on "Atoms for Peace and Progress," this hub follows what Americans were told about the bomb at home, what their government told the world about the peaceful atom, and what a newspaper cartoonist and a presidential campaign made of both. Every page rests on a FRAME archive record.

The United States government spoke about the atom in two voices after 1945. At home it spoke about survival. Abroad, through its information service, it spoke about peace, medicine and electric light. Between the two, private Americans had their own say, in newspapers and, by 1964, on television. This hub gathers what the FRAME archive holds from those years and reads it by one standard: who is speaking, what they leave out, and whether the listener is free to say no.

The archive's holdings here are uneven, and it is better to say so at the start. The snapshot has one federal civil defense object from these years and many more Atoms for Peace sheets made for audiences abroad. It has nothing on the Duck and Cover film, CONELRAD, fallout shelters, or official announcements of weapons tests. Without a record to check, this hub leaves them out. The gallery shows the 35 records that are in the snapshot.

## August 1945: the news arrives

The bomb reached most Americans first as a front page. On 7 August 1945 Washington's Evening Star gave it the full banner, "JAPS ADMIT GREAT ATOMIC BOMB DAMAGE," over an Associated Press story drawn from a Tokyo radio broadcast that a federal listening service had picked up. Beside it ran the reaction of Congress, a forecast of a new ultimatum, and a Vatican paper's fears about the weapon's use. The Atlanta Daily World, a Black-owned daily, put Black soldiers on Okinawa in its banner and gave the bomb one column headed "Atomic Bomb Loosed On Japs," relaying the White House statement and the Secretary of War without comment.

Both pages use the wartime slur for Japanese people in their headlines. The essay pages quote them as printed and say plainly that the usage was wrong. Both pages also show what a free press did with the biggest news of the war on its first day: one paper printed doubt beside the official account, and the other put its own readers' soldiers above the bomb.

## Civil defense at home

Civil defense was not new in 1950. During the war the Office of Civilian Defense printed window cards such as "Air Raid Precautions Have Been Taken Here", signed by a warden, and a recruiting poster with no issuer printed asked people to "Join the Civilian Defense!" In a 1943 letter printed as a poster, President Roosevelt thanked the "millions of our own citizens and friendly aliens" who had volunteered. The program, in its own words, ran on volunteers.

The atomic version came in 1950. Survival Under Atomic Attack was issued by the Civil Defense Office of the National Security Resources Board, inside the Executive Office of the President, and printed by the Government Printing Office. Its cover draws a mushroom cloud over a burning city and calls itself "The Official U.S. Government Booklet." The archive holds the cover only, so this site describes the cover only. The open question it raises is whether the advice inside matched what the government knew, and the cover cannot answer that.

## Atoms for Peace abroad

On 8 December 1953 President Eisenhower told the United Nations General Assembly that the United States would work so that "the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life." Within three years the U.S. Information Agency had put that sentence on a poster. A 1956 set opens with the pledge itself, then reports the 1955 treaty with the Philippines, with its promise of up to six kilograms of uranium-235, and explains fission through seven thousand jeepney trips. Later pages turn to hospitals, factories, farms and power plants.

The agency also advertised traveling exhibitions. An Arabic poster for the Beirut showing names the American Embassy as co-sponsor with a Lebanese committee; a poster for the Damascus showing a month later names only the Syrian government. In Tehran a Persian wall newspaper titled "Progress of Iran" reported the Shah opening the exhibition and promised Iran "machines of its own." The theme ran on for years: a Bengali photo sheet on Oak Ridge in 1957, a Salvadoran wall newspaper on the "Atomos en Acción" exhibition in 1965, and in the agency's file dated 1969, Frontiers of Research, under the heading "Atoms for Peace and Progress."

The peaceful atom was a real program and much of what the sheets showed was true: radioisotopes did go into medicine and research, and the exhibitions were free and open. What the sheets left out was the other use of the same science, the arsenal held by the same government. A 1957 sheet from the same agency, "In the Interest of Peace," put the atomic-powered submarine Nautilus beside rockets and a carrier, so the agency was not shy about American weapons. It simply kept the two subjects on different posters. And FRAME classes most of these sheets as blurred: the reader could not tell from the page that a foreign government had sent it. The U.S. Information Agency hub follows that question across the agency's whole poster file.

