Creepy Cold War Stuff
by Vince Daliessio
CONELRAD is a site dedicated to collecting, displaying, and explaining the government - media treasures of the Cold War Era. In one place, it offers some of the worst examples of government scaremongering, coupled with some of the best examples of why government doesn't work. From the footnotes to an article on DIDS, a failed longwave radio missile warning network;
EBS was later changed to EAS, the Emergency Alert System, using data transmission and a mercifully shorter Attention Signal.
At this writing (1999), EAS is enmeshed in a patent dispute, with the FCC requiring all broadcasters to use EAS and the apparent patent holder requiring license fees from all broadcasters.
EAS failed miserably at the FCC's ceremonial public unveiling of the system, though this fact was underreported. No actual EAS messages were successfully transmitted and received at the event. Instead, exhibiting vendors merely activated a cacophony of sirens and lights by manually switching them on.
