Atomic Americans: Citizens in a Nuclear State 9781501762116

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ATOMIC AMERICANS

ATOMIC AMERICANS

C I T I Z E N S I N A N U C L E A R STAT E

S arah E . Robey

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2022 by Sarah E. Robey All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Robey, Sarah E., 1986–­author. Title: Atomic Americans : citizens in a nuclear state /   Sarah E. Robey. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press,   2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021019755 (print) | LCCN 2021019756   (ebook) | ISBN 9781501762093 (hardcover) |   ISBN 9781501762116 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501762109 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Nuclear weapons—­Social aspects—­   United States. | Cold War—­Social aspects—­   United States. | Citizenship—­Social aspects—­   United States—­History—20th ­century. |   Nuclear weapons—­United States—­Public opinion. |   Group identity—­United States—­History—20th ­century Classification: LCC E169.12 .R5825 2022 (print) |   LCC E169.12 (ebook) | DDC 909.82/5—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021019755 LC ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​   /­2021019756

To RJB

C o n te n ts

Acknowl­edgments  ix List of Abbreviations  xiii

Introduction: The Wars to Come

1

1. Stop “Play[ing] Pattycake with the Whole Issue”: Citizen Calls for Civil Defense

14

2. “Between the Devil and the Deep”: Civil Defense and the Early Cold War Po­liti­cal Landscape

41

3. The Man in the White Lab Coat: The Uses of Scientists and Scientific Authority 67 4. The Fallout from Fallout: The Peacetime Threat

99

5. Atomic Amer­i­ca: The Expert Public and Nuclear Dissent

135

Conclusion: Renouncing the Nuclear in Nuclear Citizenship

171

Notes  179 Bibliography  213 Index  225

A ck n o w l­e d gm e n ts

Writing about nuclear history is strange business, populated by esoteric research rabbit holes, unsolvable puzzles, and the occasional vivid nightmare. Actually, the same could be said for most academic pursuits. In reflecting on the work that went into this book, I am most thankful for ­those who made the pro­cess less solitary. Researching and writing this book has brought me into the fold of several communities of thoughtful ­people who sustained me intellectually, professionally, and emotionally over the last de­cade. I sincerely thank ­those who helped me see this work through. Several institutions ­were critical to the completion of this proj­ect. Idaho State University’s College of Arts and Letters and Department of History sponsored several conference trips that allowed me to test ideas across subfields and historical communities. ­Temple University’s Department of History, Center for the Humanities, as well as the Center for Force and Diplomacy funded my many early archival trips. The Miller Center at the University of V ­ irginia, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Philadelphia History Museum all provided funding while I completed my PhD. The Friends of the Prince­ton University Library and the Rocke­fel­ler Archive Center supported me for two extended stays at their archives. I am also grateful for the help and unmatched patience of the archivists, reference assistants, and student employees at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Library of Congress, the National Archives at College Park, the National Museum of American History, the New York City Municipal Archives, Swarthmore College’s Peace Collection, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Yale University’s Special Collections. Late in the proj­ect, Lily Birkhimer, Ralph Drew, Mary Hansen, Miranda Rectenwald, and Keith Weimar provided essential assistance in securing the art for this volume. I would also be remiss to leave out thanks for the unsung library heroes at T ­ emple and Idaho State; thanks especially to Beth Downing, Barbara Mayfield, and Ellen Ryan. My many academic homes over the years have supported me in more ways than I can count. I continue to benefit from Beth Bailey’s encouragement and mentoring. This book is a testament to not only her hard questions and firm ix

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nudges but also her unwavering commitment to her students. Beth, Brian Balogh, Petra Goedde, and Richard Immerman also provided essential counsel and countless letters of recommendation in the final years of my time at ­Temple. I carry their wisdom, guidance, and compassion with me as I have formed relationships with my own students. I consider myself lucky to have found an equally supportive community of friends and colleagues at Idaho State. Two fellowship years gave me the space and time to think about this proj­ ect in new and creative ways. My year in Washington, DC, split between the National Museum of American History and the National Air and Space Museum, taught me the value of cultivating an intellectual community even in a temporary home. As a fellow at the Miller Center at the University of ­Virginia, I also had the plea­sure of being part of a tight-­knit cohort of historians and po­liti­cal scientists. I trea­sured our time spent in Charlottesville. I am also grateful for the many individuals who gave formal and informal feedback on vari­ous parts of this proj­ect as it evolved over the years. My colleagues in the Network for Civil Defense History have been a steadfast source of encouragement, enthusiasm, and camaraderie. The Technology and Physical Sciences working groups at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine not only read several early chapter drafts but also created community in Philadelphia. I thank the Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Proj­ect and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies for introducing me to two communities of bright, big-­hearted scholars. Countless conference copanelists, commenters, and audience members helped me uncover dif­fer­ent ways of thinking about nuclear history. Fi­nally, the Fellows Seminar at the Center for the Humanities pushed me to answer difficult interdisciplinary questions, and this book is better for it. At Cornell University Press, Michael McGandy saw the potential in this proj­ ect early on. His advice, encouragement, and patience are reflected in ­these pages, and I am thankful for his support over the years. I am grateful too for Sarah Grossman’s stewardship of this proj­ect in its final stages, and the editing, production, and marketing teams for making the pro­cess of publishing a first book less daunting. Fi­nally, I thank the two anonymous readers whose comments on the manuscript did much to help me position and clarify my arguments. This book was researched and written as I was employed by four dif­fer­ent universities while living in five cities on two continents. My homes away from home w ­ ere many and my friends, loved ones, and colleagues far-­flung. Countless ­people have nurtured me with their generosity, food, and good com­pany over the years. Their love made this proj­ect pos­si­ble. For solidarity, friendship,



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xi

and levity, I thank Arunima Datta, Melanie Newport, Marie Stango, Matthew Unangst, and John Worsencroft. For the joy of chosen families, I thank Nate Hopkins, Brenden Nosratbakhsh, Julia Fiorello, Zaire Durant-­Young, Adam Tecza, and Adam Erickson. For friends far and wide, I am grateful for Jess Bryson, Bettie Graham, Christian Gunkel, Svenja Hohenstein, Celeste Sharpe, Jill S­ ullivan, Katharina Thalmann, and Arwen Wyatt-­Mair. For their friendship and collaboration, I thank Peter Bennesved, Anthony Eames, and Silvia Berger Ziauddin. I would not be where I am ­today without my ­family. They unquestioningly supported my choice of c­ areer path even when it took me far away from home. My parents, Gerry and Cynthia Robey, ­were my first teachers and remain my biggest cheerleaders. They taught me empathy and in­de­pen­dence and to embrace creative thinking. My b­ rother, Tom Robey, has inspired me more than he prob­ably realizes. I learned from his tenacity, thoughtfulness, and curiosity, and I am a better h ­ uman for it. Parts of this manuscript took shape during getaways to New Haven and Seattle; visits to see Tom, Suzy, Michael, and Fritz gave me much-­needed clarity of mind and spirit. Along the way, I was fortunate to become part of a second f­amily. The Bloks’ loyalty and laughter has sustained me since the moment we met. And to all of the above, I thank you for only asking occasionally when my book w ­ ill be finished. I’m proud to deliver it to you at long last. Fi­nally, this book is dedicated to my partner in mind and heart, Richard Blok. Being an academically adjacent spouse takes a special degree of patience and calm. Yet through several moves, professional challenges, and life’s vari­ ous and sundry curveballs, I am grateful for the life we have built together.

A b b r e vi ati o ns

AEC Atomic Energy Commission AFSC American Friends Ser­vice Committee AIA American Institute of Architects APA American Psychiatric Association AUI Associated Universities, Inc. AMVETS American Veterans BEAR The Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation BSA Boy Scouts of Amer­ic­ a CNI St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information CNVA Committee for Non-­Violent Action CPC Citizen Participation Committee CDPC Civil Defense Protest Committee CTBT Comprehensive Nuclear-­Test-­Ban Treaty DOD Department of Defense FCDA Federal Civil Defense Administration GAC General Advisory Committee GE General Electric HUAC House Un-­American Activities Committee JCAE Joint Committee on Atomic Energy LTBT ­Limited Test Ban Treaty NAS National Acad­emy of Sciences NCCI National Council for Community Improvement NSC National Security Council NSRB National Security Resources Board NTS Nevada Test Site OCDP Office of Civil Defense Planning OCD Office of Civil Defense OCDM Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization OCM Office of Civilian Mobilization PER The Report of Proj­ect East River PPG Pacific Proving Grounds xiii

xiv A b b r e v i at i o n s

SANE Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy SCAS Senate Committee on Armed Ser­vices UDHR Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights UN United Nations USSBS United States Strategic Bombing Survey VFW Veterans of Foreign Wars WDCDB War Department Civil Defense Board WSP ­Women Strike for Peace

Introduction The Wars to Come

Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war) —­Adaptation of quotation from Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De Re Militari

In October 1958, the United Press International news ser­vice ran a story about nuclear fallout shelters. “Just the sound of a musket shot from the camp site where Washington’s patriots withstood the frigid winter of 1776,” it read, “Paul Pazery stands ready for what­ever the Atomic Age has to offer.” Pazery, whom the article refers to as a “Nuclear Age Noah,” had recently completed a four-­year proj­ect to build two nuclear fallout shelters for his f­ amily of six in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The article ran in newspapers nationwide, closing with Pazery’s words: “At first p­ eople thought I was a crackpot, spending all this time and money [nearly $4,000] . . . ​but they ­don’t think so anymore, with all the saber rattling in the news.”1 Pazery’s story is typical of any number of newspaper articles that ran across the country in the 1950s featuring local “optimists” preparing for the worst version of the ­future but hoping for the best for themselves, their families, and their nation. Less often, however, did a news outlet so explic­itly connect the nation’s history to the modern conditions of the Atomic Age. Yet Valley Forge evoked the patriotic ideal of 1776 so completely that the editors at United Press did not notice that the article’s author had misdated the episode: the Continental Army spent the deadly winter of 1777–1778 at the site. The invocation of national origin stories was a familiar trope in US Cold War po­liti­cal and cultural rhe­toric, but Pazery’s story is more than a meta­phor for the nation’s founding. For the Continental Army, the period spent at Valley 1

2 I n t r o d u c t i o n

Forge was the lowest point of the war. Undersupplied and cut off from aid, thousands of troops died of exposure, malnutrition, and illness. Thus, Valley Forge also represented historical survival and perseverance in the hardest of times. Like Washington’s unforgiving winter, the forthcoming nuclear war that Pazery and ­others ­imagined would be long, isolating, and cold.2 But as in the American Revolutionary War, the reward for survival would be nothing less than the triumph of American democracy. The jumbled symbols of American exceptionalism pre­sent in Pazery’s story—­patriotism, militias, Chris­tian­ ity, and millennialism—­fit naturally into the contours of Cold War culture (figure 1). For postwar Americans, the goal of surviving the Atomic Age became inextricably tied to ­matters of civic pride and American identity. If the ideological conflict that undergirded the Cold War ever boiled into a hot war, fought with nuclear weapons, a nation’s capacity to survive would dictate the outcome.3 Nuclear survival was thus never entirely absent from Cold War nationalism. In a practical sense, Americans realized that nuclear war carried the potential to disrupt the American way of life. But as time went on, they began to understand that the threat of nuclear weapons was not ­limited to how they ­imagined the catastrophic aftermath of an attack on American soil. Concerned Americans also looked inward and worried about what the peacetime growth of the American nuclear arsenal meant for American democracy. As it would turn out, the work that went into reconciling nuclear weapons with American demo­cratic ideals was much more complicated than a simplistic comparison of the Cold War to the American Revolution. In the postwar world, where the staunch defense of American society against e­ nemy threats became urgent and instrumental in waging the Cold War, nuclear weapons became a power­f ul domestic po­liti­cal force with which to reckon.4 Atomic Americans uncovers how nuclear weapons—­whether used in war or maintained in peace—­threatened to upset long-­standing assumptions about the strength of American cultural and po­liti­cal institutions between 1945 and 1963. At the dawn of the Atomic Age, Americans repeatedly encountered troubling new questions wrought by the nuclear revolution: Who, in a representative democracy, is responsible for public safety on a national scale? How do citizens imagine themselves as members of the national collective when faced with the priority of individual survival? What do nuclear weapons mean for transparency and accountability in government? What should be the role of scientific experts within structures of demo­cratic government? The prevalence of ­these questions, among o ­ thers, reveals that nuclear weapons created a new and unpre­ce­dented arena for debating individual and collective rights in the United States and threatened to destabilize the very basis of US citizenship.

Figure 1. ​Cover of Civil Defense . . . ​An American Tradition. Tropes of the nation’s founding melded easily with early Cold War civil defense ideas. In addition to the American Revolution–­era musket, powder horn, and tricorne hat featured on the cover, e ­ very essay consciously invokes the grit and self-­reliance of American revolutionaries and pioneers of an e ­ arlier era. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Civil Defense . . . ​An American Tradition: Four National Award Winning Essays (US Government Printing Office, 1960). Scan courtesy of the University of ­Virginia Library.

4 I n t r o d u c t i o n

If citizenship can be understood as a set of rights and obligations that define the relationship between citizens and a nation-­state, US conceptions of citizenship came u ­ nder extreme new pressures in the Atomic Age. The resulting contentious debates surrounding survival, responsibility, and national community revolved around what I call nuclear citizenship. Nuclear citizenship is the way Americans came to define their relationship to the federal state as something fundamentally tied to nuclear survival. This framing provides a way to understand how nuclear weapons came to be a conduit for discussing rights and responsibilities, one that reached Americans at a deeply personal level. For individual citizens, many of whom felt that their lives ­were jeopardized by the Cold War contest, the po­liti­cal became a m ­ atter of life and death. Never before had basic survival taken on such overtly po­liti­cal tones. Put another way, the body politic became intimately tied to the bodily survival of citizens. But logics of national survival and individual survival reflected back on one another again and again through a lens clouded by practical impediments to protecting the public’s safety.5 Conceptions of nuclear citizenship emerged alongside the broader re­ orientation of American po­liti­cal culture in the early Cold War. Domestic anticommunism and increasing international hostilities significantly narrowed the landscape of acceptable politics and forms of expression. Historians have examined this era in ­g reat detail, highlighting the myriad contradictions between Cold War po­liti­cal ideology, policies that often worked against ­those ideals, and the complex lived experiences of being a citizen in this era. Cold War exigencies—­real and i­ magined—­created rigid structures of inclusion and exclusion that recast what it meant to be a good American. Cold War citizenship demanded the per­for­mance of loyalty, anticommunism, morality, and normative individual be­hav­ior, especially in public. T ­ hose who embodied racial, gender, or sexual difference or po­liti­cal ideologies outside the mainstream ­were particularly vulnerable to the abuses of Cold War cultural exclusion. Reinforced by policies that could penalize outsider status by jeopardizing one’s livelihood, social standing, privacy, rights, or freedom, Cold War citizenship expectations worked to perpetuate a narrow normative culture while silencing dissent.6 Considering nuclear weapons as a site of public debate provides a dif­fer­ent win­dow for understanding citizenship in the de­cades ­after World War II, however. From the mid-1940s forward, Americans voiced concerns about a variety of nuclear ­matters, including civil defense and public safety, the role of nuclear science in government, the wisdom of nuclear testing, and the imperative to make peace with the Soviet Union. By the late 1950s, such civic debate had solidified into an antinuclear movement that brought together long-­

I n t r o d u c t i o n

5

established activist organ­izations with concerned scientists as well as unaffiliated citizens. In part, this trajectory coincides with the declining viciousness of anticommunist fervor that accompanied the second half of the 1950s. However, the earnest public debate that existed even at the height of McCarthyism suggests that nuclear citizenship is not altogether coterminous with what we have come to understand as restrictive Cold War citizenship. This is not to say that anticommunism and related forms of repression ­were absent from nuclear debates. Accusations of communist leanings dogged vocal antinuclear scientists and protest organ­izations throughout the period in question, and activists of all stripes w ­ ere careful to frame their dissent as a m ­ atter of protecting mainstream American values. With a few notable exceptions, however, prominent antinuclear critics maintained reputable standing and found significant support among the public. Nuclear threats thus created spaces for civic engagement that circumvented the po­liti­cal restrictiveness accompanying other aspects of Cold War national security culture.7 This book examines nuclear citizenship through three intersecting and overlapping threads. First, ­because citizenship in the early Cold War became inextricably tied to ideas about individual and collective survival, the history of nuclear civil defense takes a central role. Civil defense h ­ ere does not serve as a foil: I do not see civil defense as a failed federal program, a bad-­faith distraction, or, as one historian called it, a “tragicomedy.”8 As policy, civil defense was a product of its time, hemmed in by national security requirements, Cold War ideological imperatives, partisan arguments over postwar liberalism, and bud­ getary constraints. We know that very few Americans volunteered for official civil defense corps, retrofitted their cellars, or excavated their backyards, yet Americans discussed nuclear public safety at length.9 The idea of civil defense was highly vis­i­ble in American life during the early Cold War and has remained remarkably so in public memory ever since. The compelling question in the history of civil defense is not why it never would have worked or why it failed. Thankfully, we have managed to avoid the kind of armed conflict that would test the utility of nuclear civil defense. Instead, this book joins a body of nuanced recent scholarship that interrogates the cultural and po­liti­cal consequences of programs designed to transform civilians into nuclear cold warriors.10 The nuclear threat was a constant reminder that although nuclear war had the capacity to devastate entire cities or the country writ large, it was a dire threat to individual Americans as well. The question of individual survival relative to the survival of the collective emerged at the crux of discussions about the logic of civil defense in the Atomic Age. Therefore, civil defense—in both its practical and hy­po­thet­i­cal forms—­serves as a primary vehicle for understanding how American citizens positioned themselves in relation to their

6 I n t r o d u c t i o n

state. Historian Laura McEnaney in her thoughtful work on the history of civil defense in the 1950s argues that civil defense “paved the way for the intrusion of military ideas and structures into civilian life.”11 McEnaney’s focus on militarization reveals how civil defense policies worked to domesticate the national security state and mobilize its citizens. Still other studies have used civil defense to examine the intersection of culture, politics, and personal life in the Cold War. Through explicit and implicit means, civil defense recommendations reified a white, middle-­class, heteronormative, family-­centered ideal, echoing other structures of postwar inclusion and exclusion. In par­tic­u­lar, historians Kenneth Rose and Thomas Bishop use the ­family fallout shelter as a point of connection between postwar social and cultural anx­i­eties and the survivalist demands of the Atomic Age.12 As a body of scholarship, ­these cultural histories of civil defense show that individual national security–­mindedness was something promulgated by the state, then sometimes reproduced and reinforced by citizens themselves.13 Still, as is the case with all histories of civil defense, it is easy to overstate the power of the federal government in conditioning how Americans thought about nuclear threats and survival. This work positions civil defense as a conceptual battleground that emerged from a set of historical actors much wider than government experts and policymakers. From the earliest moments of the Atomic Age, citizens articulated and endorsed a wide range of nuclear public safety concepts. Once the newly formed Federal Civil Defense Administration codified a system of self-­help civil defense in 1951, however, the philosophical onus was placed on individuals to facilitate their own survival, just as Pazery had understood in 1958. What­ever practical mea­sures ­were necessary for civil defense—­training, funding, stockpiling—­were left to the discretion of local and state governments. This federalist complement to self-­help created a wildly inconsistent implementation of federal recommendations. For reasons that ­will be discussed in the chapters that follow, self-­help civil defense logic marginalized and excluded millions of Americans.14 Against this backdrop, many concerned Americans sought alternatives to self-­help, insisting on a system that offered universal protections against the horrors of nuclear war. O ­ thers repudiated the premise of civil defense entirely. At vari­ous moments in the early Cold War, then, civil defense became the subject of intense public demands and controversy. While such dialogues did not always affect policy changes at the national level, civil defense became a means for everyday Americans to see life and death in federal policies. T ­ hese complex exchanges surrounding civil defense reveal a history that deserves to be understood as both a top-­ down policy pro­cess and a site of impor­tant grassroots agency.

