Note: the interview questions have been ommited

MILLER: I understand, okay. These films are, of course, propaganda, propaganda being any organized attempt to move large numbers of people to certain actions, or attitudes. TV commercials are propaganda, these are as well. And their purpose seems to be to becalm Americans during the early Cold War years. Something that I think was particularly necessary at the time, because Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, both together, took--

MILLER: This is something that was necessary at the time, because there had been a tremendous mass reaction against the bomb, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those events took the nation’s people, and indeed, the people of the world, by storm, as it were. I mean, people were, were awestruck, by the fact that this had happened, and that the destructive power of these new weapons was so vast. It was so awe-inspiring an event that there was quite a wave of activism against escalation of the arms race, against war itself, on the part of many of our nation’s most eminent scientists. Their efforts were propaganda, too. They believed ardently that it was now necessary to do something, to get people to the point where they would simply oppose anything like war. Let me say that over again. How did I start?

MILLER: This development in the history of warfare was so traumatic that it gave rise to a concerted propaganda effort by many of our nation’s most eminent scientists, to do something to prevent the outbreak of another war. In fact, the bulletin of the atomic scientists was one of the products of that moment. There was a very successful scientific/journalistic effort to educate people about the realities of nuclear devastation. And I think that, from the point of view of the national security hawks at the time, this was not a good thing. This might make people defeatist, it might make people too pacifist, you know? So it’s not surprising that films like these came out, which weren’t only telling people, you know, "go down into the shelter when the air raid siren sounds," that’s not the real purpose here. The subtext of these films is, nuclear war is survivable, and hence winnable. Radiation burns are no big deal, this is just another larger version of what the Londoners went through when Hitler bombed them during World War II.

MILLER: These films suggest that within the government agencies that were responsible for them, there was a genuine failure to understand what it was they were dealing with. A real failure to grasp the enormity of nuclear war. Which is something that was not unknown, because of the great barrage of alarmist propaganda that came out after Hiroshima.

I think what happened was that people in the government, and citizens generally in this country, were eager to feel better about what might happen. There was a mass desire to be reassured, and there was obviously, an answering inclination on the part of the government, to tell everybody that right, it’s fine, we have it under control. These films are not only trying to calm people and allay their fears, but they’re also implicitly authoritarian. They basically urge mass obedience. They ask people not to panic, which means don’t rebel, don’t criticize, don’t raise any questions, simply do as you’re told. And our expert personnel, you know, with the helmets and the whistles, and everything that they have, their connections to the headquarters and so on, they’ll tell you how to handle it. Just, you know, go along with the instructions and you’ll be absolutely fine. And again, I think it’s important to point out that this was not a cynical exercise, but rather an expression of self-delusion. And one that had tremendous economic payoff, too.

You know, the arms race was predicated on precisely this attitude, mass acquiescence. If people had been more activist and assertive, better informed, things might have gone in another direction. But as it happens, this was pretty successful. People were terrified by the possibility of nuclear annihilation, and I don’t think that these films were entirely successful at stifling that fear. I think that the fear was necessary, in order for the authoritarian message to succeed. So that people’s understandable fears could never be entirely repressed. It was a decade of anxiety; in fact, it was a half a century of anxiety. No one sane could find the emotional strength to repress such fears completely. I think what is more likely to have happened is that people were afraid, they stayed afraid, and they therefore tended to listen carefully to what they were told. A lot of people followed those rules. A lot of people built shelters. A lot of people wanted to believe that it was so, and that self-deception, I think, obtained for a very long time.

MILLER: Well, when I say propaganda, I mean to use it neutrally. I mean to use it as a mere descriptive term, which has been difficult to do for the past century, because the word became a pejorative one after World War I. But prior to that time, it was perfectly serviceable. Were it to refer to what we now mean by "spin," "impression management," "PR," "advertising," you name it. "Strategic communication." All these are euphemisms for propaganda.

MILLER: I’ll say that again. All these are euphemisms for propaganda, which is by and large, only as evil as the intention behind it. So, you know, I probably would have sympathized with the people who sought to convey a realistic sense of what nuclear war could do. But it was propaganda, nonetheless.

MILLER: Propaganda always pretends to a disarming candor. "Let’s face it." That’s a great title, considering the fact that the film is about the opposite, it’s about not facing it. You’ll notice that the film identifies nuclear warfare as a Red invention, and as a Red danger. The arrows that half circumnavigate the globe are Red. We see the headline referring to the Russians’ successful development of the H-bomb.

