Crapaganda.com

In 1954, the Federal Civil Defense Administration and the National Clean Up – Paint Up – Fix Up Bureau produced a short documentary film which attempted to show that a tidy, clean, freshly painted house is more likely to survive an atomic blast than its unkempt neighbors.

The House in the Middle was actually produced by the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association.

It is highly unlikely that a fresh coat of paint would be very effective in protecting any home from the extreme heat and blast force in the event of an actual nuclear attack. The film never explains what would happen to the human inhabitants of the houses.

Watch The House in the Middle

The worlds first real introduction to the atom was the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. What we witnessed was the raw destructive force of splitting the atom. In order to win us over to the peacetime uses of this technology the public needed to be educated.

A Is for Atom is a 14-minute animated propaganda film created by Sutherland Productions and paid for by General Electric.  The short explains what an atom is, how nuclear energy is released from certain kinds of atoms, the peacetime uses of nuclear power, and the by-products of nuclear fission.

Watch A Is for Atom

The United States was the only country producing  nuclear weapons until 1949 when the USSR tested its first nuclear device.  The perception of safety generated by US weapons superiority waned.  Soon the public began to think  that the US was more vulnerable than it ever had been.

The Federal Civil Defense Administration prescribed duck-and-cover exercises as a safety measure in case of a Soviet attack.  Quickly every American citizen, from children to the elderly, practiced to be ready in the event of nuclear war.

The movie Duck and Cover was produced for school showings.  It was thought that the main dangers of a nuclear explosion were from heat and blast damage.  It wasn’t until much later that we learned that the majority of damage from nuclear weapons is long term radiation contamination.  No amount of duck-and-cover will stop radiation poisoning. Sorry for the false hopes.

Watch Duck and Cover – US Federal Civil Defense Administration (1951)

To refute early 1960s novels and Hollywood films like Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove which raised questions about U.S. control over nuclear weapons, the Air Force produced a documentary film–”SAC (Strategic Air Command) Command Post”–to demonstrate its  responsiveness to presidential command and its tight control over nuclear weapons.

During the crisis years of the early 1960s, when U.S.-Soviet relations were especially tense, novels and motion pictures raised questions about the Air Force’s control over nuclear weapons and the dangers of an accidentally or deliberately-triggered nuclear war. Foremost were Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s novel Fail-Safe (1962) (later turned into a motion picture) about an accidental war and the film Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a brilliant satire about a nuclear conflict deliberately sparked by a psychotic Air Force general. Both Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe may have created enough worries in the Air Force about its image to lead the service to produce a film–”SAC (Strategic Air Command) Command Post”–designed to confirm presidential control over the “expenditure” of nuclear weapons and the difficulty of initiating an ‘unauthorized launch” of nuclear bombers.

Never used publicly by the Air Force for reasons that remain puzzling, “SAC Command Post” is available here. Produced during 1963-1964, this unclassified film tried to undercut Dr. Strangelove’s image of a psychotic general ordering nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union by showing that nuclear war could not be “triggered by unauthorized launch.” To reinforce an image of responsible control, “SAC Command Post” presents a detailed picture of the communications systems that the Strategic Air Command used to centralize direction of bomber bases and missile silos. With the film’s emphasis on SAC’s readiness for nuclear war, higher authorities may have finally decided that it was off-message in light of the Johnson administration’s search for stable relations with Moscow.

Watch SAC Command Post

In 1974, far out in the Pacific, a U.S. ship pretending to be a deep-sea mining vessel fished a sunken Soviet nuclear-armed submarine out of the ocean depths, took what it could of the wreck and made off to Hawaii with its purloined prize.

Now, Washington is owning up to Project Azorian, a brazen mission from the days of high-stakes — and high-seas — Cold War rivalry.

After more than 30 years of refusing to confirm the barest facts of what the world already knew, the CIA has released an internal account of Project Azorian, though with juicy details taken out. The account surfaced Friday at the hands of private researchers from the National Security Archive who used the Freedom of Information Act to achieve the declassification.

The document is a 50-page article quietly published in the fall 1985 edition of Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s in-house journal that outsiders rarely get to see.

In it, the CIA describes in chronological detail a mission of staggering expense and improbable engineering feats that culminated in August 1974 when the Hughes Glomar Explorer retrieved a portion of the submarine, K-129. The eccentric industrialist Howard Hughes lent his name to the project to give the ship cover as a commercial research vessel.

The Americans buried six lost Soviet mariners at sea, after retrieving their bodies in the salvage, and sailed off with a hard-won booty that turned out to be of questionable value.

Despite the declassified article, the greatest mysteries of Project Azorian remain buried three miles down and in CIA files: exactly what parts of the sub were retrieved, what intelligence was derived from them and whether the mission was a waste of time and money. Despite the veil over the project, its existence has been known for decades.

“It’s a pretty meaty description of the operation from inception to death,” said Matthew Aid, the researcher who had been seeking the article since 2007, when he learned of its publication thanks to a footnote he spotted in other documents. “But what’s missing in the end is, what did we get for it? The answer is, we still don’t know.”

Read more at: Gone fishing: Secret hunt for a sunken Soviet sub (AP)

CIA Article on the Glomar (pdf)

NSA page on Project Azorian

Latvia sold a deserted town built around a Soviet-era radar station to a Russian investor who bid $3.1 million at an unusual auction yesterday, officials said.

The town formerly known as Skrunda-1 housed about 5,000 people during the Cold War. It was abandoned over a decade ago after the Russian military withdrew from Latvia following the Soviet collapse.

Built in the 1980s, Skrunda-1 was a secret settlement not marked on Soviet maps because of the two enormous radar installations that listened to objects in space and monitored the skies for a US nuclear missile attack.

Read more at: Soviet-era secret town in Latvia, now abandoned, sells for $3.1m at auction (Boston Globe)