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7

Civil defense created space for citizens and the state alike to consider what they owe each other ­under the novel pressures of the nuclear threat. Americans understood nuclear survival to be a ­matter that needed to be mediated by governing structures. Yet more often than not, public expectations for centralized and robust civil defense mea­sures did not align with federal, state, or local policy. The task of ensuring universal survival in the event of nuclear war was impossible. Some policymakers ­were acutely aware of this friction. During congressional deliberations about a national civil defense program in 1950, Senator Brien McMahon wondered how a self-­help mandate could work if “the first duty of a sovereignty is to protect its p­ eople.”15 McMahon struck at the heart of the theoretical debate over civil defense: How could the state convince its citizens to assume the role of protecting the collective body politic? What obligation did citizens have to the state if the state was no longer willing or able to carry out its obligation to keep its citizens safe? Over the following de­cades, civilians and officials continued to puzzle over this dilemma, using the explicit language of rights and responsibilities. The Atomic Age thus placed survival within the context of broader disputes over rights-­based liberalism and the scale and scope of federal power.16 The evolution of nuclear science and technology provides the second thread constituting nuclear citizenship. Thanks to an extraordinarily well-­funded postwar defense apparatus, nuclear weapons and their delivery systems advanced with breakneck speed in the de­cades ­after World War II. With each weapons milestone, the reach of nuclear war’s destruction grew wider. The sheer scale of individual nuclear explosions meant that the bombing of any target—­ whether military, industrial, or political—­would kill civilians. But the magnitude and character of this civilian threat changed over time. For several years following the end of World War II, the popu­lar (and strategic) image of nuclear war involved a few atomic bombs used on urban coastal targets: the key industry, transportation, and governing centers. But by the late 1950s such imaginings had given way to an attack with hundreds of atomic and thermonuclear warheads, reaching much farther into the North American continent and blanketing large swaths of the heartland with radioactive fallout. By 1961, some strategic analysts placed the pos­si­ble national casualty rate of nuclear war as high as 160 million.17 The public economy of nuclear information shifted in impor­tant ways in the context of this rapidly changing landscape of nuclear peril. Before 1945, few Americans had cause to learn about particle physics. The dramatic atomic conclusion of World War II and the technological advancements that followed, however, forced Americans to think of such science as part of their

8 I n t r o d u c t i o n

everyday lives. Coincidentally, it was civil defense media, produced in g­ reat volume during the 1950s, that was the primary vehicle for public education about the workings of nuclear weapons. But ­behind the pre­sen­ta­tion of nuclear public education, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) tightly regulated public access to nuclear information, citing Cold War secrecy imperatives. As such, the nuclear arms race created an elite class of scientists, advisers, and policymakers who operated within the protected space of Cold War competition. Such individuals seemed to wield ­g reat power over the safety and security of American civilians. As the 1950s wore on, this lack of governing transparency would come ­under the scrutiny of several formal and informal protest organ­izations as well as concerned scientists themselves.18 The C ­ astle Bravo thermonuclear test in 1954, however, best underscored the power of the public’s understanding of nuclear science. Bravo, conducted at the AEC’s testing site in the Marshall Islands, had an explosive force two and a half times its predicted yield and spread radioactive fallout over thousands of square miles of ocean, populated islands, and the unsuspecting crew of a Japa­nese tuna trawler. The scale of the accident was too large to go unnoticed by the press. In the weeks that followed, American newspapers reported that the fishing crew had fallen ill and their tuna cargo had to be destroyed. By September, one of the crew members had died of radiation poisoning. The AEC worked to manage the news reporting, but the test and its aftermath unleashed a widespread public discussion about the dangers of nuclear testing and a new awareness of a potentially deadly threat: nuclear fallout. Concerned observers drew immediate parallels between testing in the distant imperial outpost and the AEC’s ongoing test series in Nevada. Throughout the late 1950s, activist scientists, consumer watchdogs, AEC officials, and a host of other commentators fiercely debated the extent to which fallout endangered ­human health. ­Because subsequent scientific research often raised more questions than it answered, popu­lar awareness about the dangers of fallout from nuclear weapons testing galvanized a new wave of antinuclear activism by the end of the de­cade.19 Importantly, public debates about fallout raised a critical question about ­whether or not the federal government was operating in a way that served the public good and protected its ­people. Historians and sociologists have explored at length the relationship between nuclear physicists, science activism, and nuclear dissent movements in the early Cold War.20 Kelly Moore and Paul Rubinson in par­tic­u­lar have illustrated the power of scientific expertise to persuade and inform the antinuclear movements and national security policies alike. Science knowledge production, scientists as information disseminators,

I n t r o d u c t i o n

9

and scientific authority are all part of the story that follows. However, what the general public did with nuclear knowledge is essential in explaining how concerned Americans strug­gled to reconcile nuclear policies with their expectations of the state. Knowledge of nuclear science gave civilians a means to understand how nuclear weapons affected their daily lives, even in peacetime. Indeed, the message of antinuclear campaigns was rooted in a populist appeal: the existence of nuclear weapons, ­whether in peace or war, constituted a danger to ­every man, ­woman, and child on the planet. Nuclear survival was no longer dependent on one’s ability to survive an attack. Instead, concerned Americans came to understand that fallout was a constant peacetime threat to survival as well. In raising critical questions about governing transparency, responsibility, and safety, fallout fractured the relationship between citizens and the Cold War state. Nuclear weapons testing, like civil defense, became wrapped up in the contested terrain of nuclear citizenship rights. The final thread of nuclear citizenship examines expressions of demo­cratic participation in the context of the Atomic Age. Citizens wrestled with the manifold changes that nuclear weapons brought to American life and did so in the context of civic engagement. From the end of World War II ­until the early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Americans wrote to elected officials and administrators with their concerns. As one might expect, their messages ­were diverse, reflecting public support for and opposition to existing policies, outlandish and practical suggestions, and informed and uninformed positions. By the end of the 1950s, however, the nuclear Cold War had opened significant ave­nues for public engagement in nuclear issues, including testing, civil defense, disarmament, and proliferation. Several essential histories have chronicled the landscape of formal antinuclear activism during this de­cade, which included long-­standing pacifist organ­izations and the emergence of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.21 This work likewise highlights the evolution of nuclear dissent from written demonstration to or­ga­nized direct action, public protest, and educational campaigns, or what one historian calls “nuclear democracy.”22 Yet letter writing, editorials, consumer protest, grassroots petitions, and spontaneous expressions of dissent characterize the entire period as well. By using a framework for understanding public engagement in nuclear issues that extends beyond formal protest movements, I show that nuclear weapons created a principal site of Cold War civic participation even for Americans who never became block wardens but also never took to the streets. Why ­were so many citizens compelled to assert their opinions about nuclear policies, m ­ atters over which they undoubtedly felt they had l­ittle control? ­After all, it is clear that Cold War Americans understood that the federal

10 I n t r o d u c t i o n

government held ultimate authority over nuclear weapons. The arsenal constituted the substance of the American state’s power in the global Cold War conflict, and for much of the postwar era the power­ful AEC held near-­ monopolistic control over nuclear policies. Nevertheless, Americans understood that nuclear weapons—­and all their attendant policies—­affected their lives on a personal level. I contend that it is this connection between federal policies and individual well-­being that drove so many Americans to stake a claim in nuclear ­matters. Contrary to the federal government’s insistent self-­ help rhe­toric, Americans came to understand that nuclear survival was not something that could be ensured at the individual or local level. In the same way that the public understood nuclear weapons to be the purview of the federal government, they also understood nuclear survival as something that must be facilitated by the federal government. Yet taken together, federal nuclear policies—­from civil defense to continued weapons testing to deterrence strategies—­communicated the message that American citizens had new obligations to bear in the nuclearized world. This disparity over rights and responsibilities did not go unnoticed; it stood at the heart of public anx­i­eties about survival in the Atomic Age. Examining how dif­fer­ent sets of Americans attempted to graft nuclear survival onto citizenship ideals offers a new framework for understanding the lived experience of the Cold War. For de­cades, the public memory of Americans confronting the Atomic Age has been dominated by satire and kitsch. For better or worse, Bert the Turtle is the preeminent cultural touchstone of the time. In the course of researching and writing this book, I spoke informally with hundreds of Americans who ducked and covered in elementary and high schools in the 1950s and 1960s. While looking back at their memories, many members of the first Atomic Age generation strug­gle to make sense of a practice that seemed so trivial in the face of such terrifying forces. Usually, the best they can do in ­these conversations—­ which I have had with neighboring airplane passengers, fellow researchers over archival cafeteria trays, and ­family, friends, and students—is shake their heads and shrug. One of my goals in the pages that follow is to get closer to a more complex, nuanced, and satisfying explanation of how Americans coped with the strange new conditions of the Atomic Age. The archival rec­ord of life in the early Atomic Age is vast and varied. Atomic Americans draws on a cast of everyday characters as wide ranging as members of a Parent Teacher Association in Pennsylvania, homebuilders in northern California, a stenographer in Illinois, pacifists in Connecticut, and a host of local journalists and pundits. In federal archives and presidential libraries alone,

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t­ here are hundreds of boxes of letters, tele­g rams, pamphlets, news clippings, and ephemera sent to elected officials. Newspapers, popu­lar magazines, tele­ vi­sion, and films offer another win­dow for understanding what information the public had access to and when. Together, t­hese rec­ords make for a rich topography of individual and local experiences that can be mapped onto broader national conversations. The voices that appear in this book are by necessity mere dozens among millions. Diverse as their ideas may be, bringing them together u ­ nder the umbrella of civic life in the Atomic Age works to reconstitute a landscape of a thinking body politic that is other­wise hard to find. ­These concerned and civically engaged citizens tell us much about what it meant to be an Atomic American. It may seem counterintuitive that a story emphasizing grassroots engagement should rely so heavi­ly on rec­ords at the National Archives, presidential libraries, and gubernatorial collections. Federal and state archives centralize constituent letters and provide a means for aggregating disparate and geo­ graph­ic­ ally distant voices as the Atomic Age progressed. Americans who wrote to elected officials ­were concerned enough to take the time to document their private thoughts—­sometimes at ­great length—­and send them off to recipients whom the senders had to have known may or may not take time to read them. They believed, however, that their voices should be heard and that their opinions mattered. While letter-­writing campaigns ­were a common tactic of activist organ­izations, the vast majority of the constituents represented in the work that follows w ­ ere unaffiliated writers with their own motives for committing their ideas to paper. I was stunned by the abundance of correspondence I encountered at e­ very archive I visited. Thousands upon thousands of citizens’ letters, tele­grams, and petitions demonstrate a public engagement with civil defense, nuclear testing, and nuclear weapons generally that does not always take center stage in the historiography. ­These voices are far from monolithic. In fact, it would be next to impossible to holistically cata­log the diversity of opinion about nuclearization in the first two de­cades of the Cold War. But the diversity of attitudes is the point. The multiplicity of opinions, along with hundreds of archival boxes and microfilm reels of public correspondence, convinced me that the threat of nuclear weapons accounted for a significant segment of civic life in ­these years. In what follows, I have made an earnest attempt to honor public voices alongside the backdrop of more familiar stories of legislation, developments in nuclear science, and Cold War geopolitics. How Americans worked out their anx­i­eties about the Atomic Age was at times messy, contradictory, and inconsistent. What unites their voices is that they located the issue in the public

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square. They spoke as citizens, using a language of rights, obligations, and privileges. More broadly, this book also gives salience to several broad dilemmas that circumscribed American life in the Atomic Age. First, in the de­cades following World War II the United States was si­mul­ta­neously at war and at peace, committed to the fragile algorithm of deterrence. Nuclear weapons provided the fulcrum upon which peace and war balanced: their existence promised peace but held the key to unimaginable vio­lence. In other words, nuclear diplomatic logic dictated that the only t­hings that could keep Americans safe w ­ ere the very ­things that made them the most unsafe. Paradoxically, public safety required public endangerment. U ­ nder ­these conditions, some Americans prepared for the worst and hoped for the best, but ­others rejected the mandate to do ­either. Second, nuclear science echoed a similar duality to that which existed in the logic of deterrence. Long before President Dwight Eisenhower named it as such, nuclear boosters promised “atoms for peace” alongside “atoms for war.” Public intellectuals and popu­lar entertainment alike reminded Americans that advancements in nuclear science writ large could usher in ­either technoutopia or dystopian decline. The stakes ­were high: like deterrence, only the most careful management of nuclear technology could ensure survival. Perhaps most in­ter­est­ing, however, is the ambiguous way Americans constructed an image of nuclear war. Largely lost in the conversation about nuclear policy, civil defense, and weapons development was that the United States was just as likely as its nuclearized e­ nemy to be the perpetrator of nuclear vio­ lence. Americans overwhelmingly i­magined themselves as victims in the wars to come. This remained consistent throughout the first de­cades of the Cold War, even when the United States assumed a clear lead in the arms race. Americans focused on ­enemy armaments, turning a blind eye to their participation— or their fellow citizens’ participation—in the ­labor of producing a vast arsenal of US weapons.23 In both seen and unseen ways, Americans’ universal personal connection to nuclearization is a condition that has been pre­sent since the earliest days of the Atomic Age. As remains true ­today, the overarching meanings of the Cold War, nuclear science, and nuclear war itself each occupied an ambiguous position in American public culture ­after World War II: war and peace, victim and perpetrator, visibility and invisibility, survival and extinction. Americans worked through ­these extremes with unevenness, inconsistency, trauma, and at times apathy. The contradictions of nuclear culture help explain why historical studies—­and indeed the very national memory—of the Atomic Age often fall into analyti-

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cal traps of nostalgia, conspiracy, and bald ridicule. For the same reasons, previous studies have strug­gled to give voice to individual American civilians and the jumbled fears, ideas, and hopes that helped them understand their role as citizens of the Atomic Age. The narrative that follows seeks to embrace the incongruities, complexities, emotions and feeling, and logic and reason to understand the varied ways that concerned American citizens in the early Cold War made sense of a nation—­and a world—­that had been fundamentally remade by the advent of nuclear weapons.

C h a p te r   1

Stop “Play[ing] Pattycake with the Whole Issue” Citizen Calls for Civil Defense

In June 1947, less than two years a­ fter the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the dramatic end of World War II, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveiled a startling new cover image: the stark illustration of a clockface with hands approaching midnight. The graphic, which eventually become known as the Doomsday Clock, represented an ominous vision of a world once again hurdling t­ oward conflict. The “symbol of urgency” held heavy significance for the atomic scientists ­behind the Bulletin. For ­those scientists closest to nuclear research, their knowledge prevented them from “forget[ting] that their lives and t­hose of their ­children, the security of their country and the survival of civilization, all hang in the balance as long as the specter of atomic war has not be exorcised.”1 The Bulletin’s grim warning was just one in a range of responses to the nuclearized world, yet far from being an esoteric opinion of an elite group of physicists, nuclear dread permeated postwar American life. The end of World War II was also the start of a strange new era: the Atomic Age. From the moment Americans on the home front caught wind of the “new bomb, so power­ful that only the imagination of a trained scientist could dream of its existence,” the public was conflicted about its meaning.2 From the start, the security of postwar peace was clouded by trepidation about the war to come. Polled in December 1945, 83 ­percent of Americans thought t­ here was at least some danger that the United States would be subject to an atomic 14

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attack in the next twenty-­five years, more than two-­thirds of whom thought the danger was “very real.”3 Americans assumed that another war would come soon and that it would be characterized by an entirely new level of destructiveness. Thus, despite the fanfare and cele­brations, the soldiers’ triumphant return home, and a deep desire to return to normalcy, the looming presence of war did not resolve in the months following August 1945. In fact, the postwar era was defined by a nation bracing for the next war.4 Despite the possibly damaging impact on public morale, federal leaders, public intellectuals, and popu­lar media did ­little to prevent frightening imaginings of ­f uture war from circulating in American culture ­after World War II ended. As Life magazine conjectured in November 1945, f­uture wars would include unmanned long-­range missiles delivering a barrage of atomic bombs across oceans and continents.5 As physicist Philip Morrison concluded in One World or None, a 1946 best-­selling collection of essays warning of the nuclear ­f uture, “the bombs w ­ ill never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They ­will come in hundreds, even in thousands. . . . ​The cities of men on earth w ­ ill perish.”6 Such speculative imaginings quickly became a staple of popu­lar media. Real images of nuclear explosions occupied the news cycle in the summer of 1946 as the United States resumed weapons testing at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, marking the first time the curtains w ­ ere drawn back on war­time Manhattan Proj­ect secrecy. At the same time, Americans followed with ­g reat interest as nuclear scientists warned of what could become of a world without international control of nuclear weapons.7 Despite the US mono­poly on nuclear weapons during ­these years, experts repeatedly declared that the Soviet Union was not far ­behind in developing nuclear arms of their own.8 Predictably, although sooner than some experts had estimated, the Soviets caught up and detonated their first atomic weapon in August 1949. The nuclear horrors of the last war ­were not easily forgotten ­either. John Hersey’s devastating narrative of six survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima, first published in 1946 in a special feature of the New Yorker, became a best seller in book form. Several official government reports provided Americans with physical images and quantifiable calculations of the devastation wrought in Japan.9 ­These visions of nuclear destruction stood uncomfortably up against projections of military might, security, and victory. Fourteen months ­after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ­after hearing a news report of an Armistice Day cele­bration featuring an atomic bomb–­shaped cake, Eva Hill of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was disgusted. Noting that several US Navy admirals had attended the party, she wrote to President Harry Truman: “I was horrified and embarrassed for our Country that men in such high and impor­tant positions could be guilty of such an atrocity, commemorating with levity the

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destruction of thousands of h ­ uman beings.”10 Even for Americans many thousands of miles away, the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as lasting reminders of past and pre­sent nuclear terror. It was not difficult for Americans in the late 1940s to connect the dots between nuclear destruction and concerns for their own individual safety. Yet despite anxiety over the pos­si­ble approach of World War III, the federal government was slow to take action to or­ga­nize a system of nuclear public safety, or civil defense. Offices within the Department of Defense (DOD) spent much of the late 1940s studying the prob­lem of civil defense and distributing reports to a l­imited circle of officials. By the end of the de­cade, congressional committees had begun to discuss civil defense in closed sessions. Although the news media occasionally covered t­ hese incremental developments, Americans knew ­little about their substance and saw even less of an effect on their everyday lives. Then in 1949, Truman assigned temporary civil defense responsibility to the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), a mobilization agency created by the National Security Act of 1947. Although the NSRB made l­ittle discernible pro­g ress in mobilizing civil defense volunteers, public attention to civil defense—­and the current US lack thereof—­increased dramatically at the turn of the de­cade. Slow federal action and growing international tensions in the late 1940s and early 1950s drove citizens to demand a broader and more urgent range of solutions to meet the nuclear threat. Many citizens felt that the nation was, regrettably, “in a state of apathy and disinterestedness” about the dangers of the Cold War.11 This interval of apparent federal inaction between the end of World War II and late 1951—­when the new Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) began implementing coordinated nationwide programs—­created a moment of opportunity for increased public dialogue about and support for nuclear public safety. Hoping to combat the fatalistic attitude among their fellow citizens that “if an atom bomb falls ­there is no hope,” many thousands of Americans wrote to their elected officials and to newspapers across the country expressing their faith in a civil defense program and their willingness to remobilize for the demands of the Atomic Age.12 Their messages reached the offices of mayors and governors, the halls of Congress, the desks of Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) employees and military officials, and Truman and his staff. “­There is a good deal of spontaneous interest entirely in­de­pen­dent of Pentagon influence, in civilian-­defense plans,” Lieutenant Col­o­nel Barnet W. Beers explained in a magazine profile in the summer of 1949. Beers, who for a time oversaw one of the DOD’s civil defense offices, had been on the receiving end of countless letters from across the country. “Citizens who are convinced that

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another war is impending,” he said, “have been badgering the government for three years to get on with a proj­ect.”13 That Americans badgered officials about civil defense in the late 1940s is largely lost in popu­lar and historical accounts of nuclear civil defense in the United States.14 While the fear of ­f uture nuclear wars is well documented in this era, it is less acknowledged that citizens demanded civil defense programs, sometimes in specific and concrete terms. This gap in memory can be attributed to several forces, namely the dominance of FCDA initiatives just several years ­later. Federal studies, evacuation drills, and information campaigns such as Bert the Turtle and his “duck and cover” message became vis­i­ble reminders of a top-­down public safety strategy. However, ­these cultural artifacts also obscure the fact that a significant subset of the American population was deeply invested in the outcome of civil defense planning. The threat of nuclear war thus created space for a new kind of civic activism. The ways Americans understood the meaning and function of civil defense in its formative years reveals how diligently some worked to accommodate the new perils of the Atomic Age into an existing cultural landscape. As the federal government worked to build a ­legal and institutional structure for civil defense ­behind closed doors, public ideas about civil defense ­were forming the basis of a new articulation of American ideals, that of nuclear citizenship. As concerned Americans asserted their ideas about civil defense strategies, they focused on the continuity of idealized American cultural and po­liti­cal institutions. This impulse aligns with related worries about the emergence of the Cold War and domestic anticommunism. ­These Americans wrote about the need to preserve the American way of life from nuclear war in the same way that they hoped to defend it from the evils of communism. It is not surprising, then, that Americans who petitioned the federal government about civil defense called upon the strength of tradition, national community, and cultural identity. As they had in wars past, Americans saw home front defense as a broad national proj­ect and as such looked to the federal state to take the lead. Americans also understood civil defense as something that must be supported by all levels of government and society, including civic associations, businesses, and individual effort. Thus, although a number of Americans called for a strong centralized federal program of civil defense, they also saw opportunities to make civil defense a part of nongovernmental orga­nizational and cultural traditions. Americans campaigned for civil defense in a variety of civic and private spaces, including town halls, club­houses, and living rooms. The results of a University of Michigan Survey Research study published in 1947 claimed that

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approximately 70 ­percent of Americans polled had discussed the atomic bomb with other ­people in social settings.15 As ­will be discussed in chapter 2, however, federal leaders saw American civilians of this era as uninformed, apathetic, and irrational about the nuclear threat. In real­ity, American civilians actively engaged with the unfamiliar and uncomfortable conditions of the Atomic Age. Many saw civil defense as a practical solution, and rather than panic or disengage, they looked for creative ways to fit civil defense into the varied contours of American civic life. When confronted by the specter of an overwhelmingly disruptive ­f uture war and an uncertain ­f uture, then, Americans stretched their understanding of cultural citizenship to accommodate the idea of nuclear survival. In the earliest years of the Atomic Age and in the earliest public engagement with civil defense ideas, nuclear citizenship was beginning to take shape.

