Prosperity and Paranoia. Engineering Atomic Fear with Cold War Images

Abstract

: This paper reflects on the way in which certain moving images were used to engineer atomic fear into a manageable emotion in the U.S. during the early Cold War Era. A time of political, technological, economic, and social transformations, which were met with an extensive public relations campaign that relied heavily on the creation and dissemination of tightly controlled images of nuclear tests and models of civic virtue. It focuses on a selection of ephemeral productions to offer a view of the different ideologies at work in early Cold War American propaganda and its dialectic of prosperity and paranoia.