whoops apocalypse

"Protect and Survive" was a series of public service films produced in the 1960s by the British government. The "duck and cover" mentality of the time was that a nuclear war could be won in some context, and thus governments around the world attempted to inform their populations as to methods of surviving such an attack and its aftermath. I'm fascinated by these kinds of instructional propaganda films, and some of the best were edited into the framework of the chilling documentary "Atomic Cafe". There is a Strangelove tone to this rhetoric, the chilling pragmatism of men like Herman Kahn who wrote about a "winnable" nuclear exchange, and this kind of propaganda which tried to prepare people for the unthinkable. It's a long way from Peter Watkin's "War Game" which was banned immediately by the BBC and which attempted to show in a mock documentary style just how grim the aftermath of a nuclear attack on a British town would be.