Looking Backward and Looking Forward The tension of being si­mul­ta­neously at war and not at war defined American life in the postwar years. Indeed, the very term “cold war” is encoded with this ambiguity and contradiction.16 With no true pause separating the finished war from the thought of preparing for the war to come, Americans remained partially in a war mentality. And as Americans had experienced just months and years ­earlier, war­time carried certain civic obligations, from rationing and a draft to more ambiguous requirements of loyalty. The total war model of World War II, with the federal state at its center and a demand for unity, had become familiar and well rehearsed. It is unsurprising, then, that so many Americans carried over the civilian experiences of World War II into their expectations for civilian life during the Cold War. But a parallel current of public information insisted that the new era was unlike anything they had ever known. More so than ever before, all Americans—­whether soldier or citizen—­ could expect to suffer personally if war should come. While the lessons of recent war­time applied, the war of the Atomic Age would require new ideas creatively overlaid onto the experiences of wars past. According to strategists, pundits, and policymakers, nuclear war re­oriented the front lines to the home front. Therefore, civilians would be required to “fight” in nonmilitary theaters: in homes, schools, shops, or workplaces. Moreover, postwar public information about Atomic Age wars insisted that basic survival—­not simply the acquisition of territory or the defeat of an e­ nemy’s military—­would be the key to victory. The nation with a surviving population could ensure its continuity of government, industry, and the economy

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and thus win the war. But how could a proj­ect to ensure the survival of the home front be or­ga­nized? Would the civilian defense programs of World War II be enough? Most commentators agreed that it would not. Despite early attempts to create distance between Atomic Age public safety and that which came before, World War II remained an omnipresent touchstone for nuclear civil defense discussions. Some of t­hese lessons w ­ ere cautionary. Especially in the mid and late 1940s, the press disparaged scattershot World War II civilian defense “activities [such] as victory gardens and fan dances” as useless in the face of nuclear war.17 Eric H. Biddle, chairman of the NSRB Interagency Working Group, was more charitable a few years l­ ater, but the basic assumption remained: “such ­things as bond drives, scrap collections and victory gardens . . . ​are activities necessary in war time, but actually are not civil defense questions.”18 Nevertheless, Americans themselves learned from the home front practices of previous wars and carried t­ hose experiences with them as they searched for a new approach. Thus, civilian defense in World War II gave Cold War civil defense an operational mandate, if not a direct model. Unsurprisingly, individuals and organ­izations that had been involved in World War II–­era civilian defense claimed a special authority over managing Atomic Age civil defense. The Citizen Participation Committee (CPC), for example, formed in the wake of World War II “to continue and extend the gains made in [civilian defense voluntarism] during the war.”19 By the late 1940s, hundreds of former civilian defense organizers maintained seventy-­five volunteer offices across the country with ties to other national civic organ­izations. The CPC knew that maintaining citizen interest was a difficult challenge, however. Writing to the NSRB, Chairwoman C. H. L. Pennock warned federal planning groups that “if the mobilization of civilians gets started in a haphazard way [as it had during World War II] the task is made immeasurably harder.”20 The CPC, like other organ­izations, saw the early Cold War moment as an opportunity to learn from past inefficiencies in civil defense and to start anew. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 helped to solidify the connection between older models of civilian defense and the needs of the Atomic Age. As men ­were sent overseas, Americans on the home front resurrected familiar war­time activities but re­oriented them t­oward nuclear war. In June 1951, Robert J. Ewig, chief zone warden of the Mayfair section of Philadelphia, wrote proudly to Truman about his neighborhood’s plan for civil defense recruitment. Ewig and his civil defense zone planned a “gigantic parade” for wounded Korean War veterans, complete with twenty-­five convertible automobiles, marching bands, and color and honor guards. Ewig hoped that the event would “show the p­ eople on the home front that all the boys in ser­vice

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are d­ oing their share, and it is our turn to sacrifice just a ­little bit of our time to help protect our country, by joining and becoming active in Civil Defense Organ­izations.”21 As the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, spectators would have difficulty missing the connection between wounded soldiers and the need to prevent lost lives at home.22 Ewig’s parade demonstrates how the symbolic power of military ser­vice in postwar life ­shaped discussions about civil defense. The soldiers who w ­ ere brought to Mayfair ­were not neighborhood heroes. They ­were recruited for the parade from Valley Forge Hospital regardless of “their race, color or creed.”23 Their importance to the event was based on their ser­vice and their injuries, not their individual identities or their connection to local neighborhoods. In using anonymous ser­vicemen, Ewig called upon a deeply entrenched ideology of civic duty, one that veterans’ organ­izations also used: military ser­ vice. Still, the parade was arguably not about the veterans. It was about arousing feelings of responsibility from civilians who could not demonstrate their citizenship through military ser­vice.24 Other Americans ­were also ready and willing to adopt a militarized posture, even using the vocabulary of “enlisting” into a civil defense corps.25 A stenographer from Illinois wrote to her congressman calling for universal training in defensive weapons. “I believe that ­every citizen of our country is a potential soldier, sailor, marine or coast-­guardsman,” she said, “[and] I would certainly trade my typewriter for a machine gun or what­ever ­else was necessary to defend our Beloved Amer­i­ca.”26 Although such mea­sures would surely not prepare civilians for the demands of a nuclear attack, the presence of weapons in the conversation about civil defense indicates a willingness to participate in the Cold War on the home front in what­ever form it might take. By emphasizing shared war­time responsibility and sacrifice, Ewig, the stenographer, and o ­ thers used established ideas of martial citizenship to begin to articulate a new version of citizenship, one that was responsive to the needs of the Atomic Age. ­Those Americans who attempted to formulate a vision for Atomic Age civil defense also reflected ­earlier war­time civic involvement in their trust in leadership and a centralized state response. By far, the most common way Americans engaged in civil defense discussions in the late 1940s and early 1950s was by simply requesting information from the federal government about nuclear attacks and civil defense procedures. Well before any official protocol existed, thousands of citizens contacted federal officials, elected representatives, and state-­level leaders to request information for their own safety and that of their families and communities. “I am requesting that you make it pos­si­ble for me to play my small part in this effort ­toward survival,” John S. Bush Jr. of Mis-

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souri said, “by aiding you in your program of public information.”27 As they had come to expect in World War II, Americans looked to the federal state to establish a cohesive message of public safety. Thus, even when facing the dramatically new threat of nuclear war, American civic engagement in civil defense sought to revive preexisting expectations of the relationship between citizens and their state.

Civic Organ­izations and Associational Life National voluntary organ­izations—­from charitable agencies to veterans’ organ­ izations to youth scouting associations—­were among the earliest and most vocal advocates of a nation civil defense plan. Many of ­these groups understood their role as that of an intermediary between official agencies and grassroots constituencies and thus argued that their organ­izations w ­ ere uniquely qualified to assist in the civil defense effort. Members wrote to and spoke with orga­nizational leaders, helped craft orga­nizational policy and declarations, and contacted elected officials. National organ­izations’ “intense interest in civil defense” reveals a deep faith in the existing structures of American civic life and the possibility of incorporating civil defense into ­these familiar forums.28 By positioning civil defense as a responsibility of civic organ­izations—­groups that generally celebrated demo­cratic participation and good civic be­hav­ior—­ advocates introduced civil defense as a m ­ atter of citizenship. Long before the Soviet atomic test and the outbreak of the Korean War, veterans’ associations agitated for a national civil defense plan, arguing that their status as veterans made them especially equipped to lead civil defense programs. Over the course of the late 1940s, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the American Legion, American Veterans (AMVETS), and other veterans’ groups each approached federal officials with a desire to claim a stake in the national defense program. The VFW requested that it have a permanent liaison on the federal civil defense staff. AMVETS developed an elaborate personal identification program and recommended it for the national civil defense plan. The American Legion’s Executive Committee passed several critical resolutions demanding that the federal government move more quickly to establish its national plan.29 ­These organ­izations touted the special expertise of their constituents, arguing that “we . . . ​who only a short while ago laid down our arms are fully cognizant of the vital need for a national civilian defense plan.”30 For veterans’ groups, military ser­vice not only provided an institutional organ­ization to support civil defense, but their members’ combat experience also made them uniquely qualified to assess the dangers and needs

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of the Atomic Age. Moreover, to groups such as the VFW, civil defense leadership seemed like an appropriate “honor [for veterans] to serve their country” in their postenlistment lives.31 Beyond the combat experience, patriotism, and sheer number of American veterans, the nationwide structure of organ­izations such as veterans’ groups made them especially valuable in civil defense, a job that would require an effort on a national scale. Many orga­nizational leaders w ­ ere ­eager to use their internal communication structures to distribute civil defense publications and information. But perhaps more importantly, civic leaders argued, local civil defense units could tap into the existing local membership. As a Boy Scout troop leader from Houston put it, “ROTC, l­abor ­unions, church clubs, vari­ous clubs and lodges, scout and se­nior scout units: t­ hese should all take their part ­behind government rescue teams.”32 Suggesting that American Legion posts be deployed to or­ga­nize civil defense in their own communities, Reverend John Blythe of Missouri argued that “with each and e­ very town and city so protected then let five hundred Rus­sians land any where. A nation wide organ­ization like this would save the day.”33 The lack of distinction between “rescue teams” and boots-­on-­the-­ground volunteer troops also indicates the range of ways the public ­imagined that an attack would play out. Like veterans’ groups, the Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca (BSA) argued that scouting organ­izations w ­ ere ideal candidates to assume civic leadership in civil defense. In late 1950 the BSA published a booklet titled Civil Defense, a Guide for Council & District Planning, outlining ways to incorporate civil defense practices into existing scout curriculum. The guide, published for BSA leadership but not for scouts themselves, noted that “it is not new skills that are required” for civil defense “but [rather] proficiency in t­ hose that have always been part of our program.”34 The guide suggests that scouting troops could stage a canoe trip to practice equipment evacuation or a night hike to rehearse a missing persons search or emergency conditions. All activities could theoretically engage scouts’ families and the community at large; for the missing persons activity, the guide suggests, a “certain real­ity can be attained by ‘borrowing’ some Scout’s younger ­brother as the lost child.”35 The potential for sibling trauma aside, the suggestion underscores how the BSA understood its advocacy role within the community. The writers of the guide cautioned troop leaders to “build a normal philosophy around the mobilization idea,” a balance between intensity and enrichment, so as to not extinguish interest in the training. As in all other aspects of their orga­nizational princi­ples, the BSA saw civil defense training as another way it could produce “men of character, trained for citizenship,” while modeling appropriate be­hav­ior for all Americans.36

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­Whether the Boy Scouts wrote to national civil defense planners in official orga­nizational capacities or as individual troops, they argued that their tradition “to learn to save ourselves and o ­ thers” paralleled the civic ethos that should undergird civil defense.37 The BSA saw itself, quite explic­itly, as responsible for the safety of each troop’s community. Scholars have noted that the scouts’ quasi-­military configuration lent an orga­nizational and meta­phoric legibility to the national civil defense organ­ization that would soon materialize in the 1950s.38 However, rather than relying on its own internal resources and traditions, the BSA based its nuclear curriculum on the only federal information on civil defense available to the public by 1950, produced by the temporary civil defense office within the NSRB.39 The scouting guide went so far as to adapt the NSRB’s recently released illustration for the proposed national civil defense plan, which features a chain of responsibility radiating from an individual out to the federal government (figure 2). The scouting guide replaces the NSRB’s generic citizen with a scout, but the orga­nizational scheme is other­ wise identical.40 The BSA thus saw its values as fitting comfortably into the federal government’s nascent self-­help civil defense logic and in turn saw civil defense as an easy fit into the organ­ization’s existing citizenship philosophy of serving community and nation. Beyond scouting, national c­ hildren’s organ­izations served as a focal point of agitation for a civil defense program ­because ­children held a privileged position in the ­imagined ­f uture of the nation. The Boys’ Club of Amer­i­ca, the Camp Fire Girls of Amer­ic­ a, Kiwanis, and educational organ­izations all wrote to their elected officials to describe planned programming, pledge support and resources, or request instructional information. Civic groups that served ­children often tapped into the language of ­family and the nation’s ­f uture to emphasize the critical value of civil defense. Like the BSA, c­ hildren’s organ­ izations and schools that promoted civil defense also had the added benefit of teaching parents si­mul­ta­neously.41 Postwar changes in ideas about childrearing and childhood also found their way into civil defense proposals. Kathryn W. Noonan, a concerned citizen in California, went so far as to suggest that the federal government build an extensive system of camps at least fifty miles outside of major cities where c­ hildren would be relocated.42 In protecting the ­children and “bringing them closer to nature and God,” she claimed, the United States could rely on an upstanding cohort of youths to lead the nation in the ­f uture. As an added incentive, Noonan noted, the plan would reduce juvenile delinquency, another social concern among postwar Americans.43 Thus, as citizens advocated for civil defense, they articulated a special status for American ­children. ­Children and childhood would continue to hold a special status

Figure 2. ​“The National Civil Defense Pattern.” This orga­nizational graphic shows the ideal relationship between the individual (“calm and well-­trained”), the ­family (“the base of or­ga­nized self-­protection”), the neighborhood, community, nearby cities, the state, and the federal government. The bodies of government are positioned as support systems to be used only when individual, f­ amily, or neighborhood resources prove insufficient. Similar schematics ­were reproduced in many official and unofficial civil defense publications. National Security Resources Board, United States Civil Defense (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office,1950), 2.

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throughout the 1950s both in formal civil defense policies and forces that would push back against them. The variety of voluntary associations that petitioned the NSRB in the late 1940s and early 1950s is remarkable. Groups with a smaller national membership—­from the National Council of Jewish ­Women to American ­Women’s Voluntary Ser­vices to American War Dads—­also wrote to the NSRB for instructions to disseminate to their local chapters, directives for how to help the war effort, and other means for supporting the civil defense mission.44 For the most part, however, the NSRB could not use the ser­vices offered by civic organ­izations of any size and scope. As the head of public relations John A. De Chant put it, “I frankly feel that since nearly 50 organ­izations have solicited us for similar statements we would put ourselves in a very bad light. . . . ​ From a community relations standpoint we are frankly not ready for it and it ­will be a long time before the general program is s­ haped up locally so that we could prepare such ‘charters.’ ”45 Despite the enthusiasm offered up by voluntary organ­izations, the federal government had ­little authority to employ them in a civil defense program. Not ­until early 1951 would ­there be a legislative mandate that granted that power to a federal agency. Nevertheless, some groups persisted in seeking endorsement from federal officials. In August 1950 when the BSA contacted the NSRB to request approval for a draft of the aforementioned civil defense guide, the BSA received a form letter declining endorsement. Executives from the BSA instead looked to the White House for approval. Truman heartily upheld the Boy Scouts’ qualifications, writing that the organ­ization’s membership and commitment to the motto “Be Prepared” was one of the nation’s greatest assets “in the building of a peaceful world.”46 Armed with Truman’s endorsement letter printed as a preface, the BSA moved forward with the guide’s distribution, marshaling the approval of Truman over that of the federal agency that managed civil defense at the time. While the move could be read as a backhanded scramble for authority wherever it could be found, the maneuver is better understood as a symptom of the inchoate organ­ization of civil defense policy at the time. Some national organ­izations, however, tread more cautiously in their approach to thinking about federal authority in civil defense planning. For example, the National Council for Community Improvement (NCCI), an umbrella organ­ization for more than sixty civic associations and clubs, believed that its private funding and established volunteer base could be the key to “secur[ing] the greatest pos­si­ble recognition by all citizens themselves that each individual man, w ­ oman and child has his own responsibility in this b­ attle to protect the freedom loving ­people of the world against ­those forces that are threatening world peace and liberty.”47 In assigning more control over civil

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defense to local governments, the NCCI believed it could lend thrift and efficiency to civil defense operations while promoting public awareness and citizen support and bolstering public opinion. In fact, the NCCI saw a danger in continuing the “growing tendency in American communities to shift their responsibilities to ­others and especially to the shoulders of the Federal Government.”48 The NCCI’s emphasis on the autonomy of local and state governments aligned with the postwar po­liti­cal backlash to the expansion of the federal state during the New Deal years.49 Yet even when organ­izations emphasized a ­limited role for the federal government in civil defense, they called upon the common tropes of civic responsibility, patriotism, and expressions of good citizenship. In identifying civic and voluntary organ­izations as an essential link to survival in the Atomic Age, Americans underscored the importance of public life. They saw civil defense as a proj­ect that was fundamentally about community, cooperation, and goodwill. Dif­fer­ent groups brought dif­fer­ent skills to the civil defense ­table, but what is especially notable is the ease with which orga­ nizational leadership and their members identified civic life as something that could overcome the nuclear threat. This is unsurprising, given the relative importance of associational life in the postwar period. But when specifically linked to the threat of nuclear war, Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s felt compelled to engage in a dialogue about civic involvement, not individual retrenchment.50

Civil Defense and the Postwar Housing Landscape American businesspeople and entrepreneurs also seamlessly blended postwar consumer habits, notions of good citizenship, and the goal of nuclear survival. They proposed a range of solutions both in partnership with and in­de­pen­dent of the federal government. Many of ­these men and ­women believed that civil defense was in accord with the emerging patterns of postwar consumption, including homeownership, suburbanization, and mobility. Entrepreneurs not only saw a need for civil defense—­and potential profit in the making—­but also viewed the American consumer market as the bedrock of good citizenship. As the Bicycle Institute of Amer­i­ca, a trade organ­ization for manufacturers, exclaimed, it “is in this spirit of public ser­vice that the Bicycle Institute offers its ­wholehearted cooperation to the country’s civilian defense agencies.”51 Businesspeople across the nation echoed similar sentiments, e­ ager to defend the nation in f­ uture wars by harnessing the power of consumerism.

