The Bomb Is Da Bomb

In the whole history of the Republic, America was never weirder than in 1956. In that year the government made the instructional film "Warning Red," one of dozens of so-called atomic hygiene films instructing civilians on how to act in the event of a nuclear attack. My favorite moment: A man returning from the ice cream parlor sees a blinding light, the mighty spark of an atom bomb. He comes to in a burning, irradiated ruin. Dazed and bleeding, he looks around desperately until, with a sigh of relief, he finds his smoldering fedora. It's the end of the world, but by all means, don't forget your hat.

This and many more moments of ironic fallout are included in "Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security," a darkly amusing collection of songs, civil defense messages and short films about the commie bomb. Assembled by the preservationists of Conelrad.com--the name comes from the civil-defense alert during CONditions of ELevated RADiation--"Atomic Platters" takes us to a zany yet oddly familiar land of galloping paranoia, where shadows are etched in concrete and happiness is a warm bomb shelter.

There is nothing funny about nuclear weapons, of course, but there is no denying that "the bomb" was fun, especially since it never went off. What today can compare to the unified sense of purpose of an air raid drill? What child did not wonder how those bomb-shelter crackers tasted? (When I was 10, I built a Geiger counter.) The Cold War had the frisson of fission, a huge game of atomic spin-the-bottle, and wasn't life a little sweeter for the possibility that it might wink out in a snap of nuclear flame?

And so we have Bill Haley and his Comets savoring the Mormon-esque possibilities, post-apocalypse, in "Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town)." And Wanda Jackson kicking out the bed slats in the rockabilly classic "Fujiyama Mama": "I drink a quart of sake, smoke dynamite, chase it with tobacc'y and then shoot out the light." Uh-huh. In the coded 1950s, the bomb was a euphemism for sexuality gone supercritical.

With the bombing of Japan not so far in the background, a lot of this stuff seems barbarously insensitive, or at least in bad taste, but the American public saw things differently. "The media of the day was very successful portraying the bomb as some kind of silver bullet that ended the war early," says Conelrad co-founder and editor Bill Geerhart. "The bomb was seen as a saving grace."