In 1952, the FCDA - with the help of the Ad Council - created nine different short films about preparedness. As such, FCDA was largely responsible for the first nuclear shelters. In 1950, United States Congress created the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), to guide states’ actions in regards to civil defense policy. Today, fallout shelter signs, such as the one below, represent remnants of the nuclear disaster preparedness plans that the United States government intermittently encouraged or funded during the Cold War, from the 1950s through the 1980s. Irwin Redlener, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, explained: “the rogue state and the terrorist detonation remain a possibility and should be considered among the most serious disaster threats that the United States faces.” Despite the reality of such a nuclear attack, the United States remains largely unprepared. Perhaps the newest and most relevant is the higher probability of a nuclear weapon falling in the hands of a terrorist group or rogue state, such as Iran or North Korea, as opposed to a nuclear attack by another recognized nuclear weapons state. While the world has faced the Clock’s proximity to midnight before and lived to see the minute hand move backward, the world - and thus the Clock - is currently influenced by a number of different factors that did not exist in 1953. The Clock, designed in 1947 by artist Martyl Langsdorf and set by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, signifies how close the world is to a “nuclear apocalypse.” For the first time since 1953, the world is two minutes away from nuclear destruction. Ended nearly three decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was set to 17 minutes to midnight.
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