How did fear of nuclear catastrophe influence domestic culture and politics in the mid 40s and 50s?

The nuclear and communist panic created a very interesting, and if I may say so, somewhat funny, cultural phenomenon particularly among the newly born middle suburban classes.

Movies, songs, newspapers and television reels were full of nuclear propaganda, instructing people on what a nuclear holocaust would look like and the importance of being prepared with an anti-bomb shelter and other plans in case a bomb was dropped. I once saw a didactic television advertisement from the 1950s that advised people to relax and wait a few hours inside the nuclear fallout shelter as the area was bombed. It is very interesting to see the crazy, and ultimately useless ideas to survive a nuclear attack.

Children were exposed from the earliest age possible to the anxiety of nuclear attacks. It was not a coincidence that anxiety disorders and mental illness reached an all time high during the 1950s, people were afraid of death and communists. People in the suburbs became very afraid of everything that was different because they were socialized to fear spies, enemies of the state hidden among them and people trying to "get them" and taking their freedoms. If you look at images from magazines and television shows, you will find that people were always wearing the same type of clothes, the same models of cars and appliances at home, even their homes look more or less the same. This is because fear led people to a culture of constant conformity.

People were eager to support America against its hidden enemies and economic policies at the time were telling people "buy,buy,buy" in order to support American production and pump up the economy, so the people of the 1950s, benefitting from their post-war economy bought and consumed like crazy. It was in that time that the mall shopping centers were born.

Politicians created entire agendas on anti-communist internal and international affairs. Senator McCarthy, who famously made up "facts" to convince his voters that the communist party was ready to take over the USA, became the most famous manipulator of his time, leading people into crazy witch-hunts, accusing people of communist simphatiez left and right. The fear of communism led the country into several wars and several secret interventions abroad. Vietnam,Cuba and Korea were the wars known to the American people, but the CIA was working to interfere in the democracies of other countries in South America to ensure communism would not spread and damage its interests. All the presidential administrations from the end of WII until the 1970s were profoundly conserned and based entire agendas on anti-communist and nuclear agendas. These were the issues people wanted to hear, much like today our big topics are terrorism and immigration.

Well, actually, I don't recally any nuclear catastroph fears in the 1940s -- WWII took up most peoples' attention, and after it, people were engrossed in getting back to something like normality. But by the 1950s, it occurred to US people that the Russians now had The Bomb -- and guess who their favorite target would be? Yeah, us -- so we thought. The time was then right for the McCarthy Era - as in, who is more anti-communist than who?

Real superstar could have been Franklin D. Roosevelt and taken up the offer to allow Jews to be freed from Germany before the camps were built and he had the power for other countries to save not only the Jews, but the handicapped, the political prisoners, the Amish, the gypsies, the Blacks, the Hispanic prisoners and even the Armenians that died on many fronts. Spiritually speaking ... it would have let this world know the great scientists, doctors, physicists, inventors, and aerospace designers in what they could do for the world up to now if they weren't slaughtered. Imagine, we could have no dependence on oil, or garbage in the seas, or dying fish or bees, or even a cure for cancer long ago.