## A cartoonist's running commentary

Jim Berryman drew for the Washington Evening Star, and nine of his cartoons in this hub's gallery, all from the Senate's Berryman collection at the National Archives, turn on the atom. In June 1953 Ceiling Zero sent a peace dove through a storm of headlines, one of them "U.S. running out of storage space for A-bombs." In December 1953, three days after the UN address, Strange Echo showed a message from the UN about using atomic energy "to build a peaceful world" answered from behind the Kremlin wall with "Warmongers!" Later cartoons took up the H-bomb as a 1956 campaign issue, the "Nuclear Retaliation Warning" behind NATO, an underground A-test played for a joke, and, in 1963, a scowling globe under atom symbols thrown from both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.

The cartoons do not add facts. They show how ordinary the bomb became as a subject of public talk, and they show it being talked about freely, by a private artist under his own name, about his own government's weapons as well as the Soviet Union's.

## The bomb in a campaign

In September 1964 the Johnson campaign ran "Peace, Little Girl," the spot known as "Daisy": a child counting petals, a countdown, a nuclear explosion, and Johnson's voice saying "These are the stakes." Goldwater is never named. It was campaign speech, not government information, and it was protected. It was also a pure fear appeal, aimed at Americans, with the bomb itself as the argument. The same image returned decades later, when the National Security Adviser said "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"; this site's case study on the 2002–03 case for war in Iraq follows that line.

## How this site reads the record

Three points are honestly open, and on each the site takes the reading that favors limits on power. It is a reading, not a finding of the archive. First, trust: a government that tells its citizens how to survive a weapon it is also building owes them the full measure of what it knows, and a cover marked "official" is a request for trust, not proof of it. Second, voluntariness: wartime civil defense, on the record's own evidence, asked for volunteers, and an exhibition with free admission asked for visitors. That is persuasion at its least coercive, and it deserves credit. Third, disclosure: a government that speaks abroad should sign its work. The Beirut poster did; the Tehran wall newspaper and the 1956 Philippine set did not.

The same standard runs the other way. Eisenhower's pledge was made in public, before the world, and the program's treaties, books and training were real. A government that offers other countries the medical and scientific uses of a dangerous science, under its own name, is doing something a free people can approve. The later argument over the nuclear freeze, and a President's claim that "Soviet agents" helped instigate it, is told in the Active Measures Working Group case study. The covert side of the same years' Cold War messaging is in the Crusade for Freedom.

## What this hub does not cover

Later federal civil defense booklets and films, Duck and Cover and its turtle, CONELRAD radio notices, fallout-shelter signs and campaigns, and the government's public statements about atmospheric and underground testing are absent because neither the snapshot nor this site has a record of them to quote or check. Soviet atomic messaging is outside the site's scope.

  United StatesAtomic-age sheets, 1945–1969United StatesAtlanta Daily World, 7 August 1945August 7, 1945 · Name-calling, Card stackingUnited StatesThe Evening Star, 7 August 1945August 7, 1945 · Name-calling, Card stackingUnited StatesSurvival Under Atomic Attack (1950)1950 · Fear appealUnited StatesCeiling Zero (Berryman, 1953)June 9, 1953 · Card stacking, Fear appealUnited StatesAtom for Peace Exhibition, BeirutMarch 8, 1956 · Transfer, Glittering generalitiesUnited StatesAtoms for Peace, page 1April 10, 1956 · Testimonial, Glittering generalities, TransferUnited StatesAtoms for Peace, page 2: the Philippines treatyApril 10, 1956 · Transfer, Glittering generalitiesUnited StatesWhat Is Atomic Energy? (Atoms for Peace, p. 4)April 10, 1956 · Plain folks, Glittering generalitiesUnited StatesProgress of Iran No. 40: Atoms for PeaceJune 11, 1957 · Glittering generalities, TransferUnited StatesA Fellow Just Isn't Safe ANYWHERE Anymore!September 21, 1957 · Fear appealUnited StatesPeace, Little Girl ("Daisy")September 7, 1964 · Fear appealUnited StatesFrontiers of ResearchMarch 26, 1969 · Glittering generalities, TransferUnited StatesUSIA overseas postersUnited StatesAmericans were asked to chip in for a private radio. Their government was already paying for it.United StatesWashington fought Moscow's planted stories by publishing them under its own nameUnited StatesCaveats in the vault, certainty at the podium

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/topics/civil-defense-and-the-atomic-age/