Now, at that time, Americans had not yet been able to invent one, but we still had started the whole thing, by bombing the Japanese. But, again, that’s what propaganda does. Pravda means truth, right? Anyone who tells you he’s going to give you the story behind the story, the facts, the real facts, you know, is probably about to tell you a big lie. And "Let’s Face It" is an example. But again, I think it’s important to point out that I really doubt that the makers of the film were consciously lying. It’s much more ambiguous than that. They wanted to make people relax, and accept the status quo. Accept government authority. Accept the government version of the truth about nuclear warfare. So it makes perfect sense to title the film in a way that suggests, now we're going to get to the truth that’s behind all the propaganda that you’ve heard.

MILLER: These films definitely portray a certain recklessness, that seems to express not only militant anti-communism, and, you know, an ever more powerful military- industrial complex, but also, a blind worship of technology. There was so much money available to the government at that time, to the defense contractors at that time, to the scientific community at that time, or that sector of it that was involved. So much money that it was possible to throw caution and restraint to the winds, and simply get into seeing what these nifty devices can do. Let’s just test them all over the place. Let’s try all kinds of applications. Let’s see if we can’t build dams with them, you know? These are uses that today strike us as insane, but they were going into that kind of thing with the very straightest of faces. You know, they were in deadly earnest, and it was based on this absolute worship of technology. And, you know, as it happens, a highly destructive and dangerous technology.

MILLER: Well, I’ll say two things. The worship of technology is evident, I think, in a lot of the shots in these films that represent the fireworks in the sky as, as almost, as heavenly entertainment, for the face of God. And we see crowds of people, standing quietly, rapt, staring upward, it’s a sublime experience. I think that really does bespeak a certain awe in the face of technology, an awe felt by a lot of the people in these agencies, and a lot of the scientists who helped make the bomb.

Now, these films are interesting as propaganda, because they are so thoroughly divided against themselves. They’re ambiguous, even ambivalent, in a way that makes them strangely, no, okay. These films deliver a mixed message. On the one hand, you can’t help but be very struck by the ruinousness of these weapons. You know, I mean, I have stuck in my head forever, footage of those houses swaying and buckling in the heat, and then blowing away. I saw that footage when I was a kid in some other films. And I never forgot it.

On the other hand, there’s the confident voiceover, and the shots of capable, self-possessed citizens, you know, duly going into the shelter, and air raid officials waving people along and so on. So, while on the one hand, the pyrotechnics are very, very dramatic, and really unforgettable, you’ve also got this strange overlay of official-ese, you know. Of official assurance.

Now, today, from our standpoint of forty, thirty to forty years later, when the films stand exposed as so corny, they seem so old-fashioned. And when we know so much more, we, the mass of Americans, know so much more about the truth of radioactivity and nuclear war, the films’ ambiguity is easier to spot. Because all that dated stuff falls away, and all we’re left with is the destructiveness, the spectacle of destruction.

But I think even at the time, the films were divided. I think even at the time, people couldn’t help but be moved and frightened by the footage of what those bombs really did do. I think they would also tend to want to believe the official assurances, but the assurances were not enough. Because the films couldn’t help but show you the very thing they were trying to deny. Pro-war films usually don’t do that. Pro-war films usually show parades and you know, statues and try in various ways, simply to glorify combat, without showing people bleeding to death in trenches and so on. But when it comes to nuclear war, you’ve got another problem, because it’s a kind of combat in which there are no armies. There are only these spectacularly destructive devices, and in order to catch people’s attention, you have to acknowledge that, and you have to show footage of it. But at the same time, they’re trying to say we’ve got it under control, you know. Sadly, they were, they were wrong.

MILLER: Those who were proponents of nuclear war policy had a new problem, which was to get people to accept a particular kind of war technology. That now changed the whole nature of war itself. That war had been changing for a century and a half, because of mechanization. But never as dramatically and as completely as nuclear weapons did. Because now, the battlefield was rendered completely irrelevant. Now, we had weapons at our disposal that had the potential to destroy the whole planet. Which makes traditional notions of warfare, and theatres of war, completely meaningless.