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American homebuilding practices in par­tic­u­lar showed early signs of civil defense thinking. ­After all, at the same moment that Americans began discussing the possibilities of civil defense in the Atomic Age, they w ­ ere facing a lasting legacy of the previous war: a housing shortage. By some estimates, Americans needed between 3.5 million and 5 million new homes at the war’s end.52 As contractors rushed to construct new housing, some used the nuclear threat as an opportunity to develop new building forms appropriate to the Atomic Age. The “Atom Bomb House,” for example, developed by industrial designers Jacques Martial and Robert C. Scull in 1946, was a concrete and lead compound design that featured heavi­ly fortified walls and roofs and located much of the living space under­g round.53 In many ways, the design incorporated ele­ments of Prairie School architecture from ­earlier in the ­century: strong horizontal lines, a cantilevered roof, and clerestory win­dows. However, the home’s picture win­dows and ranch-­style layout ­were much more typical of con­temporary postwar home design.54 Perhaps most notably, Martial and Scull’s design relied on significant land to surround the home, all enclosed by a concrete embankment. Like so many other forms of homebuilding in the postwar period, the Atom Bomb House was definitively not urban: the space needed to carry out such a design could only be found in suburban or rural Amer­i­ca. The nuclear threat also lent weight to an ongoing debate about another proposed solution to the housing shortage: prefabricated and modular housing. In 1950, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) officially a­ dopted a research preference for manufactured housing ele­ments. Not only could prefabricated housing address the urgency of the housing shortage, but the AIA also defended the position for reasons of ensuring national security and preparing for war­time mobilization.55 If an attack should occur, many civilians would be in urgent need of housing, much of which would need to be far away from densely built city centers. Prefabricated or modular housing offered a much more efficient means of construction. Moreover, architects argued, such construction practices made it pos­si­ble to conserve national resources and building materials during the war or recovery period that would follow an attack. The AIA’s leadership believed that the standardization of modular construction could bring war­time emergency housing practices into the Atomic Age, claiming that ­future nuclear war emergencies would be much lengthier. As the AIA argued, “victory in K ­ orea ­will not ‘end the war,’ as it was hoped V-­J Day would do.”56 In its response to the threat of nuclear war, the AIA si­mul­ta­neously promoted mobilization goals and modern building practices and standards while appealing to developers and the business community who stood to

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benefit from adapting to the housing needs of a nuclearized world. For the remainder of the 1950s and 1960s, the AIA maintained an active research agenda in civil defense construction and emergency mobilization.57 The Atom Bomb House, of course, was merely a concept, and modular homes did not make a major dent in home-­buying trends. However, other businesses sought to capitalize on the nuclear threat by offering shelter construction ser­vices. As the nascent bomb (or blast) shelter industry gained traction, builders frequently marshaled the authority of the state to position themselves as credible partners in civil defense. For example, builders frequently petitioned the AEC and federal civil defense study groups for official specifications for constructing bomb shelters for private homes. U ­ ntil the early 1950s no such information was available from federal agencies, although officials repeatedly responded to queries by stating that the research was in pro­gress and that they hoped to make it available to the public soon. This delay did not stop companies from advertising their shelter construction ser­vices “in cooperation with the civil defense emergency program.”58 This language, which came from an advertising billboard next to a construction site in a private backyard in Hermosa Beach, California, added legitimacy to a builder’s product even if no cooperation with the federal government had occurred. In the many instances of this kind of promotional language, the very mention of civil defense carried the authority of the state and an overt display of aligning with national goals. Despite the symbolic heft of bomb shelters or, l­ater, fallout shelters, very few Americans actually followed through on constructing them.59 Nevertheless, from the start shelter contractors intentionally cultivated a relationship between individual and national goals. The idea of mobility, like war­time mobilization, also played an impor­tant role in civil defense suggestions. By the postwar period mobility, ­whether physical, social, or economic, had become an impor­tant component of American cultural citizenship. Americans exuberantly integrated automobile culture into their work, leisure, and consumer lives, so it should come as no surprise that the public’s civil defense calls would also embrace automobility. In 1950, G. C. Steuart of Atlanta, Georgia, sent a proposal to the NSRB outlining his development of large extension trailers to be used as mobile housing units. Steuart called upon vaguely US western ideas in referring to each trailer as a “migratory bird” or a “home on the range” and even included lyr­ics to a song in his proposal. Such trailers, Steuart wrote, could be used as a vacationing vehicle and a resource for modern disasters, “a home on the range for ­every American ­Family before the Atom flies and the Bombs fall: then, if war comes or disaster strikes, we can all work as industriously as the bee by day and by night, or we can scatter as the quail from the dreaded guns sight [sic].”60 Steuart was one among many

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entrepreneurs who recognized the value of mobile housing. However, his proposal seamlessly blended the postwar values of automobile culture, mobility, vacation, leisure time, and flexibility with the Cold War value of quick evacuation and recovery of the nation ­after an attack. Although ­later civil defense planners likely did not see or consider Steuart’s proposal, one mainstay pamphlet of the l­ater 1950s would be 4 Wheels to Survival, which positioned the f­amily automobile as an evacuation and sheltering resource.61 As they began to market suburban developments in the late 1940s and early 1950s, American developers also marshaled spatial mobility as an asset. Cashing in on the spatial shift to the suburbs that was already in motion, builders and designers implemented a variety of methods for selling civil defense alongside suburban amenities. Even outside of building circles, early civil defense investigators ­were normalizing the relationship between space and safety. Indeed, a major goal of nuclear preparedness was permanently relocating American citizens and factories out of easily targeted cities. Press reporting frequently illustrated a nuclear weapon’s destructive potential using a bull’s-­eye superimposed over an aerial image, showing concentric rings of relative safety radiating out from a hy­po­thet­ic­al city-­center ground zero. The farther one resided from the city center, the safer one could assume to be. As Americans began the postwar exodus from cities into the suburbs, they left b­ ehind not only racially charged imaginings of crime and poverty but also imaginings of nuclear devastation.62 Some builders saw opportunities to combine the material amenities of postwar suburban life with the civil defense effort. In December 1950, a northern Californian contracting com­pany, Paddock Engineering, argued in an extensive report that swimming pools would prove critically impor­tant in the event of a nuclear attack. Belowground pools, the com­pany claimed, could provide communities with much-­needed ­water for drinking and firefighting if municipal ­water supplies failed. The proposal eventually reached federal administrators, who reviewed it and respectfully disagreed with its conclusions, citing the danger in declaring such a program universally applicable or eco­nom­ically sound.63 Still, Paddock’s proposal illustrates a willingness to incorporate aspects of Atomic Age life in the suburban backyard. Indeed, in other instances a bomb shelter literally took the place of a backyard pool. In a photo­g raph that ran in Life in early 1951, c­ hildren pose happily on what appears to be a pool deck, flanked by chaise lounges and a sun umbrella. In this new version of suburban comfort, however, the concrete deck ends abruptly in freshly turned earth and the maw of an under­g round shelter door.64 In this version of the American life in the Atomic Age, pristine lawns and idyllic pools could transition into bunkers and emergency reservoirs.

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Postwar suburbanization patterns, however, could not universally offer safety from nuclear attack. In areas that could be seen as Cold War military targets, for example, new developments could be in danger even if they ­were in less-­populated areas. A developer outside of Dayton, Ohio, reported difficulty getting his housing proj­ect off the ground ­because of the tract’s proximity to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Federal officials downplayed the risk of the nearby base, touting the development proj­ect as a boon for industrial and residential dispersion away from Dayton’s city center.65 In this case, presumptions of spatial safety stood at odds with the risk imposed by the expanding landscape of the militarized Cold War, demonstrating the limits of nuclear-­focused suburbanization business models. Nevertheless, Dayton’s example demonstrates how patterns of consumerism could be adapted to as well as interrupted by the exigencies of the Atomic Age and also demonstrates the extent to which businesspeople and officials would go to normalize the nuclear. Although many of ­these grassroots concerns and civil defense proposals reached the early federal agencies overseeing civil defense, officials typically declined requests for business partnerships. Just as they had in their communication with civic groups, officials cited an inability to enter into contracts with nongovernment organ­izations. Eventually, the FCDA and subsequent federal agencies would cooperate with organ­izations such as the Ad Council and other industry groups to produce civil defense films, printed material, and instructional media. This kind of public-­private partnership in federal civil defense would become the norm by the mid-1950s. However, in the earliest days of federal organ­ization and public discussions, civil defense agencies ­were reluctant to commit to involving themselves too deeply in private industry ­because they lacked the orga­nizational mandate to do so. Nonetheless, a host of American businesspeople wrote—­and continued to write—to officials with ideas and offers to help, using the rhe­toric of civic obligation and trust in government.

Preparing the American Individual Advocates who proposed civil defense programs also drew upon a host of postwar ideas about the importance of individual readiness in the Atomic Age. Survival-­minded rhe­toric heavi­ly underscored the individual responsibility of ­every man, ­woman, and child. Civil defense advocates believed that education, physical health, and soundness of mind would condition the efficacy of any

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kind of civil defense system in the United States. Only as a nation of strong individuals, they reasoned, could the United States prevail in the wars to come. But how could one ensure the universal readiness of all civilians? Citizen civil defense advocates proposed a variety of programs for civic readiness. Through schemes for mass communication and public health, civil defense focused on promoting the preparedness of the individual citizen. T ­ hese goals, of course, reflect concurrent anx­i­eties about health in American society more broadly. However, their application to the cause of civil defense and survival made fitness—­intellectual, emotional, and physical—an integral component of good nuclear citizenship.66 Soon a­ fter the conclusion of World War II, public commentators, policymakers, and scientific experts alike zeroed in on widespread ignorance about the nuclear threat as the most critical prob­lem facing Amer­i­ca in the Atomic Age. ­Until the 1950s, however, official efforts to disseminate nuclear information to the public w ­ ere scattershot. Information from several federal reports, such as the United States Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, filtered through press reports, but much of public economy of information on nuclear m ­ atters came from the haphazard output of interested journalists, concerned scientists, and self-­proclaimed experts.67 Very l­ittle of this material had a wide public reach or readership, yet civil defense advocates made it clear that a critical mass of the public needed to be reached for any kind of program to be effective. In lieu of a coordinated federal communications program and given the apparent urgency of the nuclear threat, some civil defense advocates looked to new information media that could reach a wider audience. The relatively new medium of tele­vi­sion in par­tic­u­lar offered a partial solution to educating the masses about the nuclear threat, and the nascent tele­ vi­sion industry was quick to demonstrate how its ser­vices could be harnessed. As tele­vi­sion manufacturers, producers, and advertisers argued, tele­vi­sion could give Americans unparalleled access to civil defense information both before an emergency and as it unfolded. In 1950, of course, fewer than one in ten American ­house­holds owned tele­vi­sions.68 However, the radio industry had partnered with federal agencies during World War II, and broadcasters and advertisers looked to tele­vi­sion as a logical extension of that partnership. In early 1951 a public relations firm in Chicago sent Truman a proposal for a publicly funded program of tele­vi­sion set distribution that would provide a wide communication network in the event of an emergency. Aside from the benefit of immediate and comprehensive emergency directive communication, the firm argued, “­there is the additional advantage . . . ​of developing spirit, loyalty,

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harmony, and esprit de corps on local levels.”69 The firm claimed to be motivated solely by civic duty: as with other businesses making suggestions to federal offices, the Chicago firm was quick to point out that it had no plans to profit from the proposal. By creating a direct communication link to the American home, the firm merely intended to help create a more informed citizenry. Frustrated by the ­limited reach of tele­vi­sion at the turn of the de­cade, other civil defense advocates turned to more accessible forms of media. One or­ga­ nizer wrote that Houston, Texas, was “making its first feeble efforts to school its citizens over tele­vi­sion but that d­ oesn’t reach far enough.”70 Instead, he wrote to officials asking for film reels and printed publications. Print media too had its limitations. Some civil defense proponents argued that Americans could not be trusted to read about civil defense information in local newspapers. In Knoxville, Tennessee, a homegrown civil defense expert studied the issue and concluded that federal agencies should invest in a comic strip dramatization of civil defense. Comics, he argued, could reach “a very wide segment of the populace—­a segment which cannot be reached in any other way.”71 In the first years of the 1950s, it was impossible to know that tele­vi­ sion owner­ship would balloon by the end of the de­cade. While ­future civil defense agencies would make good use of tele­vi­sion spots, their primary educational output would remain older media forms such as film reels, radio segments, and print, including comics and cartoons. As individual Americans called for civil defense mea­sures in the early years of the Atomic Age, they reflected a preference for established communication methods that could meet the demand of reaching the majority of citizens. Americans worried not only about how the public would learn about civil defense; they also worried that fellow citizens w ­ ere not healthy enough to participate in civil defense in the first place. In early 1951 John M. Core, a State of West ­Virginia Veteran’s Administration officer, proposed a civil defense physical fitness program to his congressional officials. Core developed his ideas in the capacity of his work with the American Legion and organ­izations for disabled veterans and was widely considered “an authority on [physical fitness] ­matters.”72 As Core likely believed, surviving and rebuilding ­after a nuclear war would have g­ reat physical demands. Images of rescuers sifting through the remains of fallen buildings solidified the image of civil defense volunteers as necessarily strong and skilled. In Life’s late 1945 envisioning of ­future war, technicians in gas masks would need to clamber over dead bodies in “the rubble of the shattered city” to reestablish order in the aftermath of war.73 “Rebuilder” images such as ­these ­were highly gendered. When they ­were featured at all, ­women w ­ ere victims in need of rescue. While Core’s proposal did not specify

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the target of his program, it was likely designed exclusively for American men in order to prepare them to rebuild the nation in the event of an attack. Although neither civil defense agencies nor the federal government created a civil defense fitness program in the end, the proposal would not have seemed out of place in the early 1950s. A national physical fitness program would have resonated with postwar Americans who w ­ ere concerned with the perceived weakening of masculine culture. Indeed, Core’s proposal circulated—­and was considered—­ among multiple officials in the White House, Congress, and federal offices before it was deemed to be a better fit for the agencies overseeing education and public health.74 A more generalized anxiety about the role of m ­ ental health in postwar society also permeated ideas about civil defense. During and immediately ­after the war, psychologists and social scientists turned their attention to studying the effects of war­time trauma.75 Indeed, the National Institute of M ­ ental Health was established in 1949 in part due to an increasing concern for the ­mental health of World War II veterans. But the postwar academic and bureaucratic focus on psy­chol­ogy paralleled popu­lar discussion of m ­ ental health as well. Americans who demanded a civil defense program revealed that they ­were deeply concerned with the public’s ­mental fitness and with their capacity to survive an attack without panic or irrational be­hav­ior. In par­tic­u­lar, civil defense proposals emphasized the urgent need for emotional training that could help Americans resist the kind of “panic which could be created by rumors and subversive propaganda.”76 ­Here, training for an e­ nemy attack blended with another concern about the Cold War on the home front: the task of resisting fifth-­column communist infiltrators in American society. More broadly, civil defense supporters argued, a well-­educated public was best equipped to respond rationally to a threat. As a locally produced civil defense pamphlet from Saint Paul, Minnesota, warned, “ignorance makes fear, fear leads to panic, and PANIC can be the e­ nemy’s best weapon.”77 Even more so than physical health, Americans who developed strategies for civil defense programs identified individual ­mental health as an impor­tant key to winning the next war.78 As civil defense advocates began to imagine the needs of a prepared citizenry in the Atomic Age, they often came to focus on the American individual. Believing that the strength of the nation was the sum of its individual citizens, ­these concerned Americans made an explicit argument that the practices of civil defense promoted the health of the nation and the continuity of the American way of life. Thus, in the earliest days of the Cold War, civil defense advocates established a clear connection between the citizen and the national community as a ­whole.

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The Prob­lem of Cities Yet even when civilians emphasized the ways that civil defense could easily mesh with other aspects of American culture and society in the abstract, the governing structures necessary to execute such programs presented a more complex challenge. This practical need fell most heavi­ly on municipal leaders, especially in medium and large cities. Not only did municipal leaders bear the brunt of citizens’ demands for civil defense planning, but ­because cities ­were assumed to be the most likely centers of attack, they also governed spaces that ­were most imperiled by the exigencies of the Atomic Age. However, during the late 1940s the lack of adequate communication from the federal government in addition to an unor­ga­nized system for funding civil defense proj­ects stymied local leaders. Municipal officials wanted to move forward with civil defense planning, but without clear direction, many felt “confused, disgusted, impatient and fearful.”79 As was quickly apparent, civil defense planning required substantial—if not prohibitively large—­f unds and cooperation that went above the scope of city governments. The task of protecting Amer­i­ca’s cities created a jurisdictional puzzle that would never be fully resolved. But in the formative years of civil defense planning before the creation of the FCDA, American cities w ­ ere not only a point of contact between citizens and their expectations of survival but also became test spaces that revealed the limits of the government’s ability to protect its citizens in the Atomic Age. T ­ hese limits revealed the first signs of fracture in nuclear citizenship: what citizens demanded from their state was not yet something any level of government could provide. Urban spaces ­were perceived to be places of extreme nuclear vulnerability in the late 1940s and early 1950s, especially a­ fter the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic weapon in August 1949. In the years that preceded the thermonuclear weapons developments, ballooning stockpiles, and missile development of the l­ ater 1950s, an atomic attack would be delivered by bomber aircraft and might hit several—­but not many—­coastal urban population centers. Despite a scale of attack that more closely resembled how the United States used atomic weapons in World War II, urban vulnerability occupied an outsized position in American nuclear imagination. Residents of cities of all sizes and continental locations ­imagined themselves to be in the prime target zone. This disparity can be explained, at least in part, by the prevalence of imagery depicting the destroyed cities of f­ uture nuclear war. But perhaps more impor­tant w ­ ere per­sis­tent reminders that the Soviet Union would unquestionably gain nuclear parity with the United States, which obscured the distinction between pre­sent and ­f uture threat levels.

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It is not surprising, then, that city officials ­were among the many Americans voicing calls for national civil defense plans. With large populations, manufacturing centers, and impor­tant transportation and communication infrastructure, city officials faced extraordinary pressure from their worried constituents. Officials too looked to federal agencies for guidance but found the response underwhelming. In November 1948, for example, municipal and state leaders eagerly received the long-­awaited Hopley Report, a federally commissioned study on civil defense organ­ization. However, the report encountered immediate criticism in the press and within the federal government for recommending both military involvement and the creation of a large federal agency requiring congressional legislation. In the wake of such controversy, the federal government offered the Hopley Report unofficially to states and cities as a loose guide, not a mandate. National organ­izations such as mayors’ and governors’ conferences hesitated to use it at all without federal endorsement for fear that ­future federal legislation might negate their pro­gress. To state-­and city-­level officials, the federal government’s tepid recommendation of the Hopley Report seemed like punting the issue of civil defense. In a hearing before Congress in March 1950, Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles testified that mayors and leaders in California ­were frustrated by the absence of a clear delineation of local, state, and federal responsibilities. Moreover, ­because of the federal government’s lack of transparency regarding ­these issues, he felt unable to convince his constituency of the need to support civil defense programming.80 Putting it bluntly to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), Bowron stated that “if [federal officials] are unwilling to take governors, mayors, and other key officials into their confidence to the extent which a realistic civil defense program would make necessary, then I submit that they leave us no alternative but to demand complete Federal responsibility for civil defense.”81 As ­will be discussed in chapter 2, members of the JCAE and other congressional committees w ­ ere hesitant about breaking silence on civil defense for fear it would threaten national security or panic civilians. From Bowron’s point of view in early 1950, however, his hamstrung city was being imperiled by federal inaction. For its part, the NSRB’s civil defense office, created in 1949, did make efforts to address complaints about a lack of organ­ization and information in the years leading up to the FCDA. However, the NSRB’s public activities ­were ­limited to a series of urban test exercises and informational pamphlet distribution. While both mea­sures satisfied the objectives of the NSRB’s leadership, public and municipal responses w ­ ere less enthusiastic. The operational authority of the NSRB in civil defense ­matters was perhaps most vis­i­ble in the summer of 1950, when it conducted three citywide planning studies in Seattle,

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Chicago, and Washington, DC. While the test exercises w ­ ere generally well received by t­ hose city planners who ­were involved, other metropolitan areas felt left out. That summer, Governor G. Mennen Williams of Michigan urged the NSRB to consider Michigan’s industrial cities for a test exercise ­because they “undoubtedly ­will be prime war targets.”82 Given the local specificity of city civil defense planning, especially for a city such as Washington, DC, the NSRB plans ­were difficult to replicate in other American cities. This was not the only t­ hing preventing city officials elsewhere from adapting plans from DC, Chicago, or Seattle. ­These NSRB exercises set out to test only the coordination of existing city government agencies, not public involvement. As an NSRB official admitted in assessing the test plans, “a state of civil defense readiness ­will not actually exist ­until plans for local, state, and federal governments have been worked out and tested and ­until volunteers are trained and equipped, and . . . ​­until citizens of ­every community understand what to do in the event of emergency alert and ­after an attack.”83 If civil defense was designed to ultimately protect the public, public involvement was a missing essential component. Medium and small cities too felt the immediate danger of nuclear war and viewed the federal government as the source of solutions. In June  1950 Thomas H. Nichols, mayor of Canton, Ohio (population about 117,000 in 1950), tele­g rammed the president urgently requesting that the federal government take leadership in guiding cities such as his in civil defense. Arguing that “Canton is in all probability a primary target for any e­ nemy planning aggressive warfare” b­ ecause of its industrial production capabilities, Nichols told the president “I must be frank with you in saying that I would be at a loss to know what should be done.”84 Even rural Amer­i­ca vied for attention. As C. A. Robins, governor of Idaho, argued to the NSRB, “though we have no metropolitan areas [of more than 50,000 residents] we should have consideration.”85 While leaders such as Nichols and Robins undoubtedly faced less complex civil defense challenges than the nation’s major cities, they felt pressured to petition federal agencies for help. Some municipalities attempted to find ways around the sluggish pace of federal planning in any way they could. The Downtown Committee of Kansas City, Missouri, lobbied Truman’s appointments secretary for help in acquiring funds for a municipal bomb shelter. Barney  L. Allis, the leader of the shelter proj­ect, argued that Kansas City, Truman’s a­ dopted hometown, needed to be the first city to obtain a sponsored bomb shelter. “It is just pos­si­ble a bomb is liable to be dropped while [Truman is] in town,” he wrote, “and we would all run over t­here [to the shelter] from the l­ittle White House with a

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case of ginger ale and some biscuits and camp out u ­ ntil the smoke blew away.” Located many hundreds of miles away from a coast, Kansas City in the early 1950s was far removed from an imminent air strike, but Allis nevertheless argued that “if anybody is ­going to have a bomb shelter, it should be us.”86 Another troubling consequence of the lack of overarching planning was that cities understood themselves to be in competition with one another for resources. When some cities tentatively began to develop their own civil defense plans, bud­get logistics immediately proved to be a challenge. As leaders expressed at the General Assembly of the Council of State Governments in 1950, one of the primary roadblocks to local-­level planning was negotiating the bud­get pro­cess with state legislatures.87 Cities needed to be able to justify new civil defense bud­get lines for training programs, emergency equipment, supply stockpiles, or construction, an extraordinarily difficult task given the ­limited or non­ex­is­tent scope of planning recommendations. ­Later planning at the state or federal level could easily render such expenditures redundant or obsolete. Additional questions remained about w ­ hether the federal government would allocate civil defense funds to states or local governments. Quite simply, without logistical direction from above or a bud­geting model, neither cities nor states could start to implement mea­sures. The distribution of funds for civil defense programs thus became a critical source of contention between local leaders, state authorities, and the federal government. New York City provides a revealing example of the extreme pressures felt by city-­level planners in the early days of civil defense discussions. ­Because New York City’s city council managed an area that many assumed would be a primary target for an ­enemy attack, the city was among the earliest municipal organ­izations in the nation to begin seriously discussing nuclear public safety. By early 1950, New York City had already mobilized its City Planning Commission to propose solutions for the city’s civil defense needs. Soon ­after the commission began studying civil defense, planners concluded that evacuating the city’s population—­close to eight million residents—­from Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs was unfeasible. Instead, officials developed a plan that would use parking garages and existing subway infrastructure as public bomb shelters, a methodology that they i­magined could be a­ dopted by city civil defense planners across the nation. Parking structures in par­tic­u­lar ­were appealing; they could generate revenue that over time could pay for the cost of their construction. In theory, they also would alleviate congestion and traffic on the streets in both peacetime and times of crisis. Relying on new and existing facilities, New York City’s plan prioritized areas that had high concentrations of impor­tant infrastructure, industry, and dense daytime population.

