Nearly half a billion FCDA booklets depicted the all-American family in their fallout shelter, creating a key visual focal point for early conversation about nuclear war in the U.S. Public domain via Digital Public Library of America Over the course of a decade, the agency attempted to quell public anxiety over nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union through public education campaigns, school room drills and exercises.ġ950s diagram of a fallout shelter for four to six people In the United States, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), founded in 1951, set out to convince Americans that if the bomb did drop, they could survive the fallout. Since then, Japanese popular culture has always kept the atomic bomb front and center, from genbaku bungaku (atomic bomb literature) to the recognition of Godzilla (1954) as an atomic text to the global success of anime films such as Akira (1988) and the work of Studio Ghibli.Įach nation had its own unique cultural reaction to the bomb. It all started in Japan in the 1940s, in the immediate aftermath of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when images of hibakusha (Japanese survivors of the bomb) and cities reduced to rubble first emerged. Thanks Russia! #ukraine #stopwar #russiastop Che La Luna - Louis Prima These images offer us a nuclear temperature check of sorts, reflecting the shifting optimism, anxieties and cynicism of the times. A litany of photographs, government films and Hollywood movies over the last 75 years communicates the public’s fears of nuclear war.

While the technology to share these images from Ukraine may be more advanced than ever before, the visuals of families in bomb shelters have always brought conflict to our doorsteps by making geopolitics concrete. Broadcast on an unprecedented scale, these viral visuals of family shelters have worked their way into our collective consciousness, humanizing the headlines and bringing the threat of nuclear destruction directly to our devices. Amassing millions of views, offerings like “ My Typical Day in a Bomb Shelter” and “ What I Buy in a Supermarket During a War” document destroyed cities, bunker cooking and daily life underground, with nuclear threat lurking offscreen. The Russian invasion of Ukraine isn’t the first conflict to unfold on social media, but commentators have been quick to dub it the first “ TikTok War.” Videos by young Ukrainians inside bomb shelters represent some of the most personal glimpses to date of teenage life inside a war zone.

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