"Nobody Wins a Nuclear War" But "Success" is Possible (fwd)
Great stuff! //Alif -- "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:43:12 -0500 From: National Security Archive <archive@GWU.EDU> To: NSARCHIVE@HERMES.GWU.EDU Subject: "Nobody Wins a Nuclear War" But "Success" is Possible National Security Archive Update, February 19, 2011 "Nobody Wins a Nuclear War" But "Success" is Possible Mixed Message of 1950s Air Force Film on a U.S.-Soviet Conflict For more information contact: William Burr - 202/994-7000 http://www.nsarchive.org Washington, DC, February 19, 2011 - "The Power of Decision" may be the first (and perhaps the only) U.S. government film depicting the Cold War nightmare of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict. The U.S. Air Force produced it during 1956-1957 at the request of the Strategic Air Command. Unseen for years and made public for the first time by the National Security Archive, the film depicts the U.S. Air Force's implementation of war plan "Quick Strike" in response to a Soviet surprise attack against the United States and European and East Asian allies. By the end of the film, after the Air Force launches a massive bomber-missile "double-punch," millions of Americans, Russians, Europeans, and Japanese are dead. Colonel Dodd, the narrator, asserts that "nobody wins a nuclear war because both sides are sure to suffer terrible damage." Despite the "catastrophic" damage described by a SAC briefer, one of the film's operating assumptions is that defeat is avoidable as long as the Soviet Union cannot impose its "will." The last few minutes of the film suggest that the United States will prevail because of its successful nuclear air offensive. One of the characters, General "Pete" Larson optimistically asserts that the Soviets "must quit; we have the air and the power and they know it." It is the Soviets, not the United States, who are sending out cease-fire pleas, picked up by the CIA. Little is known about the production or subsequent distribution of "The Power of Decision." It was probably used for internal training purposes so that officers and airmen could prepare for the worst active-duty situation that they could encounter. Perhaps the relatively unruffled style of the film's performers was to help serve as a model for SAC officers if they ever had to follow orders that could produce a nuclear holocaust. This film is from a DVD supplied by the U.S. National Archives' motion picture unit and is hosted by the Internet Archive's Moving Images Archive. View the complete film at http://www.nsarchive.org or watch a four-minute clip of the film on the Archive's YouTube channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/nsarchive#p/a/u/0/hfhqZgg_bqQ ________________________________________________________ THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals. _________________________________________________________ PRIVACY NOTICE The National Security Archive does not and will never share the names or e-mail addresses of its subscribers with any other organization. Once a year, we will write you and ask for your financial support. We may also ask you for your ideas for Freedom of Information requests, documentation projects, or other issues that the Archive should take on. We would welcome your input, and any information you care to share with us about your special interests. But we do not sell or rent any information about subscribers to any other party.
On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 12:21:57AM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Great stuff!
Hysterical. I'm glad that particular madness is mostly over. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 12:21:57AM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Great stuff!
Hysterical. I'm glad that particular madness is mostly over.
Me too. Practicing "Duck and Cover!" at school always left you with a particularly grim schoolday. //Alif -- "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech
On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 12:59:45AM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Me too. Practicing "Duck and Cover!" at school always left you with a particularly grim schoolday.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, it wasn't the duck and cover exercises (that never happened, or was before my time), but the nuclear weapon education posters on the walls. Yeah, these did really cheer you up. I also found the AK-47s in the weapon education chamber in our school slightly unnerving. No idea where the older kids got trained on weapon handling if at all, that must have been at higher grades than 7th. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 12:59:45AM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Me too. Practicing "Duck and Cover!" at school always left you with a particularly grim schoolday.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, it wasn't the duck and cover exercises (that never happened, or was before my time), but the nuclear weapon education posters on the walls. Yeah, these did really cheer you up.
What exactly was on these posters? Self-defense information, or weapon how-does-it-work type stuff?
I also found the AK-47s in the weapon education chamber in our school slightly unnerving. No idea where the older kids got trained on weapon handling if at all, that must have been at higher grades than 7th.
