Civil Defense

Imagine a summer day in New York City in 1955. An air raid sirens wails, signaling a simulated nuclear attack and Time Square empties as New Yorkers file into subway tunnels and identifiable fallout shelters. Not a person or a moving vehicle remains in the street. It's nearly impossible to imagine now, but this and other Operation Alert drills were repeated through the fifties in cities and towns all across the United States. From Bomb shelters and air raid drills to the Cold War rhetoric that justified everything from the interstate highway system to CIA wiretaps, Neither Dead Nor Read provides a fascinating glimpse at life in Cold War America.

Civil defense, civil defence (see spelling differences) or civil protection is an effort to protect the citizens of a state (generally non-combatants) from military attack. It uses the principles of emergency operations: prevention, mitigation, preparation, response, or emergency evacuation and recovery. Programmes of this sort were initially discussed at least as early as the 1920s and were implemented in some countries during the 1930s as the threat of war and aerial bombardment grew. It became widespread after the threat of nuclear weapons was realized.

5 CDs and one DVD (NTSC, region code 0) box set (LP sized) with a 250 page hardcover book. 'Atomic Platters' is the result of a years in the making musical 'Manhattan Project' that collects over 100 vintage Cold War songs and more than two dozen frighteningly naïve civil defense Public Service Announcements (many of these PSA's are voiced by celebrities such as Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, Pat Boone and Johnny Cash, to name just a few!) from the paranoid period that brought US fallout shelters, survival biscuits and uranium fever. The Cold War was a multimedia horror show and 'Atomic Platters' tops off it's mushroom cloud of entertainment with a DVD of nine bizarre civil defense and Anti-Communist short films from the '50s and '60s.