Duck & Cover

[LR Trotter]

REost #16

Sorry Ms Hassan, but are you saying that only "idiots everywhere" were concerned about a nuclear attack during the '50s and into the early '60s? Especially those that had "fallen for all that Duck and Cover shit"? Is that the time frame when "quite a few Canadians and Americans came here to live"? To be fair, we are talking about a period just a few years after World War II, and the attack by the Empire of Japan at Pearl Harbor. And, although shortly before my birth, my older sister and brother were both born before 12/7/'41. So, my family was very aware of the events of the early '40s, and that to me adds reality to fear of being bombed. As I recall, JFK, at least publicly, was fearful of an attack by "the Russkies" in October '62, and I remember that as I saw his address to the nation on TV live about the missiles in Cuba. I don't recall any "mass hysteria", just concern. The truth is open for debate, and should be, but this situation is all about perception.

[Phil Dragoo]

We began with Greg's retrospect of the duck-and-cover era in Washington, DC, the nation's capital, during the Eisenhower Administration (1953-61).

My public grade school in the birthplace of the John Birch Society, where Jim Jones got his start, where Kurt Vonnegut went to Shortridge (a disciplined mind and a cultivated heart are elements of power), and Joseph Milteer attended a Constitution Party convention in the period of his bloody premonition, was built in 1952; I completed its eight grades in 1960.


During my attendance the weekly routine included a Friday morning drill lining up all students of all grades from the four legs of the H-shaped structure to proceed in an orderly but brisk pace to the central gymnasium, that high-ceilinged block-walled chamber, therein to form concentric lines against the four walls, kneeling, head down to floor, hands clasped over back of neck in the weekly worship of the meccatonnage.


I submit the peculiar American fever peaked and broke during the October 1962 crisis, but was at such strength in the fall of 1963 that Johnson could lean on Warren and Russell with the prospect of forty million dying in the first hour of an unforturnate exchange.

As I see it this ethos fueled the popularity of the period's fiction including Alas, Babylon in which survival is sought in Australia, and in Fail-Safe in which the tragic accident occurs due to a shorted wire preventing the recall of the airborne SAC contingent from its fail-safe points.

I don't insist that the world in large measure suffered hysteria in the period, but CONUS was targeted in the manner of CD Jackson's method, perhaps more than a little intentionally overblown in marketing the Cold War business model.


As with all deep politics we expect layers of consciousness.

In some the fish have no idea they are wet.

In others, that the fish are considered idiots.


In still others, glee that the fish are biting, delightfully easy to catch.


JFK and Nikita Sergeyevitch sought to break on through to the other side.

Shot down in the wire like dogs.

We saw how that nuclear armageddon movie came out and may laugh. Now.


What if.

But to say for a certain geopolitical populace it was not a slow drip or a sword of Damocles is to say all fish were as aware as one was.

Human behavior favors Skinner, else there would be endless periods of enlightenment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qdKZBXMX5E

[Greg Burnham]

Phil said: Human behavior favors Skinner, else there would be endless periods of enlightenment.

Indeed, therein lies the key to controlling the masses. The mindlessness of the mob is minuscule compared to the perfidy of the powerful.

[Magda Hassan]

REost #16

Sorry Ms Hassan, but are you saying that only "idiots everywhere" were concerned about a nuclear attack during the '50s and into the early '60s? Especially those that had "fallen for all that Duck and Cover shit"? Is that the time frame when "quite a few Canadians and Americans came here to live"? To be fair, we are talking about a period just a few years after World War II, and the attack by the Empire of Japan at Pearl Harbor. And, although shortly before my birth, my older sister and brother were both born before 12/7/'41. So, my family was very aware of the events of the early '40s, and that to me adds reality to fear of being bombed. As I recall, JFK, at least publicly, was fearful of an attack by "the Russkies" in October '62, and I remember that as I saw his address to the nation on TV live about the missiles in Cuba. I don't recall any "mass hysteria", just concern. The truth is open for debate, and should be, but this situation is all about perception.

Children being required to participate in the ridiculous Duck and Cover exercises of the 1950's and 60's were of course not idiots. Just children. Their teachers should have known better but were probably afraid of losing their jobs or being black listed. And rightly so. The idiots were in positions to do a lot of damage to many and did just that to some. Kennedy saw through the hysteria. He knew the enemy was not the Russians and confronted them and paid the highest price for it.

[Charles Drago]

Phil said: Human behavior favors Skinner, else there would be endless periods of enlightenment.

Indeed, therein lies the key to controlling the masses. The mindlessness of the mob is minuscule compared to the perfidy of the powerful.

Behavior is not always a reflection of soulful intent. In its mindless form it exists to be overcome.

Enlightenment presumes and depends for existence upon darkness created to be overcome.

The mob, mindless, permits the powerful's perfidy, which maintains the mob.

Talk about a circle jerk.

And abundant alliteration.

[Adele Edisen]

I was a student in the College of the University of Chicago in the late 1940s. The first controlled atomic fission was done underneath Stagg Field, an athletic field named for Alonzo Stagg, the famous football coach, formerly at the University. Dr. Enrico Fermi was the leader of the team which performed this atomic splitting that led to the first atomic bomb. He was one of my physics professors because he insisted on teaching undergraduates, and not only graduate students. There were many physists and chemists on campus who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and I remember hearing about the sense of guilt many of them had in feeling responsible for the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The United States was the first country to use nuclear bombs to attack civilian populations and did so without warning. Japan was preparing to surrender at the time.

