CONELRAD READ ALERT

MASTER MECHANICS & WICKED WIZARDS

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:00:19 GMT

Friend of CONELRAD Glen Scott Allen has written a fascinating and entertaining examination of the pop cultural treatment of scientists in his new book Master Mechanics & Wicked Wizards: Images of the American Scientist from Colonial Times to the Present. Allen�s scholarship on his topic is...

THE REBELLION OF RONALD REAGAN: A History of the End of the Cold War

Thu, 28 May 2009 18:21:15 GMT

When Ronald Reagan died on June 5, 2004 the video clip of him delivering his famous line �Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall� from seventeen years earlier started running on the 24-hour cable news channels almost immediately. The clip was repeated numerous times over the course of the next week until the 40th President of the United States was buried at sunset on June 11, 2004 at his library in Simi Valley, California. The debate over whether Reagan had won the Cold War had begun, of...

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:44:48 GMT

As everyone knows, the Apollo 11 astronauts returned safely from their historic moon landing mission on July 24, 1969. But what if there had been a malfunction and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had been stranded on the lunar surface without hope of rescue? Nixon speechwriter William Safire drafted a speech to cover just such a catastrophic scenario:

To: H.R. Haldeman From: Bill Safire July 18, 1969 IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER: Fate...

REDS PROMOTE RACIAL WAR

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:49:09 GMT

Prolific and deranged pamphleteer Kenneth Goff scrapes the very bottom of the Red Scare bucket with Reds Promote Racial War (1958). The booklet, which features a happy interracial couple on the cover, seeks to mobilize anti-Communist action by appealing to the basest prejudices of 1950s white America (the caption for the picture on the cover sums it all up: "Is this the kind of marriage you...

VERY STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 19:58:57 GMT

The cautionary last chapter of Jules Witcover�s fantastic Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, published in 2007, could not have anticipated the national debut of Sarah Palin, but one is left to wonder if history might have been different if Senator John McCain had perused it before the fateful day of August 29, 2008. Witcover�s brief...

URANIUM: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:04:38 GMT

The rock that graces the cover of Tom Zoellner�s wonderful new book, URANIUM: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World, may not be as instantly recognizable as the mushroom cloud, the Fallout Shelter Sign, the Hotline and other symbols of the Cold War, but as Mr. Zoellner reminds us, it was the key ingredient of that era. Uranium, as the author illustrates in insightful and highly...

THE DAILY WORKER

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 04:28:21 GMT

The Daily Worker newspaper began publication in 1924 and by the dawn of the Cold War it was virtually synonymous with the Communist Party of the United States. Indeed, in the 1950s merely accepting a gift subscription of the DW was probably enough to earn you an FBI file. Such a �dangerous� publication has long intrigued us, so we were delighted to learn that UCLA�s Charles E. Young Research Library has much of the newspaper�s...

ATOM BOMB DANCERS AD

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:32:28 GMT

Give the manager of the Burbank Theatre in downtown Los Angeles his sleazy, but well earned, due: He knew how to exploit the overnight scientific phenomenon of the atomic bomb and he knew how to do it quickly. As a matter of fact, if the manager had submitted his �See Burbank�s �ATOM BOMB DANCERS�� ad any sooner he probably would have been brought up on espionage charges because the Hiroshima bomb dropped only...

ROENTGEN CALCULATOR

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:25:55 GMT

The Roentgen Calculator was a popular civil defense accessory in the early sixties � no fallout shelter was complete without one. It was a tool that would theoretically allow the atomic bomb survivor to figure out just how screwed he or she was after an attack. A variation of the Roentgen Calculator was used by Dr. Strangelove himself in Stanley Kubrick�s classic 1964 film. It was also used as a gimmick to help promote the film (see Press Book excerpt below). If you have a lot of time...

LIBERALITY FOR ALL

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:09:21 GMT

In 1947 the Catechetical Guild Educational Society of St. Paul, Minnesota distributed a Soviet America scare comic entitled Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism�. It was one of earliest comic books to address the Cold War fear that the United States was ripe for enslavement by the Reds. In 2005 ACC Studios issued the first of an...