After the passage of 65 years, there's talk once again of dropping the Big One on the Commies in North Korea. It would be a pre-emptive strike of course and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says we'd better start thinking seriously about it, because, while Kim Jong Un hasn't gone into the deep end yet, he's jumping up and down on the diving board.
But you know... Walt has been around a long time, long enough to remember the Korean War. It occurs to me that we've seen this movie before! And I mean that literally. If you don't remember, check The Atomic Cafe, a 1982 American documentary film produced and directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty and Pierce Rafferty. Last year, this film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, by reason of being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The film covers the beginnings of the era of nuclear warfare, created from a broad range of archival material from the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s including newsreel clips, television news footage, US government-produced films (including military training films), advertisements, and radio and TV programmes. Though the topic of atomic holocaust is a grave matter [No more puns, please. Ed.], The Atomic Cafe approaches it with black humour, much of it derived from the modern viewer's reaction to the old films, such as the "Duck and cover!" film shown in schools, and taken quite seriously at the time.
Ed. has found the complete movie on YouTube. The part about the Korean War and the threat of using the A-bomb on North Korea (and China too, for good measure) starts at 22:51. The famous "Duck and cover!" sequence begins at 1:02:49. About a minute before that some well-fed 4-H girls show you what goes into a survival kit. Whatever happened to 4-H, anyway? You get to see Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon too. Watch it now, before YouTube deletes the freebie!
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