Doomsday Machines

There are a lot of books about nuclear apocalypses, ranging from the very “grounded” to the fairly fantastic. But none of them, to my knowledge, are as strange as Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965).

In February 1957, Captain John H. Morse, Jr., a former US Navy aviator and a special advisor for the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), wrote a long memo to AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss about the “arithmetic” of Air Force strategic planning. The context was a debate inside the AEC about the prudence of a “military requirement” that the US Strategic Air Command had set for t...

The end of the world is a recurrent themes in several episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), but none perhaps are quite as direct about it as “The Shelter,” which aired on September 29, 1961. Its focal point was a family bomb shelter, and it came at one of the real peaks of popular interest in the idea, not long after President Kennedy announced a m...

While working on my post about the clergy and Civil Defense, I stumbled across a collection of scanned issues of The Georgia Alert, a publication of the Civil Defense Division of the State of Georgia, USA, from the 1950s,

What did the people who planned for actual nuclear war during the Cold War think their nuclear wars would look like? What would they be targeting? What would the consequences be?

Understanding the answer to this question, at different times in history, is often quite hard to do, because these kinds of war plans are, even decades later, often still highly classified. But...