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Even with its built-in efficiencies, however, the plan’s tentative bud­get was over $2 billion, a staggering sum equaling almost a quarter of the city’s 1950 expense bud­get.88 In December 1950, New York City mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri wrote to Truman lamenting his city’s inability to raise the necessary funds for civil defense planning, despite its strong desire to be part of the nation’s Cold War mobilization. The federal civil defense legislation that had just recently entered congressional consideration explic­itly forbade states and cities from receiving federal funds for construction proj­ects that would earn revenue, such as the City Planning Commission’s proposal to build parking garages. The rule made New York City’s civil defense plan all but impossible. As Impellitteri wrote to Truman, “we are unalterably opposed to simply digging up streets and vacant property and constructing catacombs which ­will have no peacetime use.” Seeing no other alternative for paying for civil defense in his city, he argued, “it is entirely logical that appropriations for civil defense, like appropriations for military defense, be made on the federal level.” Moreover, in New York City’s case, he argued, the federal government was much better equipped to stockpile supplies and equipment and direct large-­scale construction proj­ects than the city, which was already burdened by postwar development proj­ects. The last ­thing Impellitteri wanted to see was essential city ser­vices neglected and building proj­ects delayed in pursuit of disor­ga­nized federal suggestions.89 By the following year, national civil defense planning was relocated to a more permanent home in the FCDA, but the funding impasse between the federal government and New York City’s leaders would remain for years to come. ­Until the creation of the FCDA, the relationship between federal and local civil defense was a chicken and egg dilemma: cities felt handicapped by a lack of direction, while federal agencies had no mandate to implement programs. Under­neath t­ hese disconnects w ­ ere legions of fearful Americans. Urban civil defense became a point of fracture in nuclear citizenship. While many of the advocates discussed ­earlier in the chapter understood civil defense as something that upheld American traditions and civic life, urban officials saw civil defense as an intractable prob­lem that threatened to rupture the relationship between the local and the national. Indeed, civil defense would pre­sent a significant challenge to postwar federalist governing practices. But more importantly, even in the earliest years of the Atomic Age ­there ­were signs that ensuring the survival of American urbanites might be altogether impossible. In their requests, suggestions, and solutions, civilians demanded that the federal government establish some uniform national civil defense plan. This sentiment appears with much more frequency ­after the Soviet nuclear test and

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the start of the Korean War. In 1950 and 1951 alone, thousands of American citizens, civic organ­izations and clubs, and businesses wrote to Truman urging him to act quickly to create a national civil defense strategy. Elected representatives, the military, in­de­pen­dent federal agencies, state-­level officials, and local government agencies all received countless requests, demands, pleas, and complaints from civilians. National newspapers reported ­these advancements and published a host of editorials and reader-­submitted letters debating the merits of the government’s pro­g ress. For years the public had read about civil defense reports that ­were shelved or rejected, disgruntled physicists concerned about weapons control, and an ever-­intensifying state of volatility in foreign affairs. In 1951, Look magazine accused the federal government of “play[ing] pattycake with the ­whole issue” for more than five years. In this atmosphere of instability, Americans ­were often exasperated and disappointed by why it was taking the federal government so long to develop public safety policy.90 Despite feeling as though their nation as a w ­ hole was unprepared, t­hose Americans who developed grassroots civil defense plans returned again and again to the rhe­toric of citizenship, duty, and responsibility. ­Whether they hoped to increase their business profits, protect their families and communities, or simply apply their expertise or skills to the common good, Americans who participated in early civil defense discussions w ­ ere bound by a common vocabulary of national interest and unity in the face of a new and dangerous world balance. T ­ hese Americans believed they could win the Cold War by preserving the physical and moral integrity of American culture. The grassroots emphasis on the role of civic organ­izations and American business is also telling. Americans saw civil defense as something that could be carried out within the existing framework and structure of American postwar society. Although nuclear war was foreign and unknown, ­these Americans saw civil defense as something that need not be. In fact, many believed that if mass participation was to be successful, civil defense procedures could not stray too drastically from that which Americans already knew and ­were comfortable with. Selling civil defense, then, became a proj­ect of applying familiar fixes to an alien threat. The same discussions that expressed optimism that the nuclear threat could be addressed through familiar cultural and institutional forms, however, began to reveal the limits of survivability if war came. City officials understood that funding civil defense on a massive scale was next to impossible. Even if the federal government had pumped billions of dollars into urban protection—­ which by 1951 t­here was no indication whatsoever they would do—­urban Americans would die in a nuclear war and likely in g­ reat numbers. Likewise, civilian proposals for civil defense highlighted prob­lems of access. Official and unofficial membership in civic organ­izations excluded individuals on the

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basis of race, class, gender, and f­ amily connections. One’s ability to live in a civil defense–­minded home depended on financial privilege, which was also dependent on cultural inclusion. And the personal responsibility rhe­toric at the core of early discussions about civil defense presumed that citizens would be able-­ bodied and able-­minded. As official civil defense planning expanded in the 1950s, the image of the model nuclear citizen was decidedly white, middle-­class, suburban, and healthy. Yet ­these assumptions ­were baked into ideas about civil defense from the beginning of the Atomic Age and even in grassroots suggestions and demands. As it had with other aspects of mainstream postwar American culture, civil defense ideas mapped onto postwar cultures of exclusion as well. Prior to the creation of the FCDA, public demands for civil defense established a rhe­toric of duty, responsibility, and Americanness surrounding the issue of nuclear survival, however imperfectly. Yet it was unclear how exactly state structures would go about ensuring public safety for citizens. Many civil defense advocates assumed that authority for civil defense would rest in established federal agencies. By writing directly to the president, congressional leaders, or federal offices, civil defense advocates demonstrated their belief that the federal government could provide solutions. Yet t­ here w ­ ere signs that the government would be unable to administer a solution that could ensure survival for all Americans. As the 1950s went on, more Americans began acting on their own or looking to alternative sources of authority for what to do to prepare for, survive, and recover from a nuclear attack. Therefore, in its earliest inception civil defense authority was diffuse, complex, and impermanent. ­These conditions w ­ ere complicated by an inconclusive organ­ization of power between federal, state, and local leadership and the federal government’s active attempts to decentralize and privatize civil defense.

C h a p te r   2

“Between the Devil and the Deep” Civil Defense and the Early Cold War Po­liti­cal Landscape

In early February 1950, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy ( JCAE) met in a closed-­door session with several Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) officials with a series of classified maps. The meeting was designed to begin planning for public hearings on impending civil defense legislation, but in the ­middle of the session the committee members became fixated on a set of visual aids that the AEC men brought with them. Laid out before the committee ­were maps of Washington, DC, and New York City, with transparent overlays showing a series of concentric red and yellow rings, delineators of complete destruction and significant destruction, respectively (figure 3). Like hy­po­thet­i­cal b­ attle maps, the overlays illustrated several detonation scenarios: an attack with a Nagasaki-­sized bomb as well as with weapons with twice and one hundred times its explosive power. As the senators and representatives adjusted ground zero—­first over the Capitol, then over the White House, and l­ater over New York’s East River—­the strange horror of the maps set in. To the relief of the committee, a Nagasaki-­sized explosion could not significantly damage both the Capitol and the Pentagon, three miles to the southwest. Yet the larger overlays told another story. Observing that a bomb detonated in downtown Washington would destroy an area well into neighboring states, Mary­land’s Senator Millard Tydings ner­vously joked, “I think I w ­ ill run for the Senate from another state this fall.”1

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Figure 3. ​“Destructive Effects of MIKE on the Nation’s Capitol.” The date of this internal civil defense illustration is unclear, but it would have been produced sometime a ­ fter Ivy Mike’s detonation on November 1, 1952, and likely before C ­ astle Bravo on March 1, 1954. Cartographic repre­sen­ta­tions of blast radii over major cities populated classified civil defense reports. Less technical repre­sen­ta­tions often accompanied articles in popu­lar magazines and newspapers. Image courtesy of the National Archives and Rec­ords Administration; ARC #7386482.

As American civilians began to articulate visions of nuclear safety and responsibility in the late 1940s, federal policymakers confronted their own set of challenges and questions about civil defense. Given the familiar prospect of returning to war alongside the startlingly unfamiliar notion of a nuclear war, the protection of the home front—­and one’s voting constituency—­took on new importance. President Harry Truman had abolished the war­time Office of Civilian Defense in 1945 before the war with Japan concluded, deeming the office unnecessary for a nation at peace. But as early as late 1945, federal officials began to recognize the need for a revamped civilian protection program that could address specifically nuclear threats. The intensification of international Cold War tensions over the course of the late 1940s—­especially the Soviet acquisition of atomic weapons technology in 1949—­added urgency to the need to formulate a cohesive civil defense strategy. Over the course of the late 1940s, policymakers engaged in lengthy ­battles over the meaning, purpose, and limits of civil defense in the Atomic Age.



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The need for nuclear civil defense emerged in the context of complex changes in postwar US politics. As the 1940s progressed, the geopo­liti­cal conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union dictated that the United States marshal a vehement defense of democracy both at home and abroad. For many Americans, the Soviet Union represented a continuation of the evils of totalitarianism and militarization, ideologies that the Allies fought so hard to contain during World War II. Increasingly, citizens and politicians alike embraced a definition of American society as every­thing the Soviet Union was not: ­free and demo­cratic in the face of authoritarianism and slavery. For the first de­cade of the postwar era, t­hese symbolic shortcuts enabled the emergence of a power­f ul national security state and the significant growth of the nuclear arsenal, both of which supported the international policy of containment. The same liberal rhe­toric that defended the United States as arbiters of peace, liberty, and po­liti­cal freedom in the world ironically contributed to illiberal assertions of power at home and abroad. The crusade against Soviet power abroad also paralleled a fight against communism within domestic society. Domestic anticommunism narrowed the spectrum of acceptable politics significantly within public life to exclude programs, policies, and ideology that did not adhere to mainstream American culture. It was in this moment of po­liti­cal contradiction that policymakers ­were tasked with developing public safety plans.2 The imperatives of Cold War international and domestic politics pulled on civil defense planning in complex and contradictory ways. Members of Congress understood civil defense planning on two planes. On one hand, they had to be attentive to the ideological pressures of the Cold War. What­ever shape civil defense would take had to reflect the optics of American freedom, liberty, and anti-­Sovietism while avoiding the pitfalls of a “garrison state.”3 On the other hand, civil defense had to be a program with logistical meaning that could give concrete and practical directives to individual citizens, cities, states, and federal offices. Policymakers knew that civil defense could not simply be a mode of propaganda dissemination, as critics have since charged.4 Yet meeting the twin ideological and logistical imperatives of a civil defense program was no easy feat. As the 1940s progressed, civil defense planning became caught between anticommunism and antitotalitarianism, the pressures of the solidifying national security state, and postwar partisan politics. The more seriously that elected and appointed officials in the United States confronted public safety in the Atomic Age, the more complex their mission became. Federal policymakers gathered information about nuclear weapons, strug­ gled to interpret its meaning, discussed strategies for survival, and ultimately put a national civil defense plan in place. In the period between 1945 and early

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1951, when the Federal Civil Defense Act became law, federal officials redefined the role of the state in the context of nuclear fear and the ideological Cold War. From its beginnings, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) was decentralized and l­imited in authority. Consequently, for the remainder of the 1950s the FCDA and its descendant agencies would strug­gle to find funding, support, and power in Washington, DC. But that is not b­ ecause policymakers did not believe in the necessity, efficacy, or feasibility of a national civil defense program.5 On the contrary, ­those involved in policy decisions took their responsibilities very seriously. ­These planners understood their role as arbiters of competing and sometimes contradictory interests. Civil defense materialized amid a triad of Cold War concerns: fears of an overly power­ful military, distrust of centralized federal programs, and contradictory impulses regarding secrecy within the federal government. Throughout t­ hese discussions about civil defense, ideology, and Cold War policies, federal leaders established a rubric for how individual American citizens ­were expected to behave before, during, and ­after a nuclear attack. But while ­these recommendations assumed that Americans could participate in careful preparation, educational programs, and practice drills, policymakers had difficulty imagining the psy­chol­ogy and be­hav­ior of average Americans in the event of an attack. At times, officials assumed that Americans would gladly take up the patriotic duty of civil defense. More often, however, policymakers characterized civilians as unreliable, panic-­prone, and apathetic. By the early 1950s, civil defense officials would seek out social science and nongovernment expertise to help policymakers understand their civilian constituency. But in the immediate postwar period, policymakers projected their own emotional concerns about the urgency and enormous complexity of civil defense onto the American citizens they represented. Planning for national civil defense was thus bogged down by issues of governance, jurisdiction, authority, Cold War politics, and fears about the capacities of the American citizen. Scholars have discussed this early evolution of civil defense planning in the United States as a policy debate centered around the idea of militarization and the po­liti­cal uses of home front mobilization.6 Yet early civil defense planning also reveals how the threat of nuclear weapons redefined the very notion of citizenship in a volatile moment in postwar history. Policy discussions reflected changing domestic and international politics, but at their core civil defense debates focused on the role of the state in individual American lives. At the same time that citizens across the country ­were imagining civil defense as something that would not fundamentally reshape the relationship between citizens and the state, policymakers ­were arriving at a dif­fer­ent conclusion. With each policy decision about civil defense,



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federal officials moved closer to a definition of nuclear citizenship that carefully delineated limits on state responsibility and expanded the expectations and requirements of American citizens.

Gathering Nuclear Knowledge The experience of World War II set the stage for the development of postwar civil defense ideas. Throughout the war, American propaganda agencies such as the Office of War Information broadcasted war­time news to home front audiences. By the end of the war, the American public was accustomed to images of the war’s conventional bombing campaigns in film, newspapers, and popu­lar magazines. Nevertheless, as so many journalists, public intellectuals, and officials claimed, warfare in the Atomic Age would be altogether dif­fer­ ent than in past wars. Still, as had many civilians, postwar policymakers also looked to World War II to understand what could be expected of nuclear citizens. B ­ ecause of the historical pre­ce­dent set by the use of nuclear weapons in Japan at the conclusion of World War II, the military was central to early postwar civil defense conversations. But in the postwar era as the United States underwent the economic, po­liti­cal, and cultural transition from war to peace, the role of the military in civilian society was in flux. By the summer of 1946 Congress had passed the Atomic Energy Act, which placed control of nuclear science and weapons technologies outside the jurisdiction of the military and into the hands of the civilian-­led AEC. Although military officials ­were the first authorities in nuclear defense planning, the first nuclear civil defense studies emerged at a time when the relationship between the military and nuclear science and research seemed to be weakening. The earliest federal study to consider civil defense was part of a long-­term ordnance survey of World War II strategic targets. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) team released The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the public, the press, and government officials on June 30, 1946.7 Employing the skills of specialists in a wide range of military and nonmilitary fields, the report evaluated structural and industrial damage as well as the atomic bombs’ effects on Japa­nese morale, psy­chol­ogy, public health, and other social aspects of life. The report was the most comprehensive evaluation of the results of the atomic bombings in Japan, and nearly e­ very civil defense study in the following de­cades drew upon its information even as the American arsenal grew to include much more destructive thermonuclear weapons. Although much of the report describes the conditions of the cities before, during, and ­after the attacks, the press seized upon the report’s final section,

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which sought to answer “What if the target for the bomb had been an American city?”8 This section challenged the assumption that the massive destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was due to weak Japa­nese building construction, as many Americans believed.9 The report declared that the quality of Japa­nese building materials was comparable to American materials but also that the American tendency to build vertically—­skyscrapers especially—­made American cities even more vulnerable to blast casualties. Moreover, the report made clear that no ­matter the dominant building type, an atomic weapon would destroy every­thing within its burst radius. The report also aimed to debunk assumptions that the staggering death tolls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki w ­ ere b­ ecause Japa­ nese cities had a much higher population density than American counter­parts. The report concluded that “American cities, too, have their crowded slums,” listing New York City, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, as cities with similar or greater population density than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.10 The press reaction that followed the report was grim. As the New York Times emphasized, “the chances of survival of urban populations in the United States” ­were slim.11 Cities had long been the target of conventional attacks during war­ time, and Americans had seen images of the devastation in London, Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo. But in the years following the atomic attacks on Japan, Americans ­were acutely aware that the destructive power of new weapons compounded the vulnerability of cities and civilians in the Atomic Age. The report ends more optimistically with a section about what can be done to mitigate the threat of atomic death and destruction. Although it would depend on extensive preparation and government-­led proj­ects including shelter construction, decentralization, civil defense, and active defense, the report’s message was clear: Americans could survive a ­future attack with “minimum casualties and disruption.”12 In the context of a single urban attack with an atomic weapon in comparable yield to ­those used in Hiroshima (fifteen kilotons) or Nagasaki (twenty-­one kilotons), this was not an altogether unrealistic goal. However, the report’s writers seem to understand the magnitude of the proposals and the pos­si­ble re­sis­tance to such programs. They warn that if the nation is unwilling to embrace preventative mea­sures, only one option remained: “the surest way [to avoid destruction] is to avoid war.”13 A New York Times editorial written the day ­after the report’s release editorialized that “the other alternative, and the better one, is to outlaw war” entirely.14 It is impor­ tant to place the USSBS report release in the context of concurrent discussions about the f­ uture of the nuclearized world. By the summer of 1946 when the USSBS report was released, the United Nations, nuclear scientists, and US policymakers ­were engaged in a heated debate about how to establish safeguards on nuclear technology.15 Just two weeks before the report’s release, the United



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States had delivered the ill-­fated Baruch Plan to the United Nations, proposing international control of atomic weapons. Thus, the New York Times suggestion that war be outlawed or avoided seemed much less absurd in 1946 than it would seem just five years ­later. At a moment when regulation, control, or a ban on nuclear weapons seemed pos­si­ble, so too might the idea of a warless ­f uture. Yet in the Marshall Islands, many thousands of miles away from the United Nations deliberation rooms, the prospect of a peaceful ­future looked much dif­fer­ent. Just weeks l­ ater, the United States began its first postwar atomic test series at Bikini Atoll. The tests conducted during Operation Crossroads w ­ ere only the fourth (Able on July 1, 1946) and fifth (Baker on July 25, 1946) nuclear devices ever successfully detonated. So new w ­ ere nuclear weapons that the media continued to refer to the Japa­nese bombs as Two and Three and the Bikini bombs as Four and Five for some time. Both Crossroads tests had impor­ tant implications for the US military. By showing that ships at sea could be demolished even at ­great distances from ground zero, military officials began to think differently about dispersing ships and military bases. Although not reported at length in the press, the tests also produced an array of data on radiological effects.16 Fi­nally, the tests demonstrated that naval forces ­were especially vulnerable to a nuclear attack delivered via airplane. A newspaper report on the tests concluded that alone “navies can no longer protect Amer­i­ca” in the face of rapidly developing air delivery technologies.17 Rockets, missiles, and bombers, it seemed, ­were the f­ uture of war. Indeed, within the year, President Truman would commission a research group to study the f­uture of American airpower. If the authors of The Effects of Atomic Bombs had sought to remove American complacency about the realities of nuclear warfare, the media coverage of the 1946 Bikini tests aligned with this goal. New York Times military affairs editor Hanson Baldwin declared that “the atom bomb is primarily a weapon against city civilization.” His report on the Bikini tests ran alongside startling aerial drawings illustrating the bombs’ ability to sink and damage ships, kill and injure p­ eople, and irreparably damage or destroy housing.18 Other front-­ page headlines ran alongside dramatic photo­g raphs with language such as “Bikini Lagoon Turned into Flaming Caldron.”19 But as both the USSBS team and journalists suggested at the time, if the United States could quickly and efficiently or­ga­nize a domestic defense program, American society need not be doomed. ­Because adequate defense initiatives depended on an accurate understanding of the effects of nuclear weapons, the lessons drawn from ­these early reports and studies became integral to l­ater civil defense program goals.