This turn of events threatened to arouse a lot of people, however latently, threatened to arouse a lot of people against war, period, and certainly against the Cold War, against the arms race. So, what better way to try to assuage those anxieties, than to assure people that this technology could also do good, the same way that radio, for example, went from being, you know, a ship to shore means of communications in wartime, to being a terrific source of entertainment and news, you see. What better way than to say that we can take these bombs, or we can take this force, and we can be constructive, as opposed to destructive? So that you are basically a barbarian, you’re against civilization, you’re a Luddite, if you balk at the development of this new technology, you see?

MILLER: These films actually assure us that if we can, you know, stand in the shadow of something, if we wear light and loose-fitting clothes, if we fall to the ground and cover our heads with our hands, we’ll be okay. What this suggests is, of course, a monstrous denial of, of the facts of the matter, and also, a very striking sort of nostalgia for World War II. Let me rephrase that.

This suggests enormous denial, of course, at its, it’s predicated on a strange kind of nostalgia for World War II. Now, it’s human nature to use your past experience as a way to deal with the present, the unknown present. And the immediate future, and that’s what these films demonstrate, because World War II is really what these films are all about. It’s as if they’re talking about the blitz in London. It’s as if they’re talking about air raids that are pre-nuclear, if you see what I mean.

So, that entails, obviously, playing down the peculiar new risks of radioactive poisoning, fallout, and so on. Which obviously require a lot more than just standing behind a fence and wearing a nice, light, loose-fitting shirt, right? But it’s, it’s psychologically understandable, because, again, the purpose of these films is to calm everyone, is to make everyone acquiescent, have them accept the status quo. Well, therefore, what you do is, you take the most horrifying and novel element of nuclear war, which is to say that element that really has little to do with the blast itself -- You take that element, and you, you make it manageable, by minimizing it, you see. Again, I think an unconscious, self-deceptive move on the part of the makers of these films, and not the result of some kind of conspiracy to lie.

MILLER: Well, this is probably going to take you off the subject, but what, to my mind, what was interesting about it was it really reminds us of what a Cold Warrior that Kennedy was. You know, he was, I mean, there’s been a, do you want to get into that? I mean--

MILLER: Yeah, I think I can address this. You can use it or not, but, ready? You know, the surprising presence of Bobby Kennedy at Ivy Flats, as one of the witnesses of the test of the Davey Crockett battlefield nuclear weapon is interesting, and telling, because it reminds us of just how broad the pro-nuclear consensus really was.

We have a tendency now, in looking back at these films, I think, to assume that it was only because of certain yahoos in command, certain rightist elements and so on -- It was only because of their influence that there was so much self-deception and so on. Well, that really isn’t the case. The kind of self-deception that we’re talking about was almost universal back then. There were peace activists, and there were also, you know, some communists who were offering discordant notes, dissident statements. But for the most part, this was the mainstream consensus that these films were representing.

And so Bobby Kennedy’s presence I think serves as a useful reminder of that fact. Here’s one of the prime players in Camelot, who’s there, God knows why, really, because he is attorney general, but he’s there to lend the, but he’s there to demonstrate the presidential imprimatur on all this. This is the kind of thing that his brother, that that dynasty, really, and that political party, all approve of.

MILLER: Well, the care that the filmmakers took, to show the soldiers being brushed off, and to refer to the need to wash down a couple of vehicles, this is actually a tacit admission -- This now comic emphasis on soldiers brushing each other off and, you know, taking out the Geiger counters and those references to safety precautions; all of this is a kind of tacit acknowledgement of people’s lingering fears. You know, if people weren’t still profoundly concerned about the dangers of radioactivity, they wouldn’t make such a big deal out of the fact that they took all these precautions, which of course, to us look absurd, right? But back then, it’s conceivable that they may have allayed the anxieties of many; it’s hard to say.

MILLER: It’s easy to laugh these films off, because they’re so dated, the techniques are so dated. It looks so cheesy, so it’s tempting to just laugh at them. But we really shouldn’t do that. For one thing, they indicate a level of hubris, national hubris, that’s not really funny. To set these bombs off in outer space, without really knowing what the consequences might be on earth, is in its way, just as dubious as bombing the Bikini Atoll, and subjecting the natives of those, to us, remote places, to such dire risks.

