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4 Survival of Self and Nation under Atomic Attack There are no civilians, we are all at war. Announcement by the U.S. president after a nuclear war in the film Panic in Year Zero (1962) You Can Survive! On the night of July 25, 1961, President John Kennedy spoke to the nation about the Berlin crisis, a situation in which the United States and the Soviet Union tiptoed toward nuclear confrontation. “In the event of an attack , the lives of families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved—if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available . We owe that kind of insurance to our families—and to our country,” he said. Kennedy’s linking the destiny of individuals and the family with the national fate gave expression to a primary narrative about the likelihood in early Cold War America of surviving a nuclear explosion. He further informed a stunned nation (about to embark on a fallout-shelter craze in response to his speech) that the government had under development “a new household warning system,” the National Emergency Alarm Repeater (NEAR). He spoke of the “sober responsibility” of preparing for nuclear war, and he placed the nation’s shelter program under the control of the Department of Defense.1 These revelations reinforced an awareness that had already dawned on many Americans: they were soldiers in the Cold War, and their backyards were the front line. Their personal survival had become emblematic of the survival of the nation. Discussions and depictions of survivors following a nuclear war were common in early Cold War America. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) and other federal agencies advanced some of these images, but others reached Americans through the mass media and popular culture. At the same time that the U.S. military worried about defeating the Soviet Union in a nuclear war, American citizens worried about surviving one. Civil defense pamphlets postulated that individuals would survive an atomic attack much as they had always survived natural disasters: good citizenship would lead to survival, and survivors would help society to 62 c The Dragon’s Tail recover and rebuild. These pamphlets tended to be highly depoliticized: the atomic attacks are of unspecified origin. The pamphlets’ depictions of nuclear attack often stressed the metaphoric bond between self and nation, underlining the idea that personal survival equaled national victory. Like so many other aspects of popular culture in the nuclear age, survival narratives changed markedly in 1954, when the Cold War crossed the threshold into the thermonuclear era. Survival narratives of the latter half of the atmospheric testing era (1954–63) became far more brutal than those of the earlier atmospheric period (1945–54) had been. Narratives of the later period tend to be more fatalistic, portraying aggressive self-interest as a key to survival, even depicting nuclear war as an inevitable event that no one will survive. Public debate mirrored this brutality, as Americans and their clergy debated the ethics of killing neighbors in order to survive a nuclear detonation. This world no longer mirrored the depersonalized community depicted in the civil defense literature of the early atmospheric period; now survival became its own justification. Popular culture texts tended to emphasize personal character traits as the key to survival, from rugged individualism to violent self-interest and deeply antisocial behaviors. These narratives of survival emphasized the idea that it might be necessary for society to be largely destroyed in order for “our way of life” to continue, thus also linking personal behavior to the behavior of the state. Even though the possibility of nuclear war was terrifying to many Americans, the logic of its necessity and inevitability was personalized and justified in stories of individual survival. The correspondence of self and nation in survival narratives implicitly linked the ethos of personal survival with the necessity of national nuclear conflict. In popular culture narratives of survival, the individual is removed from society, isolated, while the grotesque surgery of nuclear warfare is performed. These narratives assume that, to make it through this period of intense self-reliance and isolation, it might well become necessary for people to revert to a primitive level of behavior and to commit acts that in peacetime would be considered abhorrent. All such acts were justified by the extremity of the situation and by the imperative to survive, and all must be considered acts of self-defense. Survival narratives made little...

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