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Importantly, the studies established that a nuclear explosion would have three modes of destruction: heat, blast, and radiation. For the next two de­cades, civil defense media repeated instructions on how civilians could cope with each of the three modes, never straying far from the information that early military findings provided. The USSBS team’s suggested four-­part defense strategy—­ shelters, dispersal of industry and population, civilian defense, and active defense—­had a lasting influence on civil defense discussions as well. Sheltering, dispersal, and preparatory training, the three passive defense strategies, would be the only policy options that policymakers seriously considered in civil defense discussions over the next twenty years. Moreover, as one of the earliest calls for a nuclear civil defense program, The Effects of Atomic Bombs catalyzed further study and planning within the military and the upper echelons of the federal government. Shortly following the release of The Effects of Atomic Bombs, General Dwight Eisenhower issued a memorandum to commission a War Department study to address civil defense planning in more specific terms. Chaired by Major General Harold Bull, Eisenhower’s war­time chief of operations, the rest of the War Department Civil Defense Board (WDCDB) was made up of six high-­ ranking War Department representatives and field officers to advise in vari­ ous logistical recommendations. For four months, the WDCDB interviewed dozens of civilian experts, nuclear scientists, and members of the USSBS team. The WDCDB released the classified Report of the War Department Civil Defense Board (widely referred to as the Bull Report) to internal staff in February 1947.20 The report outlined general steps t­ oward establishing a nuclear civil defense agency. Unsurprisingly, the WDCDB concluded that postwar civil defense had much to learn from World War II civilian defense programs in the United States, G ­ reat Britain, Germany, and Japan. Taking the most successful ele­ments of each nation’s programs, the WDCDB determined that the Atomic Age demanded strong federal leadership, lengthy peacetime preparation, and a well-­ planned chain of command that included civilians and officials.21 Using American World War II programs as a touchstone, the Bull Report also set par­ameters on how to describe postwar civil defense. The WDCDB defined civil defense as “the organ­ization of the ­people to minimize the effects of ­enemy action. Specifically, Civil Defense is the mobilization, organ­ization, and direction of the civil populace and necessary supporting agencies to minimize the effects of ­enemy action directed against communities including industrial plants, facilities, and other installations, and to maintain or restore ­those facilities essential to civil life, and to preserve the maximum civilian support of the war effort.”22 The WDCDB consciously excluded aircraft warning systems, internal security programs, and auxiliary programs such “as salvage, victory



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gardens, recreation, [and] bond drives,” arguing that t­ hese programs should be ­ ere si­mul­ta­neously voicing similar managed by other agencies.23 Press critics w concerns that “energies . . . ​should not be dissipated on such activities as victory gardens and fandances.”24 Distancing nuclear civil defense programs from the civilian programs of World War II was a critical component of t­ hese early discussions. The War Department classified the Bull Report for a year ­after its February 1947 release, making it available only to select federal offices. However, members of the press knew that the War Department had studied and released a report on civil defense. Some observers balked at the secrecy, arguing that the public deserved to have access to information that affected their personal safety. John G. Norris, who reported on civil defense for the Washington Times-­ Herald through the 1950s, charged the WDCDB with slowing the flow of public information, a type of inaction and apathy that he said was “alarmingly typical of the situation t­ oday.”25 Leadership from the American Legion, which made some of the most vocal early calls for a civil defense plan, lamented in October that “although the Legion a­ dopted a civil defense program [resolution] more than a year ago and sought the assistance of the army, not one iota of help has been forthcoming.”26 The tension between the federal need for secrecy and the public desire for information surfaced early in postwar discussions of nuclear ­matters and would continue to be a source of conflict for the remainder of the Cold War. In response to criticisms of the Bull Report, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal established the Office of Civil Defense Planning (OCDP) within the fledgling Office of the Secretary of Defense in March 1948.27 With Russell J. Hopley, president of Northwestern Bell, as chair, the OCDP set out to develop a more detailed national civil defense plan. For eight months the OCDP deliberated, enlisting the expertise of hundreds of specialists in a variety of fields. Forrestal and the OCDP released Civil Defense for National Security (hereafter referred to as the Hopley Report) to hundreds of federal, state, and local officials in October 1948.28 The three hundred-­page report expanded on the basic premises of the WDCDB’s findings but went into much greater detail about operational tasks and orga­nizational strategies at each level of government. Forrestal also released the Hopley Report directly to the public to combat charges of secrecy and to give the topic the air of demo­cratic debate. He argued that the report needed to be read and accepted widely before receiving official endorsement.29 By the end of 1948, civil defense planning had amassed some inertia among ­those tasked within the federal government to study it. Public attention to the issue was growing as the press reported on planning developments, and

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members of the public began to articulate their own demands and proposals for nuclear civil defense. Yet although the Bull and Hopley boards’ members made good use of the technical reports from Japan and the immediate postwar weapons tests, their reports made only incremental pro­g ress in sorting out the practical organ­ization and operation of civil defense. Chief among critics’ concerns was where civil defense authority should rest within the federal government. The intense debate that followed the release of the Hopley Report revealed that civil defense, like nuclearization more generally, raised difficult questions about federal power in a demo­cratic society.

The Role of the Military in Civil Defense In par­tic­u­lar, the Hopley Report drew scrutiny among policymakers and the public alike about the proposed role of the military in civil defense. Although the Bull and Hopley boards ­were both based within the military, led by military specialists, and drew upon military studies, both teams acknowledged the need for some civilian leadership within civil defense. Nevertheless, ­because civil defense needed direct coordination with military defenses, both reports recommended that the civil defense organ­ization should be ­under the umbrella of the National Military Establishment.30 In this scheme, federal civil defense would be staffed by civilians but would be responsible to the military, while subordinate civil defense offices in states and cities would be exclusively civilian in nature. The Bull board concluded that civil defense be the fourth branch reporting to the secretary of armed forces, equal in standing to the nation’s military branches. Hopley’s board took a less absolute stance, recommending that the proposed agency be responsible to the National Military Establishment but acknowledging the possibility that it could report directly to the president.31 This early waffling within the planning boards about the extent of the involvement of the armed forces reflected a much broader philosophical debate over military control in a democracy. As the reports became available the public, Americans w ­ ere torn between the growing need for national civil defense and a reluctance to consolidate such a program within the military. To some, military control of civil defense seemed problematic in light of World War II’s encounter with totalitarianism. In a radio script, news and gossip commentator Walter Winchell asked, “Mr. President, the last 30 years of history are screaming their warning. Have they told you sir, that a military dictatorship may take over? . . . ​I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that you and your liberties are again standing at Valley Forge.”32 Other less sensationalist detractors of military civil defense feared the



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“regimentation” of the public.33 As Hanson Baldwin at the New York Times argued, a civil defense office “would have enormous power and authority in times of war over the lives of us all.” Instead, Baldwin suggested, “civil defense should be as the name implies—of, by and for civilians.”34 Still o ­ thers defended the need for civil defense even at the expense of a larger military. An oppositional New York Times editorial supported the Hopley board’s plan, stating that civil defense organ­ization could only be called a war mea­sure “by t­hose [wishing] to make propaganda of it.”35 Even in its earliest iterations, civil defense was a topic of policy discussion that was vulnerable to po­liti­cal accusation. As ­these discussions played out in the press, the Hopley board waited for endorsement from the executive branch. By early December 1948, however, it began to appear as though Truman was poised to reject the Bull and Hopley recommendations entirely, perhaps electing instead to keep civil and military functions separate. Meanwhile, the Washington Times-­Herald reported that other executive agencies also disapproved of military-­led civil defense.36 Then, without an official announcement, the OCDP’s funding was removed from the military’s bud­get request. Consequently, other governing organ­izations postponed their support for the Hopley board’s plan, fearing that it might soon be abandoned.37 Their concerns ­were well-­founded. On March 3, 1949, Truman sent a letter to John Steelman, chairman of the two-­year-­old National Security Resources Board (NSRB), charging it with civil defense planning responsibilities. B ­ ecause “peacetime civil defense planning is related to, and a part of, over-­ all mobilization planning of the Nation in peacetime,” Truman believed that civil defense was part of the NSRB’s mission to advise the president on ­matters of “military, industrial, and civilian mobilization.”38 Despite its military-­adjacent function, the NSRB was an executive branch agency and bore no direct responsibility to the Department of Defense (DOD). The reaction to the president’s decision was mixed. Some newspapers reported that Truman “junked [the OCDP’s] recommendation” for a separate dedicated civil defense office.39 ­Others assumed that the move indicated that Truman was abandoning focused civil defense planning altogether.40 Still ­others praised Truman’s decision, indicating that it would save money and prevent the expansion of federal powers.41 Amid conflicting reviews in the press, Truman charged the NSRB with developing a new national program for civil defense. For the next year and a half, the NSRB’s Office of Civilian Mobilization (OCM) worked to draft an orga­nizational plan. In the meantime, Forrestal’s successor as secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, abolished the Hopley board and the OCDP in August of 1949. Seeing no need for the military to duplicate the objectives now ­under the purview of the NSRB, Johnson transferred the few remaining military civil defense ­matters to the newly created coordinating

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role of assistant for civil defense liaison within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.42 With the military’s responsibilities over civil defense greatly diminished, it seemed as though some of the jurisdictional issues over civil defense ­were fi­nally resolving. As the NSRB worked on a national-­level program, signs of pro­g ress w ­ ere emerging from other governing structures as well. In late 1949, Congress slated a number of hearings, meetings, and specialized task forces to discuss civil defense ­matters in preparation for eventual legislative action. Yet ­because civil defense oversight had no official home in Congress—­and a recent history of changing hands in Washington—­planning discussions occurred in parallel within several committees, with l­ittle to no coordination between committees or other federal agencies. The situation was dysfunctional: u ­ ntil December  1950, both the JCAE and the Senate Committee on Armed Ser­vices (SCAS) claimed that civil defense fell within their jurisdictional purview. The SCAS argued that its mandate to ensure national defense inherently included civil defense. The JCAE derived its authority from their involvement in nuclear development and strategy and argued that as a civilian function, civil defense should not be related to a military committee. Throughout 1950, both the SCAS and the JCAE in­de­pen­dently heard closed-­session and public testimony from members of the AEC, the DOD, the NSRB, and other offices. Several congressmen even belonged to both committees. Both the JCAE and the SCAS recognized that their parliamentary dispute would slow down civil defense ­matters when the NSRB was ready to pre­sent a legislative proposal to Congress, but the m ­ atter was not resolved ­until public hearings began in early December. Ultimately, in the interest of expediency, the SCAS would gain civil defense jurisdiction, despite the desire among many officials—­Truman included—to other­wise remove civil defense from the military umbrella.43 The evolution of civil defense planning ideas over the course of the late 1940s reflects how Americans strug­gled with the changing role of the military ­after World War II. Despite the growing prominence and power of the national security state, policymakers, the press, and the public w ­ ere often ambivalent about the role of the military in domestic affairs. Although civil defense theory emerged from the military experience of World War II, few Americans could reconcile the thought of militarized control of civilian life. Moreover, Congress’s decision to establish the AEC as a civilian-­controlled entity in 1946 set a pre­ce­dent that nuclear ­matters existed independently—at least officially—of the military. Thus, postwar Americans determined that their relationship to the state with regard to the pressures of the nuclear threat should exist in a civilian space, not a militarized one.44 By 1949, nuclear citi-



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zenship was predicated on the relationship between civilians and a civilian state, despite the inherently militarized nature of the nuclear threat. The responsibility for civil defense was now decidedly out of the control of the National Military Establishment even as it remained integral to the idea of national security. This in itself is a testament to the postwar realignment of national security to extend beyond the bound­aries of strictly military concerns. Well into the 1960s, the nation’s civil defense planners managed this ambiguity carefully by downplaying the military significance of civil defense, even when some operations would shift back ­under the umbrella of the military during the administration of President John F. Kennedy. The military-­ civilian debates of the late 1940s had long resonance, but for the time being the bottom line was that the nation still lacked legislation upon which to build a national program. Concerned American citizens waited impatiently for action. Over the course of 1950 as the NSRB worked on a national plan ­behind closed doors, new po­liti­cal concerns arose among policymakers outside the board. ­These debates too centered around the role of the citizen and the state in the Atomic Age.

The Transparent National Security State As the NSRB worked to study what a member of the SCAS called the shocking “scope of the ­things that are involved in civilian defense,” congressional committees began to plan for the public hearings that would need to precede any f­ uture legislation.45 During 1950 the SCAS and the JCAE held two rounds of public hearings: in March and April and then again in December. Yet the many discussions held within closed-­door committee sessions leading up to ­these public hearings reveal an ongoing dilemma in civil defense planning: the inherent tension between government transparency and deliberate management of public information. Not only w ­ ere policymakers uncertain about where civil defense authority fit within demo­cratic traditions, but they ­were also deeply anxious about how to inform the public about the nuclear threat without revealing compromising state secrets. Congressional committee members found themselves hamstrung by the Cold War po­liti­cal climate. In the context of the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, critics charged that state secrecy and public ignorance ­were hallmarks of Stalinism. Yet the Cold War also demanded secrecy in all ­things nuclear, including civil defense. For policymakers, public communication became a critical component of the relationship between the citizen and the state in the Atomic Age.

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Establishing transparency in nuclear ­matters was a delicate balance. Elected officials felt that they needed to gain the trust of Americans by giving them access to information that could save their lives. However, they believed that information management was a sensitive business, as civil defense information could easily veer into the territory of state secrets. JCAE members felt this tension acutely, as they had been negotiating the balance between transparency and secrecy since the establishment of the AEC in 1946. Its charismatic chairman, Senator Brien McMahon, took a special interest in civil defense in 1949 and 1950 and by then was known in Congress as “Mr. Atom.” McMahon’s impassioned concern for the challenges of civil defense reveals the degree of urgency and sincerity with which the JCAE approached the task of working through its complexities in the halls of Congress. It is clear that by the late 1940s, members of the JCAE ­were aware of the growing chorus of grassroots voices calling for a national civil defense plan. In par­tic­u­lar, the JCAE felt pressure from civic organ­izations that w ­ ere ­eager for instruction and direction. At one of its first closed-­door sessions regarding civil defense, Chairman McMahon warned of “the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and private organ­izations who are writing us and drumming on us.”46 He feared “that if the Legion ­doesn’t get hearings ­here [in Congress], they w ­ ill run some place e­ lse, where it might be run irresponsibly.”47 The JCAE’s close connection with the AEC and the DOD, its members’ high security clearance, and the JCAE’s status in Washington convinced its members that they had authority in arbitrating what the public could and could not know about the nuclear threat. However, given several years of public outcry for civil defense, the JCAE knew it needed to act quickly to maintain that authority. Congressional committee members felt that a number of issues needed to be resolved before open public hearings ­were held in order to curb the potential for negative public reaction. Policymakers strove to fully understand the ramifications of current weapons development and shifting strategy before making policy decisions. Indeed, clearance-­level sessions ­were necessary in many instances b­ ecause testimony involved weapon specifications, military capacities, and other state secrets. However, for the first part of 1950, public communication of less sensitive civil defense information was sometimes guarded just as closely. In a closed-­door congressional meeting of the JCAE in February, McMahon presented an abbreviated version of a staff report, “Some Leading Civil Defense Prob­lems.” McMahon removed the study’s title and content of seventy-­five questions from the public JCAE rec­ord not ­because it had classified information but ­because it “seemed to [him] that even asking ­those questions would be a quite exciting piece of news” and would provoke panic.48



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Such cautiousness was not always successful. By the time the JCAE members pored over the maps of hy­po­thet­i­cal destruction in New York and Washington, DC, the technical report had already unintentionally reached the public. When Senator Tom Connally asked AEC commissioner Gordon Dean incredulously “You ­will scare every­one to death, w ­ on’t you?” Dean cryptically responded, “We ­didn’t distribute it.” In the face of the intense public demand for civil defense information, it is unsurprising that something as sensational as an attack scenario would be leaked. Yet as congressional discussions continued, it became apparent that policymakers ­were deeply worried about the psychological consequences of releasing information to the public. Transcripts of t­ hese congressional hearings indicate that most members doubted the public’s capacity to interpret civil defense information in a rational fashion. Although the USSBS team’s 1946 report included optimistic assessments about civilian crisis psy­chol­ogy, most members seem to have left this information by the wayside in ­favor of assuming that the American public was irrational, emotional, and ignorant. The American public, Senator John W. Bricker argued, had “been so shocked and so emotionally tested” by the first five years of the Atomic Age that they could not be counted on to act rationally in response to civil defense information and even less so in an a­ ctual attack.49 Dean reinforced t­ hese assumptions, telling congressmen the “the time is ripe for hysteria.”50 Officials feared that the public could become frenzied in response to information about the nuclear threat. They also assumed that without proper training, Americans would act irrationally when a nuclear crisis arrived. However irrational congressmen i­magined their constituents, shielding them from nuclear realities would not suffice ­either. Shields Warren of the AEC assessed that “ignorance is the greatest cause of hysteria.”51 Likewise, Senator Bricker also blamed a perceived indifference about civil defense on public ignorance.52 If civil defense was to be effective, they believed, Americans needed specific information about nuclear weapons. To take one example, officials agreed that in order to prepare for an attack, civilians needed to know how a nuclear weapon destroys: blast, fire, and radiation. But did the public need to know how many operable nuclear weapons the Soviet Union held? Should urban dwellers know the likelihood of attack on their home city? And could that information be damaging to US interests if it reached the Soviet Union? For McMahon, answers to ­these questions represented a “knife edge . . . ​ between divulging to the public vari­ous ­things and also watching security.”53 However, in trying to find the thin line between government transparency and strategic vulnerability, officials worried that keeping an unnecessary degree of information from the public was akin to censorship, a hallmark of totalitarian

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governance. McMahon balked at the idea of encouraging Americans to have blind faith in their leadership, saying “by God, that is the very psy­chol­ogy, the very business we are opposing, fighting.”54 The perceived dangers of communism—­whether via subversive agents or ideology—­could not have been far from the minds of congressional officials ­either. Just over a week before the February session, Senator Joseph McCarthy had claimed that he had uncovered widespread communist infiltration in State Department. In the diplomatic context of the late 1940s and very early 1950s, it is no surprise that officials scrutinized the practice of making nuclear information public. The Soviet nuclear program advanced faster than US intelligence had previously estimated, some suspected as a result of espionage.55 Likewise, congressmen drew connections to Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs’s trial in multiple meetings throughout 1950. Federal leaders at this moment w ­ ere thus acutely aware of the consequences of mishandled information. And although nuclear weapons presented the biggest challenge and garnered the most attention, officials also included chemical and biological warfare, industrial sabotage, and po­liti­ cal subterfuge as considerations for civil defense. Especially in ­these secondary civil defense concerns, policymakers worried about how fifth-­column subversives might use publicly available information against the goals of the state. Policymakers also fretted that the Soviet Union might appropriate US civil defense strategies to bolster their own security. Beyond establishing consensus about the need for a careful public information campaign, congressional debates made ­little headway in defining what the public could know and needed to know. Some of their discussion was moot: the in­de­pen­dently operating NSRB had already begun publishing and distributing classified and public informational pamphlets. One lasting effect of congressional discussions about public communication, however, was an increased focus on interagency cooperation and oversight, especially between the DOD, the AEC, and civil defense agencies. Overall, officials failed to find a solution that balanced state and public information needs in large part b­ ecause their understanding of the psyche of the American p­ eople was so ambiguous and malleable. While officials thought that divulging more information to the public could cause hysteria and panic, the relatively calm public reaction to news of the Soviet atomic test in 1949 concerned and confused some policymakers. “­There is also the danger of underestimation,” McMahon said to the JCAE. “I think the reactions to the Soviet bomb ­were very bad in this country. I think it was underplayed. I think we kicked it ­under the rug.”56 Perhaps, some officials thought, the public needed to be more concerned about nuclear issues. At the very least, public reaction seemed unpredictable.



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The early congressional debates about civil defense also reveal how impor­ tant psychological considerations had become in some policymaking circles. Indeed, ­these discussions in Washington parallel a larger social shift t­oward using psy­chol­ogy, sociology, and other forms of social science expertise as a framework for understanding the world.57 Officials strug­gled to implement psy­chol­ogy in a legible way, using words such as “frenzy,” “hysteria,” and “panic” as blanket terms to define the American public’s anticipated response to nuclear realities.58 But the congressional discussions also resulted in lasting assumptions that the American public was indeed capable of acting in rational and orderly ways if only it had access to carefully procured information. Policymakers believed that if citizens knew more about the situation at hand, they would worry less about the threat of a nuclear attack. As McMahon put it, “a fear that produces action, that is the act of a rational and intelligent being.”59 If the federal civil defense program issued comprehensive instruction and training on how to act, policymakers reasoned, Americans could survive a nuclear attack without suffering unnecessary social or psychological distress. Controlled transparency of government thus became the way the state chose to interact with its population ­under the stresses of the Atomic Age. As McMahon put it, “the ­people are entitled to know [the danger] or ­else who are we kidding? You cease to be a democracy, it seems to me.”60 But if it w ­ ere to inform the public, even in a ­limited way, the state expected citizens to be receptive to state information and to respond rationally and responsibly. Moving forward, both the AEC and federal civil defense agencies maintained this public information practice, carefully selecting only the information that officials believed was essential. At the onset of civil defense planning, however, the exchange of governing transparency for citizen cooperation was built into how policymakers understood the relationship between citizens and the state in the Atomic Age.