You know, we’re talking about a moment of uncontested national arrogance, which I think was probably no less marked in the Soviet Union at the time. It’s just that our system is more open, and things tend to be more visible, although it is true that most of these films are still classified. But I think that that’s one reason why it’s not a good idea just to laugh. And I’d like to add, there’s another reason why it’s not wise to laugh, and that is that just because the propaganda is old-fashioned, just because techniques are dated, doesn’t mean that we are, in fact, necessarily any more sophisticated, or any savvier now than our parents or grandparents were back then.

Let’s take a look at Star Wars, for example. Look at how the Gulf War was televised. Look at how the stealth bomber, and the stealth fighter, have been extolled, using state of the art propaganda techniques, that don’t strike us as cheesy and dated, simply because they are up to date. You don’t hear people laughing at that propaganda. So I think we really ought to avoid the temptation to-- And so I really think we ought to avoid the tendency, however strong the temptation may be, just to, to chuckle, just to laugh and feel superior, because propaganda is a danger that’s, you know, no more passe than the danger of nuclear destruction.

MILLER: All of our technologies are the result of human endeavor, and the product of human decision-making; all of them are. That means that they are all vulnerable to political control, of one kind or another. To talk about the H-bomb as the product of some kind of metaphysical process of evolution, beyond human grasp, is a way to ensure that people don’t ask inconvenient questions. Do we want to build such a weapon? Do we want to use such a weapon, you see? That kind of discourse, the kind that makes it seem as if it’s a natural process, the H-bomb is just here, that has a way of de-politicizing the whole discussion. It’s profoundly antidemocratic, as is the tendency to refer to man’s use of the bomb. You know. When they say "man," they mean the United States government, which is, theoretically, a government of the people. But to put it that way makes it sound as if the elites at the top are somehow in close touch with universal currents, divine forces, they’re just connected with those, and the rest of us had simply better, you know, make do with it.

MILLER: You know, you have to listen very carefully to the language they use to describe what’s going on. On the one hand, there’s a show, as usual, of openness, of candor. We’re showing you the results of an error, right? But there’s a much more powerful and I think successful effort at the same time, to minimize not only the destructiveness and the suffering, but also, to erase the moral dimension of the whole episode. There’s really nothing to worry about here. In fact, it was a good thing, because we learned from it. And anyway, we took care of them, and they weren’t suffering.

They use one excuse after another. You know, one way to try to gauge the enormity of this mistake is to try to imagine how our government would represent it if the Soviets had done this, to some remote population. Then, it would be cast as further evidence of communist indifference to human life, heartlessness, and so on, and it would be true, in that case.

But it’s no less true for our having done it, you see. One of the things that these films do is make a pretty chilling case against the system at the time, which would be so cavalier in its treatment of human populations, and animal populations as well.

MILLER: You know, in a way, the most chilling film in the whole archive is the one about Harvey the Otter. This movie, like, you know, the one that deals with the inhabitants of the Bikini Atoll, demonstrates the complete callousness and indifference of mighty superpower, in cavalierly subjecting a remote and innocent population, in this case an animal population, to the ravages of nuclear force.

I say it’s the most chilling, because in a way, it’s the most dishonest. In this case, you see nothing to indicate what the facts of the matter were. You have a kind of happy-go-lucky, National Geographic type film. With an otter named Harvey, I don’t think his parents named him that. He’s cute, you know, he doesn’t have the best table manners, but he’s a lovable little cuss, and so on, and we were engaged in making sure that he and his relatives and friends were all put out of harm’s way. So it was a conservation effort. I mean, this represents, it seems to me, the worst of propaganda in its pejorative sense, because it takes an atrocious actuality, which was nuclear tests that killed hundreds and hundreds of otters, and ducks, in an extremely gruesome way, and unnecessary-- And it puts a happy face on this, and actually represents it as a benevolent deed, you see. So even though there are no human victims here, it’s, the most chilling to me, because at least the films that include human victims, do show visibly some of the evidence of what they’d been through. Even though the voiceover denies that evidence. But in the case of the otter film, it’s profoundly contemptuous, both of the animal victims of that moment, and also the audience, of American citizens who are watching this film, and have no reason not to be taken in by it. Because there’s no, there’s no hint as to the truth that’s being covered up.

MILLER: I just finished co-teaching a course in Cold War propaganda. One week we devoted to nuclear (inaudible) The Bombs’ Early Light, that book, it’s really terrific. Some other stuff, and we watched some of the movies, the duck and cover, you know, those things.