Illustrated on page 24 of Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Soucebook by Joan Lyons, 1985.

Illustrated on page 344 of the Korean edition of Structure of the Visual Book by Keith A. Smith, 2003.

Illustrated on page 353 of Structure of the Visual Book by Keith Smith, 4th Edition, 2003 and 2005.

Printed offset in four-color plus white on a pale gray paper. Text, appropriated images, patterns reproduced in exaggerated dot screen. Saddle sewn with wrap covers. With stamps. Signed by the artist.

Phil Zimmermann: "In late 1983 I decided that I wanted to do a book that reflected the upcoming Orwellian year of 1984. The cold war was still at its coldest and most frightening. Ronald Reagan uttered the now famous words at a microphone that the USSR should not worry, the bombers were already on their way to hit the Soviet Union. He meant it as an adlibbed joke, but many of us thought that it was a Freudian indicator of his true feelings about the bomb and the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. It would be hard for the youth of today to know how scary many people felt the times were there. I participated in a huge Ban the Bomb rally in Manhattan during the summer of 1983. No one remembers this million person peace demonstration today. But Civil Defense was born in those times.

"The book was about the paranoia of an advancing radioactive cloud approaching an inhabited area (the Hudson Valley where I lived) and the uselessness of trying to escape the radioactivity. I used a mechanical device of disintegrating and steadily enlarging halftone dots and patterns to show the increasing radioactivity. By the end the page images have become almost atomistic and unreadable because the scale of the dot components making up the image is so large. Tiny little boy scout icons futilely signal SOS.