Duck, Cover, and Pass: The Atomic Bowl

""It was some fast-talking manager, who said, 'I've got this hot act. We're getting a big press entourage, taking you all up to Sing Sing prison,'" Mitchell recalled. The act was playing for the inmates to début his new band. "I thought, Well, I don't care about this guy, but I get to go to Sing Sing," Mitchell said. He and Peter Knobler, the magazine's editor-in-chief, rode along in the band's van. The manager was Mike Appel. The act was Bruce Springsteen."

""This air-raid signal would go, and you would go out in the hallway," Mitchell said. "They would call out, 'There are four casualties in Room 203!' And these kids would carry stretchers around with fake injured on it." Nowadays, he covers both music and nukes. "I am really the perfect boomer for this," he said. "It's duck and cover and rock and roll.""

Greg Mitchell worked as an editor at Crawdaddy in 1972 and traveled with Bruce Springsteen's band to Sing Sing. He later became editor of Nuclear Times despite limited nuclear background beyond atomic-bomb drills in junior high. Mitchell covers both music and nuclear topics, combining cultural and Cold War themes. He produced a PBS documentary titled The Atomic Bowl about a New Year's Day U.S. military football game staged in a killing field in Nagasaki months after the atomic bombing. The makeshift stadium stood outside the charred ruins of a middle school where 152 students and 13 teachers had been killed; walls bore messages written in blood.

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