Thoughts on the 1950's and today

I was born in 1957, right about at the peak of the Cold War. I was only five years old when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. I remember only the atmosphere of fear and worry in my parents, and my dad stapling newspapers to the basement ceiling. (I learned later that people thought the lead in the ink on the papers would stop radiation. They were wrong, even by that time most printing inks were either petrochemical or made from soybeans.)

If you think of the technology of those times, it makes sense that people would fear mass nuclear attacks. ICBMs were brand new and not yet very reliable. Any attack would have been mostly by aircraft, and the template people had in their minds were the mass air raids of World War II. When you watch these old CD videos, keep that in mind.

The culture of the country in the 50's and 60's was also radically different. Even though I have lived through those changes, it is almost impossible for me to list them all or categorize how different we are. The whole idea of family and community is different. For those people, the idea of building large bomb and fallout shelters, where they would stay in place during a crisis, was the most natural response. For us, staying mobile and having more than one bolthole option would probably be best.

It was customary to build shelters large enough to accommodate random strangers who might be nearby when the bomb hit. That would be a very risky strategy today. I don't know whether to say people and the society had more commonality, or more collectivism of the natural voluntary sort. People are still willing to help others today, so it's not a simple change in values as it might seem.

Just about everything in our infrastructure has also changed. For instance, the battery radios were what people would rely on for information, and they assumed telephones would be out. We rely on cellphones, which can be recharged, and even if the electricity goes out, the cellphones can still get out through towers etc. as long as we can keep them charged. So, what we consider good preparations will be different from the 1950's, and in almost every case, far superior to anything they had. On the other hand, we use electronic cash instead of paper money and coins, which is a huge liability if the electronics go out.

Still, these old videos and pamphlets still give us valuable information. We have to rethink how we will respond to it in light of how the world works today. 60 years is a long time ago. The video below is an excellent example of the typical thinking on civil defense in the 1950's.



Video link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFK2PBD4_TE