The Cold War Politics of Civil Defense As committees in Congress debated how to strike the right balance of public information and secrecy in open hearings, they also uncovered other areas where the needs of civil defense w ­ ere incongruent with Cold War po­liti­cal exigencies. One of the most difficult questions apparent in early civil defense discussions was this: if the goal of civil defense was to protect e­ very American man, ­woman, and child from the effects of a nuclear attack, how far could the government intervene in individual lives to ensure survival? Mandatory participation in civil defense programs and practices was a tough sell for

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lawmakers promoting freedom and democracy. Policymakers also saw a po­ liti­cal liability in endorsing the creation of a large, power­ful, and expensive federal agency designed for war in a postwar climate of peace. Moreover, although civil defense was a domestic concern, it was inseparable from the nuclear arms race and e­ nemy aggression and therefore carried the symbolic weight of the international Cold War. For representatives in Congress, a program of nuclear civil defense needed to address both practical and ideological considerations, but the two imperatives w ­ ere often in conflict, exposing difficult questions about American democracy in the Atomic Age. In the context of escalating Cold War tensions, lawmakers ­were particularly concerned with how civil defense might run c­ ounter to American demo­ cratic ideals. Members of Congress understood that a successful national civil defense program would require the participation of the vast majority of Americans, but they shied away from direct enforcement b­ ecause it bore the hallmarks of authoritarianism. By the end of the year the JCAE was relying on the recently released “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” known as NSC-68, for strategic civil defense assumptions, and it would be surprising if the document’s framework of a “conflict in the realm of ideas and values” between the two superpowers was not also taken to heart.61 Freedom and choice had gained unpre­ce­dented status in the American po­liti­cal culture of the early Cold War in part b­ ecause Soviet society had become so thoroughly associated with slavery. Officials rankled at the idea of forced participation in civil defense for the same reasons. As McMahon put it in March 1950, “you c­ an’t regiment a democracy u ­ nless you tell them some of the reasons why you are d­ oing ­things.”62 Even with appropriate communication with the public, a program that bore characteristics close to regimentation would have been exposed to intense po­liti­cal criticism. For elected officials at the height of domestic anticommunism, the ideological stakes of defending American ­free society and democracy ­were high. Despite the enormous complexities and unique needs of civil defense planning, it could not escape the cultural politics of the early Cold War.63 Congressional officials also feared that a national civil defense program could vest the federal government with extreme powers in the event of war. The decision to make civil defense a civilian program reflects this concern. Yet complex questions remained regarding the nature of the nuclear state. What responsibilities might individual states lose during and immediately a­ fter an attack? How could a federal defense agency’s powers be contained in the chaos of war? McMahon and o ­ thers saw war­time powers as a slippery slope. Even if New York was the only city attacked, one would have “the prob­lems of mo-



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bilization, of manpower, allocation of supplies. In other words, the immediate setting up of a police state, an absolutely regimented all-­powerful dictatorship.”64 Hyperbole aside, McMahon was particularly troubled by the task of devising a successful system that could preserve the autonomy of individual states but provide the logistical needs of a crisis scenario. Again and again in congressional meetings, the need for interstate coordination arose. As DOD, AEC, and NSRB officials often pointed out, the destruction ring of urban target areas frequently straddled state lines. And although it was not a frequent topic of consideration in 1950, fallout spread and widespread crop damage—­presumably an interstate prob­lem—­was briefly discussed at a JCAE meeting in March.65 Although interstate cooperation was assumed to be part of a nationwide civil defense plan, committee members saw the uniform implementation of such partnerships to be an intractable prob­lem. The unwillingness of Congress to venture too far into the civil defense affairs of individual states also reflects the postwar po­liti­cal move away from the kind of statist governing solutions that had characterized the G ­ reat Depression and the war years. Symbolically, the nation’s confrontation with totalitarianism on many fronts during the war created antipathy t­ oward centralized federal power afterward. This postwar attitude meshed with long-­standing criticisms from small state advocates who opposed federal expansion in the 1930s. By the late 1940s, conservative pushback from both parties had halted Truman’s attempts to expand the New Deal state with Fair Deal initiatives that included additional l­abor and employment protections, a system of universal health care, and federal educational aid. By then, anticommunism had also become po­liti­cally expedient on both sides of the aisle and across much of the po­liti­cal spectrum, making it easy to disparage statist programs as communistic. A federal civil defense program that appeared too centralized, too power­f ul, too expensive, or too much like a social welfare program would almost certainly have met the same fate as Truman’s Fair Deal.66 The nation’s federal civil defense planning unfolded across ­these years of po­liti­cal flux and fracture. Even as elected officials spoke of the unpre­ce­dented nature of the nuclear threat, civil defense programs still had to reside within the logic of early Cold War po­liti­cal realities. However, as congressional officials and other civil defense commentators quickly realized, it was not always an easy fit. The ideological dictates of the Cold War often created impediments to the logistical function of an effective public safety program, as was apparent even before the establishment of the FCDA in late 1950. The US system of civil defense thus emerged out of a series of compromises and imperfect solutions framed by the po­liti­cal and cultural context of the early Cold War.

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Self-­Help Civil Defense Ultimately, a­ fter years of studies, reports, and debates, policymakers answered ­these questions by articulating a system of civil defense with a diffuse command structure and a weak central organ­ization, undergirded by the central idea of self-­help. As historian Laura McEnaney argues, self-­help “satisfied an array of divergent interests without the attendant risk of appearing ‘soft’ on defense or communism.”67 Some members of Congress supported self-­help at its most extreme. “I think prob­ably the best solution of t­ hese prob­lems is to let the p­ eople know what the prob­lem is and leave it up to their devices,” Representative W. Sterling Cole told other members of the JCAE in March 1950. He had faith in “what­ever ingenuity the American ­people may have to find answers rather than for us folks to lay down a pattern for them and tell them this is it. Tell them the prob­lem and let each one dig his own shelter.”68 As Congress deliberated about a federal civil defense plan in 1950, Cole’s emphasis on complete individualism was a minority opinion. However, the idea of “rely[ing] upon the ingenuity of each American,” as Paul J. Larsen, director of the NSRB OCM, put it, became central to the shape and form of civil defense as it was written into law.69 Self-­help, at its core, was a concept that localized civil defense responsibility. In emphasizing economy, feasibility, and minimal bureaucratic growth, both the Bull and Hopley boards had used self-­help as an organ­izing princi­ ple. In light of the potential scale of a nuclear crisis, both reports also emphasized the practical need for individual citizens to take responsibility for themselves whenever pos­si­ble, promoting a bottom-up local chain of action. If individuals could not help themselves, they would look for assistance from the community. If the community could not help itself, it would look to mutual aid from surrounding communities and then the county or the state and so forth, from the immediate to the distant and from the neighborhood to the national. In operation, self-­help civil defense placed the majority of the responsibilities on existing agencies at the state and local levels. For postwar politicians who cast a critical eye ­toward state growth and bud­getary largess, this gave a national civil defense plan more appeal. Speaking on behalf of the NSRB team developing a revised civil defense recommendation in 1950, Larsen stated that they ­were operating “with the hope that to maintain our demo­cratic type of government we have, that we ­don’t bankrupt it.”70 With estimated bud­get lines in the billions of dollars, diffusing the financial and operational burden to states and cities seemed to be the only feasible strategy.71 Aside from its utility as an orga­nizational and bud­getary strategy, self-­help had meta­phoric uses as well. The Hopley Report indicates that each civil de-



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fense warden—­the first level of orga­nizational authority above the individual and ­family—­“­will be the local leader through whom civil defense becomes a living force.”72 Indeed, the report not only uses the capitalized “Civil Defense” but also personifies the program with ­human verbs, stating that civil defense “is ready,” “rescues, “cares,” “knows,” “furnishes,” and “reassures.”73 The Hopley board may have used such language unintentionally, but the compassionate tone of the report underscores that it was a program intended to garner a positive public reception. The report also further emphasized the importance of the individual citizen in civil defense and humanized what could be construed as an unwanted expansion of state power. Although appealing in some re­spects, a universal self-­help methodology had logistical weaknesses. Some aspects of civil defense required a more active federal office that some members of Congress would have preferred. As mentioned above, the interstate nature of a potential attack muddied the clear delineation of planning responsibilities to individual states. In a closed-­door session, AEC official Warren warned “that if you plan on a state basis only, you are ­going to be in very serious trou­ble.”74 The distribution of financial responsibility was another area of unresolved conflict. The Bull and Hopley boards punted on devising a specific federal, state, and local bud­geting structure, as did the congressional civil defense committees. It was not ­until well into the legislative review of the Federal Civil Defense Act that policymakers arrived at a loose cost-­sharing method for financial responsibility. Even then, as discussed in chapter 1, the funding structure was unrealistic for many states and cities. Even a­ fter the Truman administration abandoned the Hopley plan shortly ­after its release in 1949, self-­help remained the centerpiece of civil defense logic into 1950 and 1951. Once self-­help had solidified as the core tenet of civil defense, leaders ­were loath to deviate from it u ­ nless d­ oing so proved absolutely necessary. Despite challenges that spurred lengthy debate in Congress, the civil defense legislation that passed in late 1950 maintained a bottom-up structure for civil defense, focusing on individual responsibility. Not the least of t­hese interests, of course, was practicality. If properly implemented, officials argued, localized civil defense rooted in self-­help could tap into existing grassroots resources: ­people, ser­vices, and organ­izations. The princi­ple stuck. Nearly all of the civil defense media produced during the 1950s would emphasize the central idea of self-­help: individuals responsible for training and preparing, families responsible for making h ­ ouse­hold disaster plans, and factories responsible for creating their own emergency directives. Faced with the nearly impossible challenge of protecting the American citizenry from a threat of unpre­ce­dented scale and scope, policymakers effectively reassigned responsibility for the safety of the nation from the federal state to its citizens.

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The Path to Legislation By March 1949 when Truman transferred civil defense responsibility to the NSRB, the United States had been airlifting food and supplies to Berlin for months, the Communist Revolution in China was nearing its conclusion, and the United States was approaching an agreement with other Eu­ro­pean nations to form what would become the North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization. Truman’s move to place civil defense u ­ nder the capacities of the NSRB mirrors the broad logic b­ ehind the National Security Act of 1947 to streamline defense activities. Bringing civil defense ­under the formal jurisdiction of the executive branch would in theory facilitate streamlined communications with other mobilization efforts and expedite the chain of communication with the president. However, Truman was si­mul­ta­neously leery of granting operational authority to a new organ­ization ­under the executive branch. The executive’s interpretation of the National Security Act held that the NSRB was strictly an advisory organ­ization. But its first chairman, Arthur M. Hill, strug­gled with his board’s ­limited mandate. In a series of letters to Truman, Hill argued that the changing course of world events made it necessary for the board to take active leadership in managing resources, especially manpower mobilization. Hill argued that some operational authority was necessary for the NSRB to carry out its function of accelerating mobilization in the event of war. Hill’s views met unwavering re­sis­tance from Truman ­until the Korean crisis in June 1950, at which point Truman conceded l­imited, specific operational authority to the NSRB.75 Thus, when Truman had transferred civil defense planning to the NSRB over a year e­ arlier, it was in an advisory capacity only, and the NSRB’s OCM confronted the same jurisdictional disputes as the NSRB at large. The OCM was able to stretch its narrow definition to include organ­izing mock-­attack planning exercises and training courses, printing informational pamphlets, and making formal agreements with organ­izations such as the Red Cross. Yet the OCM could not employ more than a skeleton staff or operate without approval from the president. Perhaps unintentionally, the advisory nature of the OCM established a pre­ce­dent for ­f uture national civil defense organ­izations. Although the OCM spent the period between March 1949 and September 1950 developing an extensive national civil defense plan, it appeared to civilians and local leaders as though no agency or official led civil defense planning. Pro­ gress was hampered by the fact that Truman’s mandate to the NSRB’s OCM required a g­ reat deal of interagency planning, consultation, and cooperation. The Washington Times-­Herald reported that by June many federal offices ­were contributing to the OCM plan, including the Federal Works Agency, the Fed-



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eral Security Agency, the AEC, and the Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Commerce, Trea­sury, and Justice.76 Still, Truman and the NSRB came ­under heavy criticism for the lack of pro­gress and for slow central planning.77 Meanwhile, some state legislatures, feeling the intense pressure of local demands for civil defense programs, crafted legislation based on the Hopley Report, released several years e­ arlier.78 By the end of 1949, at least twelve state legislatures had passed or ­were debating civil defense laws. Many more states had established advisory committees within the governors’ offices. State-­level legislation typically allowed for emergency powers in the case of a nuclear strike, created a ­legal mandate for appointed civil defense committees, and defined the relationship between the state government and its municipalities and counties. But civil defense planning at the state and local levels was a moving target so long as both the OCM and Congress studied the issue. That state legislatures ­were willing to commit the time and resources to draft and pass their own legislation despite an unclear path forward indicates the perceived urgency of the threat of war. At long last, on September 8, 1950, the OCM submitted its completed report, United States Civil Defense, to Truman.79 Officials referred to the report as the Blue Book for the color of its cover. Just ten days ­later Truman sent the Blue Book to Congress, requesting its use as the backbone of the f­ uture FCDA. The Blue Book plan resembled the previous Hopley Report in many ways, emphasizing self-­help and the autonomy of states and municipalities. But the Blue Book gave a more detailed orga­nizational plan and included loose specifications for a funding structure. As Lieutenant Col­o­nel Barnett W. Beers, the civil affairs liaison assistant to the secretary of defense, assured the skeptical House Armed Ser­vices Committee in a meeting to consider the civil defense bill, “the bill is based on all of the previous studies and is a pro­g ress rather than a new approach.”80 Although the press had criticized Truman for “junking” prior civil defense work a year and a half ­earlier, the Blue Book was billed as the culmination of years of postwar research and planning. Truman sent the Blue Book to Congress shortly before legislators recessed at the end of September. Congress reconvened for a lame-­duck session at the end of November amid an intensifying situation in ­Korea and diplomatic instability in Yugo­slavia. Truman issued Executive Order 10186 on December 1, 1950, creating the FCDA within the executive office to facilitate a smoother transfer of civil defense responsibilities from the NSRB. Congress held hearings at the beginning of December on H.R. 9798 and passed the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 by the time Congress recessed again on January 2, 1951. Truman signed the act into law on January 12, 1951, fi­nally creating the FCDA.81

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The Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 created a statutory FCDA and reassigned Truman’s executive FCDA into the new office. Importantly, the Federal Civil Defense Act created the first civil defense agency established by law and not exclusively by executive or military order, as had been the case in previous wars. In the brief month that the FCDA existed prior to congressional mandate, it had strug­gled to find authority and funding to facilitate orga­ nizational action without enabling legislation.82 Recycling portions of the Blue Book, the new law included explicit funding restrictions, qualifications on the administration’s powers in peacetime and war­time, and additional approval requirements from Congress and the president. None of ­these additions fundamentally altered the intent of H.R. 9798. Given the slow pace of civil defense planning over the prior four years, what accounts for the comparatively quick pro­g ress of the civil defense bill in late 1950 and early 1951? The answer lies in both external and internal f­ actors. The changing geopo­liti­cal environment created new international concerns for American diplomatic strategy that increased the presumed need for a civil defense plan. Internally, state and local governments and a host of civic organ­ izations began agitating for federal action and acting on their own, as discussed in chapter 1. Federal policymakers felt the need to establish a national program to coordinate local plans and minimize orga­nizational redundancy and inefficiency. Yet perhaps most importantly, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device on August 29, 1949. Truman announced the news in a short press conference on September 23. Saying that “the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected,” he reemphasized the need for international control of nuclear technology.83 The loss of a mono­poly on nuclear weapons changed the US diplomatic position: the possibility of a foreign attack was no longer an assumed ­f uture prob­lem but instead was a pre­ sent real­ity.84 Then on June 25, 1950, the crisis in K ­ orea began. Two days l­ ater Truman, with the support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization and the United Nations, sent troops to the Korean Peninsula to intervene. While some doubt remained about the viability of the Soviet nuclear program, the Korean War had critical nuclear safety implications. Should the Soviet Union be provoked, ­there existed a possibility of nuclear retaliation. As the first hot war since the conclusion of World War II, the Korean War had symbolic importance on the home front. In 1950, World War II was a very recent memory for Americans. The public had assumed that the next war would be fought with nuclear weapons, and the lack of a ­viable civil defense program left many Americans wondering what the federal state was d­ oing to protect them u ­ nder new war­time conditions. As an editorial in the New York Times claimed in July, the Korean War “crystallize[d] some rather vague no-



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tions on internal protections prob­lems” and contributed to renewed speed in planning efforts.85 As public concern for civil defense accelerated a­ fter the Korean conflict began, it was a happy coincidence that Truman had commissioned what became known as the Blue Book over a year e­ arlier. When the report was completed in September, the timing was right for an expedited legislative path. Many historians have written from the cynical point of view that civil defense was merely a ploy to get citizens to support the deterrence politics of the Cold War state.86 However, viewed in the light of compromise, the story becomes more complicated. Rather than a disingenuous program designed intentionally to curry unquestioning public support, federal civil defense emerged out of a complex set of contradictions. With its close relationship to the nuclear arms race and Soviet aggression, civil defense could not escape the pressures of Cold War po­liti­cal expectations. Policymakers ­were well aware of the competing interests between ideology and practical necessity. Self-­help civil defense was a product of being “between the Devil and the deep,” as McMahon once said about the tension between informing the public and inciting panic.87 The Federal Civil Defense Act was the culmination of years of federal dialogue regarding the purpose, limits, and meaning of civil defense. It also was a direct reflection of the international and domestic dimensions of Cold War politics. By early 1951, civil defense had also uncovered impor­tant ways that nuclear weapons w ­ ere transforming the relationship between the state and its citizens. Self-­help reflected the sum of policy debates about civil defense. Civil defense as such was decidedly separate from military defense, which no one could doubt was a responsibility of the state. Civil defense policy vested authority in the federal state only insofar as the state would guide and inform citizens, thereby ameliorating charges of big government and federal secrecy. And policymakers developed civil defense as a means for bolstering the nation’s Cold War self-­image of a ­free society of responsible, patriotic Americans. A practical solution to a range of competing po­liti­cal impulses, self-­help civil defense offered the path of least re­sis­tance. Although self-­help created a new federal agency, the FCDA’s scope was ­limited from the onset. In subsequent years, Congress would consistently underfund the administration, ensuring that the state-­and local-­level civil defense offices would be responsible for most practical tasks. However, within its ­limited scope, the FCDA and its descendant organ­izations contributed much to the nuclear culture of the 1950s and early 1960s in the United States. The federal office set the agenda for civil defense best practices. Through its wide-­r anging information campaigns, the FCDA also gave Americans a new logic and vocabulary for civil defense, of

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which duck and cover and fallout shelters rank most prominently. As w ­ ill be discussed in chapter 3, civil defense information also served an impor­tant, if less expected, function in expanding the public economy of information about nuclear science and technology. As self-­help moved from a proposed strategy to being the bedrock of civil defense law and practice, the concept created a new responsibility for citizens of the United States: their own survival. Although policymakers and civil defense officials occasionally called upon imagery of revolutionary militias and circled wagons to promote the rugged individualism of Cold War civil defenders, the scale and scope of pos­si­ble nuclear war made the responsibility of self-­ protection altogether new.88 In the Atomic Age, national defense shifted from being a military concern to an individual civilian one. Civil defense planners worked hard to construct the notion that in protecting oneself, one could ensure the survival of the nation. Thus couched in the language of duty, patriotism, and civic pride, survival became a ­matter of ser­vice to nation and therefore an obligation of citizenship. Many late 1940s civil defense advocates agreed. But many Americans expected more from the bargain. As the 1950s progressed, more and more Americans began to question what rights, benefits, and assurances they garnered from the state in exchange for their individual responsibility for national survival. The construction of nuclear citizenship as laid out by civil defense law in the early 1950s had fractures that would only exacerbate as nuclear arsenals and yields grew over the following de­cade. Self-­help also had the unintended consequence of diffusing authority over survival strategies, civil defense, and nuclear ­matters more broadly. Although federal civil defense offices spent a ­great deal of energy producing instructional materials, ­these messages ­were, by design, merely advisory. Without any enforcement mechanism for citizens, cities, or states to actually carry out civil defense procedures, many came to their own conclusions about the best path forward, which sometimes included inaction. The logic of self-­help civil defense vested a ­great deal of control outside the realm of the federal office, leaving federal planners with the difficult task of trying to maintain authority over national messaging. For much of the 1950s, federal civil defense planners attempted to mitigate the situation by positioning their office as a disseminator of official nuclear information. In coupling rhe­toric about civic-­minded survival with the authority conveyed by nuclear expertise, the FCDA established nuclear knowledge as another essential part of good nuclear citizenship.

