In the event of an imminent attack, TV personality Arthur Godfrey—one of the era’s most trusted voices, and a close friend of Dwight Eisenhower, the president at the time—had been asked to record a special public service announcement. His PSA, copies of which have never been found, was meant to calm panic and report optimistically that most Americans would survive the forthcoming nuclear war.

Later, in the 1970s, the Watergate scandal actually derailed an update to the Conelrad system, as public distrust of government surveillance forced the FEMA predecessor to abandon a new technology it had proudly developed. In the years after World War II, the government had moved away from relying on air-raid warning sirens, and instead briefly set its sights on a system known as the National Emergency Alarm Repeater, or NEAR. The small buzzers, available for $5 or $10, could plug into any household electrical outlet and were triggered by a unique high-frequency electrical current transmitted across the national power grid by 500 specially designed warning signal generators.

The small town of Charlotte, Michigan—close to the civil defense agency’s headquarters at the time, in Battle Creek—became the test bed for the NEAR device, US Patent 3,284,791. The government handed out 1,500 devices to civilians and, for its low-tech test, gave each NEAR-equipped home a pink weather balloon to release into the air if the buzzer went off successfully. Spotters set up camp atop the city’s courthouse roof and counted the mass of balloons as they rose into the sky to determine the test’s effectiveness.

Although it was originally intended to alert 90 percent of the country’s population within 30 seconds, the multimillion-dollar NEAR program was abandoned quickly when it became clear how useless a blanket, indistinct national alert would be. It provided no way for the government to give specific details or updates on the imminence or scale of an attack, and there was no way to reach citizens afterwards with further information about the government’s response.

Wednesday’s test of the Wireless Emergency Alert System is only the latest in the country’s odd history of national doomsday alerts.

Instead, officials through the Johnson and Nixon administrations began to develop what they called the Decision Information Distribution System, a national radio network designed to notify citizens of a Soviet strike. The DIDS device could be installed in television sets for $10—or retrofitted onto existing TVs for about $30—and would, following a special government signal, turn on the television at any hour and tune it to a special low-frequency channel. Within 30 seconds of Washington issuing a warning, every TV in the country could be alerted, saving precious minutes in the race for shelter.

At the same time the Watergate burglary was unfolding in 1972, the government invested $2 million to build the first dedicated DIDS transmitter outside Washington, for a station dubbed WGU-20, Public Emergency Radio. The government branded the program—which it estimated would save the lives of 27 million Americans by providing immediate warning of a Soviet attack—with PERki, a peppy, friendly puppy mascot emblazoned all over its literature. It began to move ahead with plans for 10 more DIDS stations spread across the country, all of them controlled by centrally located radio transmitters in Ault, Colorado, and Cambridge, Kansas.

In one poll, seven out of 10 Americans said they were excited about the program and willing to invest their own money in a DIDS transmitter. But as the Watergate scandal spread, so too did public distrust of the government. When congressional oversight hearings highlighted secret surveillance programs and dirty tricks by the FBI and CIA, the government quietly shelved the entire warning system. “The technology is there,” one federal official explained anonymously afterwards, “[but] after [Watergate], there was no way we were going to tell John Q. Public that we were going to put something in his home TV that was controlled by the government.”

By the 1980s the government had settled into the Emergency Broadcast System, with regular public tests turning its incessant buzz and staccato warning voice into a familiar aspect of the American TV and radio experience. Behind the scenes, FEMA and the Pentagon tested the system twice a day, ready for a Soviet attack that never came.