HOW COOL IS *THAT*! Weapon education chamers? Shit! I grew up in NYC, where there are *zero* legal guns, unless you're LEA or one of the under 100 people who could afford the weekly $500.00 bribe! Not that handguns weren't all over the schools - almost everyone in my class carried at IS44 (IS == "Intermediate School". Kinda of like junior high school and high school all in one: grades 6-12), since the likelyhood of needing to defend yourself was very close to 100% NYC schools in the 60's were horror shows, even in the better neighborhoods (which I certainly didn't live!). Our "weapons education" was going out at night and shooting out street lamps (at $1.00 per shot to the betting pool - first to take the light gets the pool. Not so easy with a <3 inch barrel on a saturday night special!). I am in envy of you and your schools :-) //Alif -- "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech
At 01:20 PM 2/19/2011, Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 12:59:45AM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Me too. Practicing "Duck and Cover!" at school always left you with a particularly grim schoolday.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, it wasn't the duck and cover exercises (that never happened, or was before my time), but the nuclear weapon education posters on the walls. Yeah, these did really cheer you up.
A friend of mine was in a rough airplane landing many years ago, and after the pilot had gone through the usual steps of "seat belts on, seat backs up, lean forward and hold on to the seat in front of you" safety instructions, she and half her fellow passengers responded with "and kiss your ass goodbye", which is the punch line of the hippie version of the American nuclear war education posters.
At 10:59 PM 2/18/2011, J.A. Terranson wrote:
On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, Eugen Leitl wrote:
Hysterical. I'm glad that particular madness is mostly over.
Me too. Practicing "Duck and Cover!" at school always left you with a particularly grim schoolday.
Yeah. Al-Qaeda and their ilk were really wimpy terrorists compared to forty years of "we can blow up the world N times over and we've got the crazy generals to do it!" nuclear terrorism. I was a kid during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and one of my neighbors had dug up their back yard to put in a bomb shelter. It was really freaky the first time I heard the Emergency Broadcast System come on the radio in the ?early 90s? and say "this is not a test" - they were using it for flood warnings during a storm, which is a sensible thing to do, but before that it had always been "this is a test of the 'let you know that the Russians and Americans are trying to blow up the world' alarm system", whether it was EBS or CONELRAD or whatever, so by the time they got to the "flooding" part, I'd already mentally been through the "WTF? The politicians haven't been saber-rattling at each other, is this some surprise attack? How fast can I get home to my wife?" panic attack. They'd probably been using it that way for several years, just not at times I'd been driving with the car radio on.
On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, Bill Stewart wrote:
It was really freaky the first time I heard the Emergency Broadcast System come on the radio in the ?early 90s? and say "this is not a test"
Interesting: I have *never* heard the EBS et al used other than for testing. Had I ever heard it, it would have scared the crap out of me - I don't know if I'd even hear past that point, having spent a childhood listening to that damned system being "tested" all the time (?I believe it was weekly or bi-monthly?). Like most Americans alive through the period, I can still recite, word for word, the text of the EBS "test" announcement: "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test. The broadcasters in your area, in voluntary cooperation with the FCC and other authorities, have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, you would have been instructed where to tune in your area for news and other local information. This concludes our test of the Emergency Broadcast System." I can't even imagine the panic of hearing "this is *not* a test"! Interestingly, the EBS had at least one accidental activation in the late 60's or early 1970s, which I fortunately missed out on: good for me!
using it for flood warnings during a storm, which is a sensible thing to do,
Very. But then we wouldn't have paid any attention to it when the Russians were finally ready to end it all! //Alif -- "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech
On Sat, 2011-02-19 at 18:34 -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
I can't even imagine the panic of hearing "this is *not* a test"! Interestingly, the EBS had at least one accidental activation in the late 60's or early 1970s, which I fortunately missed out on: good for me!
Growing up, I heard it used a couple of times here locally during severe weather events. But I don't dispute at all that the tests were more common than real activations. I'm glad testing of the EAS is a bit less obtrusive. -- Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@speakeasy.net>
participants (4)
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Bill Stewart -
Eugen Leitl -
J.A. Terranson -
Shawn K. Quinn