Emergency Broadcast System - Purpose

Purpose

"The Emergency Broadcast System was established to provide the President of the United States with an expeditious method of communicating with the American public in the event of war, threat of war, or grave national crisis." It replaced CONELRAD on August 5, 1963. In later years, it was expanded for use during peacetime emergencies at the state and local levels. Although the system was never used for a national emergency, it was activated more than 20,000 times between 1976 and 1996 to broadcast civil emergency messages and warnings of severe weather hazards. Some dramatic works depicting nuclear warfare (most notably the 1983 made-for-TV film The Day After) included fictionalized scenes of EBS activations. Occasionally the EBS would be shown in fictionalized use for events other than nuclear warfare, such as the 1978 Dawn of the Dead.

Read more about this topic:  Emergency Broadcast System

Famous quotes containing the word purpose:

    Possibly the Creator did not make the world chiefly for the purpose of providing studies for gifted novelists; but if he had done so, we can scarcely imagine that He could have offered anything much better in the way of material ...
    Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)

    Don’t confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science.
    Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

    Men may construe things after their fashion,
    Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)