Trickle Down Episode 7: How To Be Afraid (Part 1) Sample
In the early fifties, the United government had to reckon with the escalating nuclear arms race. The cold war meant that ascendant rival superpowers were amassing the tools of apocalypse. Internal committees and think tanks decided that they had to avoid the American people becoming terrified, paralyzed, and panicked about the bomb.
The solution? Make people afraid.
Citizens should fear the bomb. But they shouldn’t lose their heads. Fear is manageable. Panic is not.
The Federal Civil Defense Administration organized messaging and educational campaigns to show how people could defeat potential nuclear destruction with can do American spirit. Officials hoped to fine tune nuclear anxiety, so it never lapsed into apathy or terror.
This is a 10-part series brought to you by the QAA podcast. To get access to all upcoming episodes of Trickle Down as well as a new premium QAA episode every week, go sign up for $5 a month at patreon.com/qanonanonymous
Written by Travis View. Theme by Nick Sena (https://nicksenamusic.com). Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
REFERENCES:
Chernus, Ira (2002) Eisenhower’s Atoms For Peace
Gladdis, John Lewis (2005) The Cold War: A New History
Masco, Jospeh (2014) The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror
Oakes, Guy (1994) The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture
Osgood, Kenneth (2006) Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad
Starck, Kathleen (2010) Between Fear and Freedom: Cultural Representations of the Cold War
Alert America!, Google Arts & Culture
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/alert-america-u-s-national-archives/awVBMrc3sxGJLg?hl=en
Penney department store was a consumer's paradise.
From the endless sales floor, one could acquire clothes, furniture, musical instruments, toys, and even rifles.
But among the selection of home goods, shoppers might also find a collection of intentionally damaged J.C.
Penney mannequins.
They had recently survived a blast from the atomic bomb.
After they were blasted at the Nevada test site, the government's laboratory for nuclear weapons, they went on a tour from store to store.
They were charged and their clothing was tattered.
And they were accompanied by a sign encouraging the shoppers to see themselves in the lifeless plastic.
These mannequins could have been live people.
In fact, they could have been you.
Unlike the rest of the mannequins in the store, they were not on display in order to sell fashion.
Instead, they sold an important message that was crafted by early Cold War policy makers.
Namely, the Soviets could strike at any time.
The bomb was something to fear.
But, as evidenced by the fact that the mannequins were damaged but not destroyed, the bomb was survivable.
So there's no reason to lose your mind when contemplating the awesome power of the A-bomb.
It was just a bit of propaganda designed to help the population avoid ignorant complacency by paralyzing terror.
This finely tuned emotional response was seen as crucial to policymakers at the beginning of the nuclear weapon standoff and would become important again in the 21st century at the beginning of the war on terror.
I'm Travis View and this is Trickle Down, a podcast about what happens when bad ideas flow from the top.
With me are Liv Agar and Jake Walkitansky.
Episode 7, How to Be Afraid, Part 1.
All right, Liv, thanks for taking time to join us today because I'm really excited to talk about nuclear terror.
Yeah, yeah, great to be here.
I'm glad I'm going to be pronouncing nuclear wrong all the time.
Everyone always makes fun of me for this.
I pronounce it like Bush does.
Look, if you're going to steal one thing from President George W. Bush, that's the thing to steal, you know?
And if you have a problem with how I pronounce it, please take it up with Travis.
Travis's email is...
Speaking of Bush, this podcast series is like partly an excuse to explore and research questions that I'm interested in.
And one of the things I was really interested in for many years is something I experienced in my lifetime.
And if you're an American millennial or older, you probably remember from your younger days as the Homeland Security Advisory System, or the HSAS.
And this was the color-coded terror alert system that was created in 2002 in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
And if you don't remember, there were like five colors that were supposed to represent risk levels of terror threat.
The lowest level was green, and then there was blue, yellow, orange, and then red was the highest.
Now this system lasted just nine years.
It was scrapped in 2011 because it was obviously terrible.
There's no evidence that it ever served its purpose of helping people avoid terrorist threats.
But what it did help people avoid was whether or not they were going to fly on an airplane somewhere.
Because I remember during this period, any time you were going to take a trip, the first thing you would do would be like, well, let's check the terrorist threat level today.
Be like, oof, orange.
Probably shouldn't go on this trip to Oregon to visit my stoner buddies.
It's like, oh, green.
OK.
Oh, it's green.
we're good, we can feel somewhat safer now.
Yeah, you know, it's, it was frustrating because I, you know, I think it's, you know, the responsibility of a government to protect citizens from terrorism that falls under their more broad responsibility of protecting their citizens generally.
Sure.
I would argue like, you know, like if there's some specific intelligence that indicates that a terrorist attack is imminent or likely, you know, then it's a responsibility to disclose that so people can protect themselves.
