1953 US does't lie to you

[Ichingcarpenter]

[DetlefK]

1. We could do a similar one for gas and oil:

Global warming will not destroy the Earth. (Just the foundations of human civilization. Earth will be fine.)

Doubling CO2-output does not equal more heat-trapping in the atmosphere.

Polluting the very air we breathe is not the greatest threat.

Drinking ground-water from near a fracking-well is rarely fatal.

"My children like to hear about the time when weather was super-boring without droughts, floods, a never-ending hurricane-season and polar vortices every winter."

[n2doc]

2. Anthropomorphized A Bombs!

Propaganda like this must have been why some thought that having a global nuclear war with the USSR would be just fine.

[randr]

3. Are the long cloned noses a hint from the artist?

[DeSwiss]

4. ''Exposure to radiation does not cause sterility or impotency.''

- But it does cause horribly elongated noses and a tendency toward wearing preppy clothing, in some families......

K&R

[A HERETIC I AM]

6. IDENTICAL elongated noses!

[Armstead]

7. My father walked around Nagisaki shortly after the blast

He was in the Navy.

I have an elongated nose and wear preppy clothes.

Gulp.

[newfie11]

5. What else is new

Never believe what the government feeds you.

[KurtNYC]

8. At first glance, the child holding non-impotent Dad's leg has a fish tail

[FailureToCommunicate]

9. We KNOW it's safe, and have the photos to prove it...

("Oops, wrong batch of photos&quot

[Octafish]

10. ''Better Dead than Red.''

The Real Eisenhower: Planning to Win Nuclear War

by Ira Chernus
Common Dreams
March 18, 2008

Peace activists love to quote Dwight Eisenhower. The iconic Republican war hero spoke so eloquently about the dangers of war and the need for disarmament. He makes a terrific poster-boy for peace. But after years of research and writing three books on Ike, I think it's time to see the real Eisenhower stand up. The president who planned to fight and win a nuclear war, saying "he would rather be atomized than communized," reminds us how dangerous the cold war era really was, how much our leaders will put us all at risk in the name of "national security," and how easily they can mask their intentions behind benign images.

From first to last, Eisenhower was a confirmed cold warrior. Years before he became president, while he was publicly promoting cooperation with the Soviet Union, he wrote in his diary: "Russia is definitely out to communize the world....Now we face a battle to extinction." On the home front, he warned that liberal Democrats were leading the U.S. "toward total socialism."

SNIP…

For Eisenhower, the point of amassing a huge nuclear arsenal was not to deter war but to win it. This was enshrined as official policy in NSC 5810/1: "The United States must make clear its determination to prevail if general war occurs." The only meaningful war aim, he told the NSC, was "to achieve a victory." He described his war plan as "Hit the guy fast with all you've got if he jumps on you"; "hit 'em ... with everything in the bucket."

SNIP…

Eisenhower assumed that a post-holocaust America would be a totalitarian state, ruled by martial law. But he worried about (among other things) what would happen to the credit structure of the country and how to print and sell war bonds to finance the next war if Washington were destroyed. At one NSC meeting he complained that if the President and the Vice President were "knocked off," the "damnable" law of succession would result in the Democrats (he called them "the other team&quot taking the White House. "To assure against that happening, the President thought the Vice President should be put in cotton batting."

SNIP…

And we ignore it at our peril, because it was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would "push whole stack of chips into the pot" and "hit 'em ... with everything in the bucket"; who would "shoot your enemy before he shoots you"; who believed that the U.S. could "pick itself up from the floor" and win a nuclear war, even though "everybody is going crazy," as long as "only" 25 or 30 American cities got "shellacked" and nobody got too "hysterical."

CONTINUED…

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/18/7742

[BlancheSplanchnik]

13. +++ and saving to read later, on break. n/t

[slumcamper]

11. Want to use this in the classroom! Can you help me with a source? TYVM n/t

[bananas]

15. Don't know where the OP got it

but there are some browser add-ons which do reverse image search, for example https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googlesearch-by-image/

It looks like it was posted at http://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/2bwxog/i_found_this_in_a_1953_army_field_manual/

then someone else crossposted it to http://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/2bxdiu/1953_military_manual_on_nuclear_weapons_and/

Maybe they could help you with the original source.

[slumcamper]

16. Thanks

Great leads! If necessary I'll enlist the help of our underpaid but outstanding Information Resources professional. Doing history is like stripping wallpaper; you scrape away the surface to get to what really lies beneath. From there, you construct meaning. To understand the political dynamic of the time, Howard Zinn would demand that we strip away this image and explore what lies beneath. That will be done.

Thanks, Bananas.

[heaven05]

12. oh man

the BS people were told to believe and it's just as bad now.

[bananas]

14. k&r nt

[KG]

17. we're still being lied to, about all kinds of stuff. yes, even by a dem president.

[elias49]

18. I was a year old when this came out. Is that friggin weird art?

or is it me? Nukes with faces and bolts of radiation sickness coming from his fingers!! Were we all rubes in the early 50s? I find it a bizzaro piece of "Americana".

[linuxman]

19. The first three are actually true.

The second two could be true depending on what your particular definition of the operative word is.

Just saying...

[kentauros]

20. Comic books toed the line, too:

1953


http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?cid=875


1952


http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?cid=272

[JEB]

21. The cartoonist should have watched REEFER MADNESS.

[Rex]

22. Wow army man had lots of kids after beating up particle man. Take that atomic man!

And they all look like him too! So you know they are all his.