4: Ducking Under the Communist Cloud: The KMT's Civil Defense Media and the Atmospheric A-bomb in Postwar Taiwan

In 1964, the People’s Republic of China successfully tested its first atomic bomb “Lady Qiu” in the northwest Lop Nur area, a world-historical event that catapulted the nation into the theater of nuclear deterrence by realizing Mao’s 1958 vision of liangdan yixing (two bombs, one satellite). Such explosive momentum would continue into the heyday of the Cultural Revolution, paving the way to China’s first hydrogen bomb (1967) and first satellite (1970). But across the Taiwan Strait, the PRC’s nuclear ascendance cast a heavy cloud of anxiety. It prompted Nationalist military media production of propaganda films and pedagogical materials, aimed at indoctrinating the Taiwanese general audience into a mentality of A-bomb civil defense and counter air-strike mobilization. This paper investigates the media of the KMT’s postwar civil defense, including films, textbooks, drill pamphlets, and posters, contextualizing them against the emergence of a totalizing media-sphere characterized by speculation over the PRC's aerial and nuclear threat to Taiwan. Focusing on the pedagogical melodrama film The Chances of Life under the Atomic Bomb, I highlight how the film connects memories of air warfare during the Sino-Japanese War with the operations of a modern civil defense system influenced by the U.S.’s Federal Civil Defense Administration. The KMT military adopted an audio-visual logic of control and management in its representation of the urban domestic sphere as an atmospheric media environment constantly infiltrated by the enemy’s noise, gossip, and propaganda, equating the ability to survive doomsday with the sensorial capacity to navigate polluted “air” in militarized environments.