Poster contest

Graphic from “Survival in a Nuclear Attack,” produced by the State of New York Committee on Fallout Protection (1960), showing the reduction in fallout intensity over time.

What can you do in the event of a nuclear detonation? More than most people think. The Reinventing Civil Defense Project poster competition is looking for artists, designers, and other creative people to make bold, accurate, and potent visuals that can change how people see their role in the nuclear world.

Who can enter: Anyone! We especially encourage students, designers, and artists, but anyone can enter. You may enter as an individual designer or a team.

Deadline: July 16, 2019, July 31, 2019 11:59pm EDT. (extended!)

Prizes: A variety of monetary prizes will be awarded, up to $1,000. Your work will also be featured in the Reinventing Civil Defense August 2019 Workshop at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Teams that receive an award will split the total prize.

Judging: Your work will be judged by a panel of experts in the fields of design, nuclear weapons, risk communication, and other related fields. Posters will be judged on their visual potency (aesthetics, legibility), their message potency (communication), and their technical accuracy (major technical errors will be penalized).

Technical stuff: The file you submit should be in PDF format, at the highest quality possible (e.g., lowest compression), at 300 dpi. The dimensions of the poster should be  24″x36″. Your name or other identifying information should not appear on the poster itself — the judging will be done anonymously.

How to enter: Submit your document through the Google Form here. If you have difficulty submitting the file, or questions about the submission process or contest guidelines, please e-mail poster@reinventingcivildefense.org.

Fine print: The poster authors retain copyright of their work, but by entering your artwork into this contest, they agree to give the Reinventing Civil Defense Project and the Stevens Institute of Technology a non-exclusive, non-commercial license to use it for any purposes to do with the Reinventing Civil Defense Project workshop and research on risk communication.

The message: The message we’re looking to get out is that:

    • A single nuclear detonation in a city would be destructive and devastating, but most Americans — even those very nearby — would survive, and need to cooperate in recovery.
    • In the event of a nuclear detonation, there are strategies that can improve the chances of those in the near area to avoid becoming a casualty.
    • Nuclear weapon risk should be part of public understanding, and not ignored because people either believe it cannot happen (it can), or that it is totally unsurvivable.
Examples of how Protection Factors for radioactivity vary by building type and location. From “National Capital Region: Key Response Planning Factors” (2011).

What are the strategies for survival? The slogan that US government agencies like to use is: “Get Inside. Stay Inside. Stay tuned.”

    • Get inside. In the event of an imminent nuclear detonation, or in the aftermath of a detonation, getting indoors is always an improvement, versus being outside. If one has the time to be picky, the center core of large buildings, and basements, are the best sorts of structures. But any indoor structure is better than being outdoors or in an automobile.
    • Stay inside. If you’ve survived the immediate blast, and the structure you are in is not itself a danger (it isn’t on fire, it isn’t about to collapse, etc.), then you should stay inside until you hear official instructions to do otherwise. You should definitely not try to evacuate on your own: nuclear fallout can create invisible hazards out of doors, and your car (much less on foot) does not provide any significant protection from it. Furthermore, if hundreds of thousands of people try to self-evacuate at the same time, they will snarl the roads, creating conditions that actively inhibit evacuation and the work of emergency responders. You don’t have to stay inside for hundreds of years — but you might need to stay inside for up to three days (72 hours), until the rates of radioactivity decrease.
    • Stay tuned. It isn’t clear how easy it will be to get official information after a nuclear detonation (telephone networks might not work, for example), but you try to have a plan to get information without going out of doors. This might mean acquiring an emergency radio, for example. Again, in the case that one cannot get information from officials, you should expect to stay indoors for up to 72 hours.

You don’t have to use this slogan in your poster, but it’s useful to understand what it means about what people ought to do (and what it says they should not do).

The main “scenario” we are targeting this message for is for a single nuclear detonation in a city, as you might get from nuclear terrorism or from an attack by a state without many nuclear weapons (like North Korea). We are not giving preparedness advice for a “major” nuclear exchange (like US vs. Russia or US vs. China) which complicates the situation considerably.

Resources: The following resources are recommended reading, and contain many useful sources of inspiration and expertise.

Present-day recommendations – The guidelines presented here can be taken as “valid” for the purposes of the “technical accuracy” requirement.

Cold War visual materials – The guidelines here should be used with caution (some of the basic communications about the threat are valid, but not all of the recommendations are currently endorsed), but are included for the purpose of aesthetic inspiration.

Fallout radioactivity decreases dramatically over a period of several hours. This pays a key role in devising survival strategies, and goes against most people’s intuitive understanding of radioactive contamination. From “National Capital Region: Key Response Planning Factors” (2011).