The Cold War On A Clock

Operations as its chair.  This little mundane committee also included a Permanent Sub-Committee On Investigations which had subpoena power.  This allowed McCarthy to parley his witch hunt tactics into a sensational media event that contributed to the fear and paranoia that permeated the times.  As both the SoThere was a time when you could measure fear of a nuclear war by a clock. By 1950 when the fears manifested by the Cold War was the meme of the day the House Un-American Activities Committee had been sitting for over a decade since its inception in 1938 to 'investigate' allegations of subversive actions by notable citizens in the public eye. After WWII the committee began to focus exclusively on allegations of communist infiltrators in the U.S. government. In February of 1950 Joseph McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin, began to make hysterical accusations about communist infiltrators in every facet of the U.S. government through what could only be called a witch hunt by today's standards. By 1953, in an effort to assign what many Republicans felt was a troublesome McCarthy a sub-committee where he could do as little harm as possible, he was placed on the Senate Committee On Government viet Union and the United States had a nuclear arsenal this contributed to the growing fears of a nuclear Armageddon. 

The October, 1953 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists represented the state of fear and paranoia of the time by using a clock with midnight as the point where nuclear war was inevitable.  The issue above shows a clock on its cover at three minutes to midnight reflecting the fears of the community of atomic scientists and how close to he precipice of Armageddon we actually were.  Some members of the general public began to manifest their fears through the construction of nuclear bomb shelters like the one depicted below.  While President Roosevelt calmed a nation in 1933 with his famous words, "The only thing to fear is fear itself" it would be twenty years later when American society would began to measure those fears through visualizations like the bulletin above.  Today's modern society would reflect that hysteria with the advent of 9/11 and afterwords with our own modern version through the Department of Homeland Security and its danger advisory informing the public how fearful they should be.



A family H-Bomb shelter in 1955 constructed by the Walter Kidde Nuclear Laboratory.