Watch Chilling Footage of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki Bombings in Restored Color
Atomic cafe how to#
Protect and Survive: 1970s British Instructional Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack Detonates Nuclear Weapons in Space People Watch Spectacle Sipping Drinks on Rooftops (1962) How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Survive the Atomic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954 The Atomic Café has been put on YouTube by the New York film distribution company Kino Lorber. “ Life magazine ran blueprints for fallout shelters, and Estes Kefauver barnstormed the nation with warnings about strontium 90 in the milk supply.” In one scene “girls in home ec classes display their canned goods designed for nuclear survival, and it is clear from their faces that they have no clue of how they would survive nuclear war, and little hope of doing so.” The film as a whole evokes a time when the United States “spent a good deal of its resources on addressing the possibility of nuclear war, however uselessly.” We no longer hear much about that possibility, perhaps because it has genuinely diminished, or perhaps because - as viewers of The Atomic Café will suspect even today - the propagandists are busy convincing us of something else entirely.
“I was an exact contemporary of those kids in this old documentary footage,” writes Roger Ebert in his review The Atomic Café. These decades-old clips of strenuously pious politicians, drawling bomber pilots, rambling Babbitts, and civil defense-ready nuclear (in both senses) families could hardly have met with more intense cynicism.
It came out in 1982, when the public’s assumptions of American military benevolence - and its patience with the country’s seemingly permanent arms race against the Soviet Union - were running low.
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