Nuke and Commies Bundle: Civil Defense, CONELRAD, and the Atomic Age Collection During the Cold War

The first half of the twentieth century was defined by the forty-year conflict which history remembers First and Second World Wars. That conflict finally ended with a series of seemingly illogical contradictions. The ravages of the "hot war" left the world's greatest empires in financial ruin, and world mastery seemed to be going to a pair of nations which were considered second-rate powers at the dawn of the century, America and Russia. America had been seen as almost a dumping ground for Europe's refugees but combined their industry with a wealth of natural and economic resources to finance the First World War and emerge from the Second as the de facto leader of the free world. During the WWI, the Russian people threw off the yoke of Tsarist tyranny through bloody revolution only to find themselves under the thumbs of the Soviet, tyrants in their own right, who based their power on an interpretation of Karl Marx's philosophy of the power of the working class.

Perhaps the biggest contradiction at the end of the forty-year conflict was that America and Russia, who had been allies during the Second World War, would become bitter enemies during the post-War period. The West was distrustful of the Communist philosophy, especially having seen that philosophy perverted into a form of tyranny over the Russian people and their client states. The Russians felt that they had been treated as less than a full member of the community of nations, and resented America's delayed entry into the Second War, feeling that they bore the brunt of the fighting against Hitler's forces (as many as 27,000,000 Soviet citizens died because of the War, compared with 7,400,000 Germans, 450,900 British, and 419,400 Americans).

When WWII finally ended in 1946, the only powers with the military, economic, and political power to lead the world were the Americans and the Soviets, and with their mutual distrust future conflict seemed inevitable. The Americans had developed crude atomic weapons which were pressed into service to shorten the War in the Pacific, and with the rate of continuing atomic development was convinced that they could keep the Soviets in check. Although the West feared Soviet domination of their "satellite nations", the Soviets saw their expansion as rightfully deserved spoils of War. America's atomic program had begun in response to advancements by Nazi scientist which made the A-bomb a feasible concept. Thanks to the Soviet capture of several of these scientists, information gleaned through security breaches in the West, and the surprising competence of the Soviet scientific community, America soon discovered that she was not the only atomic-armed power. The result was an increasingly deadly arms race between the "superpowers", and the threat of an all-encompassing atomic war became a dominant theme in the public imagination.

For good or ill, many people's perception of atomic warfare was based on the experience of "conventional warfare". Strategic bombing of civilian populations came of age in World War Two, and for many, it was how they related to the threat of atomic bombs. CBS Radio Workshop replayed a program from 1939 called "Air Raid" in 1957. The original radio play in verse anticipated war from the skies being visited on non-combatants well behind the front lines. By the late '50s, people were forced to face the fact that the bombs in such a scenario could be atomic.

In this collection, you will learn how to design your home to shield against the dangers of radioactive fallout and how to fight nuclear flash fires (close doors, windows, and Venetian blinds, or cover windows with aluminum foil). You will also learn how to improvise in case tragedy strikes and you are not near a fallout shelter (use doors off their hinges, furniture and appliances, plus stacks of other shielding materials such as trunks or drawers filled with sand or earth to make an enclosure large enough to live in for a short time). There are also instruction on what to do if you see a nuclear flash in the distance (take cover immediately - get in a ditch or building, get under a parked car, behind a tree or a wall, then curl up in a ball and cover your head with your arms and stay there until heat and blast waves have passed, then go to the nearest fallout shelter before radioactive fallout starts drifting.

Spy fiction and espionage drama have always been popular, but it gained a special edge during the Cold War when it was well known that our enemies may be catching up with us thanks to the efforts of their spies. Counterspy, Dangerous Assignment and Yours Truly Johnny Dollar all featured stories of bad guys trying to get their hands on atomic secrets and Good Guys stopping them.

Developing more terrible and destructive bombs was seen as a patriotic duty, but it also brought morality into question as it did on X Minus One's episode "The Castaways" where a tribe inhabiting the South Pacific atoll which is the site of a nuclear bomb test. The tribe refused to leave and set a curse on the officer in charge of the test that he would share the fate of the islanders.

The terror of atomic warfare stems from the fact that there is no way to really win an atomic war. The best that can be hoped for is to simply survive, and that is far from guaranteed in any scenario. A tactic encouraged by many Civil Defense organizations was the building of bomb or fallout shelters. The concept was developed during the Blitz on London during the Second World War. During a raid, noncombatants would take shelter underground and come out to continue and rebuild their lives after the danger passed. However, an atomic attack carried the added danger of fallout, dust blown into the atmosphere by the atomic bombs and particles from the bomb itself would become radioactive and poisonous, perhaps for years after the attack. The respected news program, Meet the Press, explained fallout and shelters in 1961, almost a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis made their installation a national craze. Both Suspense and Theatre Five had episodes exploring the possibility of living and perhaps dying in a fallout shelter while the neighbors and everyone else you knew were dying on the outside.

One of the fears which cropped up during the Cold War was that Soviet bomber pilots could home in on radio broadcast towers to guide their attacks. Imposing nationwide radio silence during an attack would be impracticable because the government depended upon radio to keep the public informed. A partial solution came in the form of the Control of Electromagnetic Radiation or CONELRAD program. Frequencies 640 and 1240 on the AM dials of civilian radios were reserved for emergency broadcast and were marked as such on receiver sets sold during the period. The CONELRAD system was explained in detail on This is Civil Defense program from the Rocky Mountain Radio Council.

The Civil Defense Administration was tasked with preparing the public for disasters beyond warfare, of course. This is Civil Defense also had programs discussing responses to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and wildfire. Interestingly, the original CONELRAD system was not set up for weather-related disasters, a shortcoming which was addressed by later emergency broadcasting systems. Other civil defense efforts were highlighted by Hop Harrigan in a series of recruiting plugs for the Civil Air Patrol program.

In a time when Americans feared nuclear threat from abroad, when schools were designed to double as fallout shelters, and Americans wore dog tags and practiced nuclear drills and blackout runs to their nearest shelter, radio became the main method of communication between defense officials and the public. These messages from the Office of Civil Defense and the North American Air Defense Command provide an insightful historical perspective on the worries and uncertainties of this time.

Thirty-one Great Old Time Radio volumes from the Cold War and Atomic era! Don't duck and cover, buy this compilation today!

• Atomic Radio Collection - 2 MP3 CDs
• Apocolypse Collection - 2 MP3 CDs
• Civil Defense Collection - 1 MP3 CD
• Cloak and Dagger - 1 MP3 CD
• Communists & The Cold War In Old Time Radio - 4 MP3 CDs
• I Was a Communist for the FBI - 2 MP3 CD
• McCarthy HUAC Recordings - 1 MP3 CD
• David Harding Counterspy - 1 MP3 CD
• Enola Gay and bombing Hiroshima - 1 MP3 CD
• Fifth Horseman - 1 MP3 CD
• Keys to the Capitol - 1 MP3 CD
• Lear Radio Show - 1 MP3 CD
• Living in an Atomic Age - 1 MP3 CD
• Man Called X - 2 MP3 CDs
• Quick and the Dead - 1 MP3 CD
• Radio News 1950-1959 - 4 MP3 CD
• Stars for Defense - 1 MP3 CD
• This is Civil Defense - 1 MP3 CD
• World Security Workshop - 1 MP3 CD
• Your Pocketbook - 1 MP3 CD

(No substitutions please)