Nuclear Holocaust in the Heartland
By Anthony Eames
November 11, 2019
The Day After revived a genre of nuclear nightmare films.
The Day After is a cultural touchstone of the 1980s and remains the most watched television movie of all time. Over 100 million people tuned in on the night of 20 November 1983 to watch nuclear war unravel civilization in the small college town of Lawrence, Kansas. Watching the movie today, viewers might chuckle at vaporized skeletons and other dated special effects that make Mars Attacks! look like a high-end production, but the film brilliantly captured American’s anxieties at the time.
When The Day After premiered, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were the highest they had been at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Millions of Americans fearing the outbreak of nuclear war joined the Nuclear Freeze Movement, which promised to freeze the size of the superpower’s nuclear arsenals and then reverse the arms race. In the Freeze Movement, ABC had all the free promotion a network could dream of. Antinuclear activists held watch parties, distributed thousands of viewer guides, set up emotional support phone hotlines, and had spokespeople appear on hundreds of radio and television programs across the country to discuss the significance of the film. Even Carl Sagan and William F. Buckley Jr. got into the act when they argued over the film’s impact on the episode of Nightline that followed. Now that you’re ready to watch, you can go check out the film on youtube!
A brilliant innovation in the Atomic Age: survival biscuits
By Christa White
November 1, 2019
Survival biscuits are the OG “doomsday” food.
Developed by the Eisenhower administration, survival biscuits were made of a ” ‘parched wheat form known as Bulgar’…nutty, nutritious, high-fiber, supremely safe.” Are you salivating yet?
A civil defense federal employee told Congress that “Its shelf life has been established by being edible after 3,000 years in an Egyptian pyramid.”
If you say so, sir.
NARA / Scan by Bill Geerhart
This shrewd commodity, the product of millions of federal monies and several years of research, was proudly named the “All-Purpose Survival Cracker.” However, considering nutrition to be a desirable quality in food, it had a single purpose, to be thrown directly in the trash.
Read more about survival biscuits in a 2017 story on Eater, The Doomsday Diet , by one of our great podcast guests Garrett Graff.
The Duck and Cover Podcast 