Assembled entirely from archival footage, this film compiles government propaganda, newsreels, and military training films from the early Cold War to show how the United States prepared its citizens for nuclear war. There is no narrator; the footage speaks for itself, from civil defense shorts instructing schoolchildren to duck under desks to servicemen ordered to watch atomic tests from trenches a few miles from ground zero. Politicians and generals appear reassuring the public that a nuclear exchange is survivable with enough canned food and plywood, while Bikini Atoll test footage and radio broadcasts of the Hiroshima bombing sit alongside kitschy songs about the bomb. The editing lets absurdity and horror share the same frame, cutting from cheerful jingles to soldiers describing the shock wave hitting their bodies. The result is less a lecture than a mood: a country talking itself into believing atomic war was manageable, using its own official images to make the case, and the effect is as unsettling as it is funny.