PSA Monday: “Do-It-Yourself SDI Survival Test”

June 26th, 2006

Filed under: Comics, Politics

With nuclear missiles and missile shields in the news again, this PSA seems nearly as topical now as it did almost twenty years ago. From Eclipse Comics Airboy #22 (May 1987) comes this surprisingly political PSA entitled “Earth Island’s Do-It-Yourself SDI Survival Test.”

(For those of you who may not remember, SDI stands for the “Strategic Defense Initiative,” commonly called “Star Wars”, which was a plan to use armed satellites and ground-based counter missiles to protect the United States from a Soviet ballistic missile attack.)

SDI PSA. Click for the full page.

Click on the panel for the full image

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6 Responses to “ PSA Monday: “Do-It-Yourself SDI Survival Test” ”

  1. DrObviousSo
    June 27th, 2006 at 7:14 am

    I’m not sure if that’s really a PSA as much as it is policy advicoy, reall.

  2. Erich
    June 27th, 2006 at 8:42 am

    That looks like a lot more than 5% that the guy’s marking off in panel 2…

  3. Carl Fink
    June 27th, 2006 at 3:24 pm

    Um, that test proves that a bad test shows nothing. It doesn’t even let 5% of the missiles through, only leaves 5% of the area uncovered. Anywhere up to more than half the beans can fall through dime-sized holes, depending on how they’re applied. What a meaningless stunt.

  4. Lis Riba
    July 11th, 2006 at 4:29 am

    I wonder if someone could send that to Congress and the President.

    In comic book format, maybe they’d actually understand it…

  5. mpb
    July 13th, 2006 at 11:53 pm

    Here’s another comic version of a bm system. [How come Alaska’s not on that map? Where is…. Bethel Alaska from Pyongyang

    “Finally, I hope an anthropological perspective of the issues can remind ourselves and the rest of the public what is at risk in a nuclear exchange—for human existence is far more colorful, complex, and worthwhile than any two-dimensional crayon drawing can suggest. *

    *The Peace Shield ad, run on Washington, DC, television stations in early November 1985 portrays the complexities of the scientific and policy issues involved in the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) in a 30-second animated child’s drawing. The commercial is summarized in Ellen Goodman’s column (The Crayola Defense, Boston Globe, November 5, 1985), described by Lloyd Grove (The Star Wars Soft Sell, Washington Post, November 4, 1985) and by John J. Fialka (Combative General is a political Godfather of Star Wars Plan,Wall Street Journal, November 12, 1985), and parodied by Herblock (Washington Post, November 8, 1985) and Gary Trudeau (Doonesbury, November 22, 1985)”

    http://cerebraloddjobs.edublogs.org/2006/01/12/anthropology-of-human-survival/

  6. GW Crawford
    February 20th, 2008 at 11:32 am

    So the lesson here is apparently ‘don’t defend yourself at all’

    Estimates range from 10% (mid-70’s) to 90% (now) failure of Soviet missiles on launch
    so that is a whole heck of a lot less missiles.

    I remember the ‘experts’ arguing that no computer could ever have
    enough speed to handle the calculations involved.
    Which is now demonstrably false.

    And the newest anti-missile systems are a rousing success.
    We can now ‘hit a bullet with a bullet’

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