That could be an important part of government transparency.
But talking about the threat of terrorism in vague terms like it's a weather report was clearly a terrible idea.
In fact, rather than helping people prevent terrorism or be informed of terrorist threats, it only served to terrify people.
You know, if you see on the news that the terrorist threat level was elevated from yellow to orange, what exactly are you supposed to do with that information?
Like, you don't know what intelligence this change of status is based on.
You don't know what areas of the United States are now more at risk.
So you're not presented with any actionable information, so your only possible reaction has to be, like, emotional.
Like, you just live your life, or, you know, try to see if you can fly, but you're a little more scared because you believe that another 9-11 might happen anywhere.
So it's basically like, if, like, a weatherman didn't tell you the actual weather, they were just like, don't go here, there's a lot of bad stuff happening.
Like, just trust me on this one, if you go into this region at this time, you're gonna be very sad.
Yeah, it would just be like, weather, weather incoming.
Uh, location, unsure.
We're going to get a whole lot of weather in this country at some point or another.
Yeah.
This thing is like, if there's like a hurricane that's going to strike, you know, the government usually talks about that and the threats, but there's specific information, like it's done in specific terms.
There's a specific geographical location, and it's going to cover a specific amount of time, and there's a specific degree of severity.
And, you know, the weather service doesn't come out and say, the threat of a deadly weather event somewhere in America is now medium high.
So be alert.
A horrible weather disaster could strike somewhere, maybe where you're standing right now.
People wouldn't stand for that.
People would demand details.
The weather is top secret.
Exactly.
But in the insane years after 9-11, Americans were at least temporarily tolerant of vague, evidence-free pronouncements regarding the rising and falling threat of terrorist attacks.
I didn't appreciate it at the time.
I remember thinking it's very weird how the news constantly kept people updated about the terror alert level.
And I was glad when it was finally done away with.
Now, I started researching how the system got into place and how it was used and implemented and what caused the government to realize that it was worthless after trying it for less than a decade.
And as I looked into it, I realized that in order to really understand how this debacle happened, I needed to understand the first real existential threat to America and the world, which was nuclear weapons.
Because before the U.S.
felt the need to communicate terrorist threats to citizens, it felt the need to communicate the nature of the nuclear threat.
At the beginning of the nuclear arms race in the early 1950s, the government took on the responsibility of essentially determining how scared people should be, and how American citizens should focus their fear.
And unlike discussions inside the federal government that led up to the Homeland Security Advisory System, the discussions that led to the PR campaigns around nuclear weapons have long since been declassified.
So we now have access to internal reports and summaries of National Security Council meetings that couldn't be viewed by previous generations.
Now, reading formerly top-secret documents is always fun, feels like I'm getting away with something, but in addition to that, you know, it can provide us some insight into this high-level strategizing about domestic communications regarding possibly horrible violent death.
So, for this episode, I'm going to talk about how the U.S.
government decided to make its populace afraid in the right way when confronting the nuclear threat in the early years of the Cold War, and I'm going to discuss how this connects to the disastrous and short-lived Homeland Security Advisory System in the next episode.
So, to start at the beginning, the United States tested the first atomic weapon in 1945 and used them in the war in the same year to bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Briefly, we enjoyed the monopoly on nuclear firepower, but it was short-lived.
The problem with nuclear weapons is that their function flows from principles of physics discovered in the 20th century, and the challenges in making the bomb involve engineering rather than science.
So that, combined with the fact that the Soviet Union had some well-placed spies that revealed America's nuclear secrets, meant that the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb in 1949.
Yeah, shout out to the communists in America's nuclear physics program that leaked all those so we didn't have some terrifying unipolar American nuclear world.
I will say that the Soviets, the reputation of their intelligence program was well-deserved.
The American nuclear program was thoroughly penetrated.
Well, and look, I mean, is that not the point of communism?
It's like, we share the wealth, we share the nuclear secrets.
And almost the nuclear hellfire.
Almost, yeah.
Almost the bad part as well.
The terror induced by the nuclear arms race intensified after the first test of a hydrogen bomb in November of 1952.
This thermonuclear device was 500 times more powerful than the first atomic bombs.
When it was tested in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as part of a test series called Operation Ivy, the bomb left a crater a mile long and 175 feet deep.
Hey there, you've been listening to a sample clip of Trickle Down.
This is a side project that I've been working on.
It's a 10 episode series about misinformation and bad ideas that flow from high authority sources.
I think it's fascinating and I mean it's a way for I guess me to explore the way people who Should know what they're talking about.
Don't always, actually.
Not gonna lie, some of it's kind of a bummer, but if you're anything like me, that's actually more of a reason to dive into the subject matter.
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