Why would anyone assume that the Russians would not attack us at that time of the Cold War, and especially after our President was killed by a (supposed) communist? It was all that President Kennedy could do to control his military generals when he was still alive from shooting off missles at Russia and China and bombing Cuba, initiating a nuclear war, WWIII.

Some months ago I posted an article on this when Kennedy shut down the missle silos that were actually being prepared and ready to do this. There was a movie, "Twilight's Last Gleaming" which may have been based on this event, released in 1978, starring Burt Lancaster as a former Brigader General with two commando accomplices, Paul Winfield and Burt Young, who seize control of a missile base and threaten to release nine missiles. Charles Durning, Richard Widmark, Melvyn Douglas, Vera Miles, and Joseph Cotton also star in the film.

It was not so much the fear that the Russians would do the first strike, but that we would provoke them with some false flag operation, as far as many of us were concerned. We did not know of the opening of communications by Krushchev with Kennedy in 1961 which led to the back door correspondence between Krushchev and Kennedy. Neither one wanted an atomic war. It was their resolutions and agreements that made us all a bit safer. The Nuclear Non-Prolifration Treaty and similar agreemets are still in effect.

Yet after the atomic bomb came the more powerful hydrogen bomb. and as if that wasn't enough, the neutron bomb which could destroy living things, but leave buildings intact. There is no limit to the human imagination and production of methods of destruction.

As the little cartoon character, Pogo, said: "We have met the enemy and it is US."

Adele

[Adele Edisen]

https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...Edisen+JFK

The Joint Chiefs of Staff Pushed Kennedy to Nuclear First Strike



DANIEL SHEEHAN:
"The entire Joint Chiefs of Staff of The United States convened,
and voted to go to "nuclear first strike." Because, they said:
You can't be faked out. You can't blink when you go toe-to-toe
with these guys. We've got to go to "nuclear first strike"!

And when they INSTRUCTED Kennedy to that effect,
Kennedy ABSOLUTELY REFUSED!

President Kennedy was so traumatized, according to Kenny O'Brien,
who was there. Kenny O'Brien said that he sat there in his rocking
chair, and tears actually appeared in his eyes, and he said,

"I will NOT be the man who does this!"

And he ordered the entire United States nuclear forces to stand down
from their alert, because he did not want to have any accidents."


Adele Edisen

[LR Trotter]

Ms Edisen,
Your posts in this thread is a reflection of history as I understand it as it pertains to the '50s and '60s. I was a teenager in HS when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred, and I remember it well. The '50s I remember quite well also. But, I'm afraid I don't understand the "idiots" comment or the "duck and cover shit" comment. And, please excuse my language. You mentioned the bombing and destruction of Japan in '45 at the end of WWII. Add Korea and the Cuba situation, along with Indo-China/Vietnam and wonder how it all would end. I do believe we did understand the potential for mass destruction, no matter who "fired first". While living normal lives, we did so with concern, not hysteria.

:nosmilie:

[Adele Edisen]

Ms Edisen,
Your posts in this thread is a reflection of history as I understand it as it pertains to the '50s and '60s. I was a teenager in HS when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred, and I remember it well. The '50s I remember quite well also. But, I'm afraid I don't understand the "idiots" comment or the "duck and cover shit" comment. And, please excuse my language. You mentioned the bombing and destruction of Japan in '45 at the end of WWII. Add Korea and the Cuba situation, along with Indo-China/Vietnam and wonder how it all would end. I do believe we did understand the potential for mass destruction, no matter who "fired first". While living normal lives, we did so with concern, not hysteria.

:nosmilie:

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I can't understand the comments by others you mentioned either.

The problem was that the American people and the Russian people, and all other peoples of the world, did not want wars. This is also true today - the common people do not wish for war. But, certain elements, a certain small fraction of the population who own most of the wealth of their own country and who control the government and hold key positions in it, and who would profit greatly, personally, from expansion of their economic interests onto the rest of the world, seek to do it by using force with no regard for the lives of humans, including those in their own military sent into foreign lands on their behalf.

The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima had no real military purpose. It was to show the rest of the world that the United States had the power to destroy which no other nation at that time possessed. It sent a message to capitalism's "enemy", the Soviet Union, a socialist economy, our ally during the war, and to smaller nations as well. That is why there was no prior threat made to Japan and its citizens before the bombs were dropped. It was a "first strike" of the worst kind that Kennedy did not wish to repeat during his administration, and why he fought so hard against his own Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Adele

[Greg Burnham]

I think that the earlier "objectionable" comments were spoken from a position of "the cheap seats" --no offense intended toward those who made said comments.

My parents were neither "idiots" nor were they reactionaries. Quite the contrary.

There was a "real and present danger" to all of us in the U.S. as there was a "real and present danger" to those in the Soviet Union...as well as the REMAINDER OF THE WORLD.

This is not even in dispute.

However, the "duck and cover" remedy was known by its authors to be IDIOTIC in both its inception and in its impotency. That the employment of such a "strategy" (in response
to a NUCLEAR threat to one's immediate personal safety) was even suggested is far and away the best evidence of the insanity of those who actually believed it was true. Even as
children, had we been given the REAL facts about nuclear explosions, we would have known that "duck and cover" was a ludicrous defense.

So, I see that we have had a mis-communication here. Nothing more.

Carry on children. And do try to get along. :lol: