Spies! Fallout shelters! Communists! The Cold War was at times frightening and comical, thoroughly strange and strangely practical. New buzzwords entered the dinner table conversation and “atomic” was used to describe everything from motels to cocktails. Burt the Turtle taught American schoolchildren how to “duck and cover” while some Americans built bomb shelters in their back yards. This seminar will be a survey of the ways in which films and books tried to capture the terror and the terrible absurdity of the era.