This essay examines how civil defence films released in the 1950s
by the United States federal government were used, as part of its
overall civil defence effort, to inflate the threat of atomic war
and establish a programme of domestic social control that enabled
the government to maintain a foreign policy that was publicly
contingent on the use of the atomic arsenal. In the United States,
post-war thinking was dominated by two popularly held concerns: the
assumption that war with the Soviet Union was not a remote
possibility and that any war would entail the use of nuclear
weapons. Strategic planners within government agencies has to sell
to the public a concept of deterrence based on nuclear weapons
which meant that the 'front line' in the next war would not be
'over there' but at home, within the United States. The concern was
that fear of nuclear weapons would undermine any dependence of a
nuclear strategy. To overcome this, the federal government embarked
on an ambitious, planned campaign to sell nuclear war as survivable
and a viable option for self defence. Film's potential to influence
public opinion made it especially attractive to public relations
practitioners retained by the government to develop the campaign.
General
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