C h a p te r   3

The Man in the White Lab Coat The Uses of Scientists and Scientific Authority

On December  8, 1953, President Dwight  D. Eisenhower made a surprising speech about “the awful arithmetic” of nuclear weapons before the United Nations General Assembly. Calling for openness among nations with regard to nuclear science, Eisenhower argued that the weapons “must be put into the hands of ­those who w ­ ill know how to strip [their] military casing and adapt [them] to the arts of peace.”1 The proposal represented a shift in foreign policy that seemed to back away from aggressive proliferation and international secrecy. The “Atoms for Peace” speech mirrored an idea that had undergirded civil defense messages for several years: the f­ uture of the world depends on the responsible use of nuclear science for the betterment—­not destruction—of mankind. If the message had come as a surprise to policymakers and foreign leaders, it would have been a familiar one to many American citizens. Eisenhower delivered his “Atoms for Peace” speech during a critical period of changing ideas about scientific authority in American society. He believed that the peaceful uses of nuclear science could provide a solution to the monumental dangers of the Cold War. Moreover, he linked the peaceful atom to a key tenet of the scientific community: the sharing of information. The proposed program tied together t­ hese two ideals—­that of a peaceful f­ uture and scientific cooperation and pro­gress—­under the rubric of candor and functional democracy. “Atoms for Peace” represented a new chapter in the US focus on 67

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transparency in governance. ­Earlier, civil defense officials had all but institutionalized a careful balance of public information and secrecy. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace,” however, signaled a freer flow of nuclear science expertise among citizens of the world, not only American citizens. Although the policy messaging of “Atoms for Peace” was primarily directed to a diplomatic audience, Eisenhower’s speech also spoke to broader efforts within his administration to better educate the public in m ­ atters of nuclear science. Throughout the early 1950s, civil defense media campaigns ­were the most readily available ways that Americans learned about nuclear science and technology. From 1949 onward, civil defense agencies published hundreds of educational pamphlets, fliers, posters, bulletins, and films, some of which w ­ ere reprinted or duplicated in the hundreds of thousands. In order to meet production goals while managing bud­get constraints, many of t­ hese publications ­were produced in partnership with organ­izations, advertisers, and businesses. Federal civil defense offices then distributed this media widely to individual families, community groups, industry, and private companies as well as to state, county, and city agencies. Although the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) held tight control over nuclear information, it was the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) that assumed a more prominent public face. Civil defense information remained largely consistent throughout the early Cold War, despite changes in the diplomatic landscape and weapons technologies. The overarching message was clear: civilians could survive a nuclear attack if they armed themselves with the proper information, training, and preparation. Still, the rhe­toric of survival needed to be grounded in practical, applicable information especially when the general public was assumed to have ­little knowledge of nuclear warfare. More importantly perhaps, the public needed to believe that civil defense would work. Civil defense officials, in response, leaned heavi­ly on scientific explanations to legitimize their directives. In general, officials framed this information as a corrective: nuclear science may seem frightening on the surface, but through understanding and education, the threat would seem less overwhelming and survival more plausible. Without irony, the state framed the science that created nuclear weapons in the first place as the solution to defending against them. Through civil defense education, administrators constructed an idealized vision of an American citizen in the Atomic Age, one who not only acted in accordance with civil defense directives as a way to defend self and state but also wholly accepted nuclear science as the rational basis for ­doing so. Policymakers used scientific expertise to establish their authority as civil defenders, advocates for American nationalism, and rational, trustworthy, and in-­control leaders. The federal civil defense bureaucracy demonstrated its com-

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mand over nuclear knowledge in two ways. First, civil defense offices relied on specialists from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds to help craft policy. When ­these agencies commissioned expert studies, they often released the completed research to the public and the press. They also used research findings in civil defense instructions, emphasizing that the recommendations had been developed, tested, and vetted by the most qualified scientific con­sul­ tants. Civil defense agencies thus emphasized the role of scientific research in their recommendations and proposals to portray themselves as both the producers and the keepers of essential knowledge. Second, civil defense administrators positioned themselves as scientific educators—­the disseminators of knowledge—­believing that the public needed to become familiar with basic nuclear physics. To make such materials approachable and thereby more credible, civil defense materials called upon a range of established cultural motifs and tropes about scientists and science work. Themes of scientific authority in civil defense, however, existed against a backdrop of changing cultural ideas about the roles of the scientist and science in demo­cratic culture at large. Several events in the early and mid-1950s made Americans question their nation’s faith in science and technological pro­ gress. The development of the hydrogen bomb stirred public controversy and made Americans begin to doubt the wisdom of developing such power­ ful weapons. Moreover, for some Americans the placement of nuclear physicists in impor­tant policy adviser positions made weapons advancement all the more dangerous. Fi­nally, several high-­profile loyalty scandals and espionage revelations involving nuclear physicists made headlines in ­these years. While Manhattan Proj­ect scientists had emerged as public intellectuals and celebrities in the postwar years, their position as trusted experts during the 1950s was fragile and contingent and could be seen as potentially dangerous. Both veins of public conversation—­the questioning of the science and the questioning of the scientist—­complicated the optimistic image promoted by civil defense media. Despite civil defense officials’ efforts to streamline and simplify popu­ lar notions of nuclear science, the changing public opinion about nuclear science worked against the goals of civil defenders. To skeptics and critics, the scientist could more appropriately be viewed as a liability in demo­cratic life, giving science itself a more sinister visage. Scientific authority pulled in many dif­fer­ent directions in American culture in ­these early Cold War years. But the popu­lar meaning of scientific authority was especially fraught in the arena of nuclear physics. Outside the world of the FCDA, public attitudes ­toward nuclear science—­especially atoms for war—­ were becoming more ambiguous. As the Eisenhower administration attempted to realign the idea of nuclear science with peaceful atoms, civil defense

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officials worked to normalize nuclear science. Indeed, civil defense media was a major contributor to public education on nuclear ­matters. However, civil defense itself was a constant reminder of the perils of nuclear science. ­These contradictions ­were inescapable and would eventually undermine the federal state’s ability to manage public opinion about nuclear science and remain an authority of the m ­ atter more generally.

The FCDA as Research Body Upon the FCDA’s establishment in early 1951, its officials set out on an information-­gathering program. Self-­help civil defense was a fine basis, but many other questions remained about formulating a national civil defense policy. The Bull Report, the Hopley Report, and 1950’s Blue Book all focused on orga­nizational structure, but each punted on specific policy items that required more study. As one of the first major initiatives of the newly created agency, the FCDA partnered with the National Security Resources Board and the Department of Defense (DOD) to commission The Report of Proj­ect East River (PER), a wide-­ranging study of civil defense needs and methods to reduce the public’s vulnerability to nuclear attack.2 PER set the tone for how the FCDA and subsequent civil defense agencies would use scientific expertise to inform its policies for the remainder of the 1950s. By partnering with other agencies, civil defense administrators consolidated expertise from across the postwar research spectrum to convey scientific authority onto the FCDA’s policies. Thus, civil defense recommendations came to reflect postwar currents in social science research and the changing relationship between research institutions and government agencies in the Cold War. PER was compiled by Associated Universities, Incorporated (AUI), a research collaboration of nine research universities.3 The proj­ect employed over one hundred specialists from the sciences and social sciences as well as military, business, and policy experts. The stakes for the report ­were high. “An attack with modern weapons,” the director of the proj­ect warned, “would be much more damaging to our population, our property, our way of life, and to our demo­cratic institutions generally than is realized by the public or even by many responsible government officials.”4 Indeed, the report’s final form lent gravity to the prob­lem. The completed PER report was a ten-­volume, one thousand–­page tome that advocated for three major goals: the reduction of urban vulnerability through decentralization and new construction policies, the improvement of continental air defense and warning systems, and the establishment of a permanent civilian-­led civil defense bureaucracy that, whenever pos­si­ble, used existing civic

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structures. The report’s experts also included over three hundred additional recommendations while outlining extensive descriptions of current prob­lems facing civil defense. Despite the enormity and importance of the report’s undertaking, PER “­didn’t make the impact expected,” as a historian of the Federal Emergency Management Agency would put it de­cades ­later.5 Thus, the report failed to make a revolutionary impact on policy. Some of the report’s conclusions ­were moot almost immediately a­ fter its release in October 1952. The next month the AEC successfully detonated its first hydrogen explosive device, confirming ­earlier predictions of the possibility of much more power­ful weapons. Unfortunately, many of PER’s specific recommendations w ­ ere based on atomic blast assumptions, not ­those of the newer hydrogen devices still in development. In addition, many of PER’s general recommendations ­were not new: despite the considerable effort that went into the report’s production, PER’s experts ultimately echoed the same core recommendations that had emerged in the late 1940s. However ­limited its long-­term impact, the range of expertise deployed in PER should be understood as an early example of Cold War “big science.” The relationship between university institutions, scientific research, and federal funding ran deep in the pursuit of weapons development and other Cold War objectives.6 As a proj­ect run by AUI, PER falls into this category. Many of AUI’s board members w ­ ere prominent leaders in their scientific and professional fields, and some served as close advisers to the federal government. The membership of each of the proj­ect’s nine research panels is a virtual roll call for an emerging class of elite experts and researchers who straddled the academic-­ scientific-­government divide. AUI also had close connections to similar Cold War government-­research organ­izations such as the recently established RAND Corporation and even operated Brookhaven National Laboratory, an AEC nuclear fa­cil­i­ty. It is no won­der, then, that physicists Lloyd V. Berkner and I. I. Rabi, so instrumental in the early years of Brookhaven, had a heavy hand in the development of PER. What is most notable about PER, however, is the scale of expertise called upon to tackle the complexity of civil defense planning. Urban planners, public health officials, sociologists, communications engineers, emergency logistics specialists, and nuclear experts all contributed to the report’s extensive findings. Thus, although PER reached many of the same conclusions as ­earlier civil defense studies, the interdisciplinary approach offered by PER far eclipsed them in both breadth and detail. Significantly, the East River team was the first to lend extensive study to the role of psy­chol­ogy, h ­ uman be­hav­ior, and emotional considerations in civil defense planning and execution. Several substantial sections of PER ­were

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concerned with emergency issues such as panic, shock, and leadership breakdown. Other portions assessed preattack considerations such as “making inroads into the hard kernel and lack of support of the civil defense program,” creating “an enduring position of prestige and authoritativeness for the civil defense organ­ization,” and maintaining public participation.7 PER’s sections on emotion and be­hav­ior have sometimes been isolated in recent scholarship and framed as evidence of the coercive nature of Cold War civil defense.8 Indeed, ­these sections are sometimes shockingly callous in their treatment of panic, disaster, disorder, and death. However, in the framework of early 1950s expert culture, the psychological findings in PER are better understood as an attempt to examine civil defense from all ­angles rather than a nefarious example of social control. Civil defense administrators would continue to grapple with the psy­chol­ogy of nuclear war for de­cades to come; PER’s conclusions ­were one approach of many in that re­spect. PER’s expert assessment on the challenges of h ­ uman be­hav­ior also reflects the continued expansion of research expertise in psy­chol­ogy that predated the postwar period.9 Federal interest in psychological research, for example, resulted in the 1949 establishment of the federally funded National Institute of ­Mental Health. And although behavioral sciences w ­ ere subject to suspicion during the McCarthyism years, psy­chol­ogy in civil defense seemed too large an issue to ignore: if official policy emphasized self-­help, policymakers must address the self. Indeed, PER is also further evidence of what one historian calls “the tight correspondence between psy­chol­ogy and national security during the 1950s and 1960s.”10 The logic applied outside the immediate military arena: considering h ­ uman be­hav­ior in the civil defense context became a way to promote national survival and security. PER’s Panel on Public Information and Training was responsible for much of the proj­ect’s overall consideration of h ­ uman be­hav­ior. In its report summary, the panel stresses the psychological role of information access: “our vari­ ous recommendations have a single unifying keynote . . . : just as civil defense has been conceived as the primary responsibility of the ­people, so, nothing less than a public well-­practiced and fully informed can carry out civil defense if any ­enemy should strike.”11 Using the logic of self-­help civil defense, the panel gestures t­ oward a reciprocal relationship: the state’s responsibility for making citizens capable of helping themselves. Given that PER’s initial audience was made up of members of federal agencies, its keynote might have been directed t­ oward officials who preferred the concept of self-­help ­because it minimized federal responsibility. But when push came to shove, the panel concluded, civil defense should have a command-­and-­control structure of information dissemination: “We have faced and rejected in our thought what­ever, except from direct necessity,

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would obstruct the essential flow of facts to ­people ­under stress. We are cognizant of the attractions of strict censorship, but we are greatly concerned to make sure that in time of crisis, neither e­ nemy agents nor hysterical citizens should usurp the sources of information.”12 PER’s sometimes stilted language reflects the East River team’s earnest attempt to parse through the complex relationship between state responsibility and transparency, public information, self-­help, and clear-­headed response. Congress had wrestled with the same set of philosophical questions several years ­earlier. Yet the PER panels presented a more informed approach to questions of rationality and irrationality. Instead of dismissing ­human be­hav­ior as impossible to predict, as had frustrated policymakers, AUI employed social science experts to try to make sense of the prob­lem. In d­ oing so, the panels recommended a nuanced conception of civil defense, one that considered not only practices but also psy­chol­ogy. For PER’s experts, the only way to motivate Americans to participate in civil defense was to appeal to both logic and emotion. The sections of PER concerned with h ­ uman be­hav­ior are evidence of the report’s attempt to break down the many considerations for civil defense into manageable parts. This compartmentalization spoke to the enormity of the prob­lem; dividing it into focused parts was the only way to avoid “being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of a prob­lem so large, so complex, and so seemingly impossible of adequate and practical solution.”13 Perhaps inadvertently, ­later civil defense media produced for public consumption echoed PER’s approach to understanding the prob­lem as well. Civil defense materials often simplified a prob­lem by dividing it into basic components, a strategy employed to teach civilians about nuclear explosions and their personal responsibilities before, during, and ­after a strike. Compartmentalization lent an orga­nizational pattern to many federal agencies related to nuclear weapons, and the FCDA was no exception.14 This was particularly evident in how the administration gathered scientific information to inform its programs and policies. In the first years of the FCDA, officials used what they could from data provided by the AEC. The kind of information the AEC produced often described target vulnerability and weapons information, which had to be translated into information that had an explicit civil defense message fit for public consumption. As the 1950s went on, however, the AEC began tests with an eye t­ oward civilian-­based defensive research. Several tests in 1953’s Operation Upshot-­Knothole and 1955’s Operation Teapot series tested utilities infrastructure, mock suburban ­houses, and consumer products, as discussed l­ater in this chapter. Such information was valuable to the FCDA b­ ecause it could lead to policy and instruction that civilians had been

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demanding since the mid-1940s. The administration also used footage from ­these tests to illustrate content in civil defense films.15 But as proj­ects such as PER demonstrated, civil defense required research that extended well beyond the expertise of nuclear weapons scientists. The FCDA commissioned many other smaller-­scale studies and educational material from research groups, other government entities, and professional organ­izations. Sometimes t­ hese reports w ­ ere printed for in-­house information purposes. Other times the FCDA tapped the expertise of other agencies to develop informational material suitable for public use. In 1954, the FCDA asked the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to compile and publish a pamphlet titled Psychological First Aid in Community Disasters, intended for use by civil defense workers.16 ­Here, the APA pre­sents specialized knowledge to the lay reader so that civil defense workers could “be of maximum ser­vice to an emotionally disturbed person.”17 In instances such as this, the FCDA was able to cull the expertise of other organ­izations while minimizing its own costs by outsourcing the research and often sharing or delegating printing and distribution responsibilities to other agencies. Indeed, the FCDA was practicing what it preached: budget-­minded civil defense that utilized an existing bureaucratic structure to accomplish its goals. This practice, however, appears to be more necessity than ideology, as the FCDA scraped by with a mere fraction of its annual bud­get requests throughout the 1950s. By the mid-1950s, civil defense research extended beyond the bounds and purview of the AEC, the FCDA, and the DOD. ­Because civil defense research involved so many fields and had broad relevance in its application, civil defense issues landed on the agenda of nondefense-­related agencies across the nation. For example, in 1955 the National Acad­emy of Sciences delivered a report on war­time vulnerability of the US food industry to the Food and Drug Administration.18 A copy of this report ended up in the personal papers of a civil defense administrator in the late 1950s and existed ­there alongside hundreds of other reports, pamphlets, and other civil defense material produced by agencies without the direct cooperation of the FCDA.19 Much had changed from the earliest days of federal civil defense, when congressional lawmakers wanted so badly to control and centralize the dissemination of civil defense knowledge. By the mid-1950s private businesses, industry, civic organ­izations, and local governments w ­ ere translating a growing body of civil defense–­related information to create their own policies, plans, and educational media. While ­there is ­little evidence that such ground-­ level civil defense plans directly contradicted official suggestions, their existence meant that the FCDA could not have final control over the messaging. As nuclear information migrated from the secretive realm of the AEC to federal

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civil defense offices and into the public sphere, more and more Americans had access to a range of civil defense instruction and could use it to inform how they chose to prepare for nuclear war. This was self-­help civil defense even if not exactly the terms ­under which officials in 1950 had in mind. This is not to say that official scientific research related to civil defense was completely transparent and available to the public, however. The AEC and the DOD continued to control nuclear information, and the FCDA was careful to align itself with established nuclear narratives. For example, despite the dramatic increase in the size and scope of weapons’ destruction potential over the course of the 1950s, the FCDA was slow to acknowledge the changes. Although the FCDA would have had some access to the details of what a new and larger attack might look like, it did not substantially change its recommendations for evacuation or shelter construction u ­ ntil the late 1950s.20 During the intervening years, the AEC faced fierce public relations b­ attles over its mono­poly on nuclear information, but the FCDA had ­little choice but to remain in lockstep with the AEC’s official messages. As an administration with a publicly oriented mandate, the FCDA was able to maintain more of an appearance of transparency than the AEC. Declassified portions of PER ­were released publicly in January 1953, to mixed reception. National news outlets called the report “grim” and “not encouraging” but touted the thoroughness of the report and the wide-­ranging expertise that went into its creation.21 In its earliest years, the FCDA used scientific research to not only craft policy recommendations but also bolster its authority in public. For a new agency tasked with dealing with a relatively new threat, establishing trustworthiness was critical. Given the technical nature of the nuclear threat, it is also no won­der that the FCDA rooted its trustworthiness in science-­ based information. In its capacity as an advisory agency, claiming scientific authority was safe ground especially given that the administration’s inception was marked by fears of military authority and centralization. Although civil defense administrators framed civil defense as a concrete, scientific proj­ect backed by a group of trustworthy experts, they held to the ethos of self-­help. By pairing messages of scientific authority with the civic responsibility of self-­ help, administrators also implicitly aligned ideals of civic duty and scientific knowledge.

Civil Defense as Science Education In addition to using scientific research to guide policies and recommendations, civil defense officials also used experts to create educational campaigns rich

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with scientific information. Nearly all civil defense material explained the science b­ ehind nuclear weapons to some extent. This information was not always very detailed, but in providing some basic understanding of nuclear science, civil defense administrators indicated that they believed it could help sell self-­help civil defense. They also drew on a range of cultural symbols to double down on the legitimating power of scientific expertise. Civil defense media often featured a scientist character—­a scientist in a white lab coat—as a  tool for communicating with the public. Such characters si­mul­ta­neously stood as trustworthy b­ earers of information, served to bolster the authority of the FCDA, and gave ­human, relatable form to the scientific enterprise more broadly. Why did early civil defense publications invest so much energy and ink in the ser­vice of explaining scientific concepts such as nuclear fission to the public? Civil defense agencies needed to convince the public that the nuclear threat was understandable, manageable, and thus survivable. To that end, nearly all civil defense educational information taught Americans to expect three types of destructiveness from a nuclear weapon: fire, blast, and radiation.22 A nuclear bomb’s effects, the information claimed, set nuclear weapons apart from ­earlier weapons of war. But each effect could be protected against in the same way that one prepares for more familiar threats, such as natu­ral disasters. And while an explosion’s radiation was usually acknowledged, it was almost always downplayed. Nevertheless, breaking down a bomb’s effect into discrete parts made the nuclear threat seem like something that could be more easily managed. Perhaps more interestingly, civil defense authorities believed that civilians needed to understand not only the effects of nuclear weapons but also the science b­ ehind them. Civil defense media often took time to explain the structure of atoms, the pro­cess of nuclear fission or fusion, or how a nuclear reactor worked. For example, the creators of Atomic Attack: A Manual for Survival in 1950 divided the instructional booklet into two sections, the latter being a primer for nuclear science. While the authors claimed that “this [section] ­will tell you nothing of what you can do about the Bomb,” the next ten pages explain the science of nuclear explosions in some detail.23 Using familiar and homey metaphors—­a supercritical bomb core as a volatile pile of oily rags in the home—­the authors imply that the average citizen can understand nuclear science and that this understanding is necessary and sufficient for survival. Civil defense educational materials also often included an explanation of the technological paraphernalia associated with nuclear science.24 Geiger ­counters, for example, appeared frequently in civil defense instructional booklets and films (figure 4). Even if most Americans would never operate a Gei-

Figure 4. ​“Testing House­hold Items for Radioactivity,” 1959. Two w ­ omen—­wives of OCDM officials—­demonstrate the use of a Geiger ­counter to test a can of Campbell’s soup and a cellophane bag reading “Easter Greetings” for traces of radioactivity. Geiger c­ ounters ­frequently appeared in civil defense media as a way to demystify and domesticate radioactivity. Image courtesy of the National Archives and Rec­ords Administration, ARC #7386131.

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ger ­counter, civil defense materials claimed that understanding how one worked was essential for understanding the science of a nuclear explosion.25 Geiger ­counters performed several functions in civil defense narratives. First, filmmakers and writers often used the machine as a practical segue into an explanation of particle or energy-­wave physics: a Geiger c­ ounter clicks audibly with a frequency related to the number of radioactive waves it encounters. More implicitly, Geiger ­counters served as a narrative device to ­counter the audience’s assumptions about the inaccessibility of nuclear science. In other words, the device, once explained by a narrative authority, appeared to be ­simple and easy to operate by anyone. The 1950 manual Atomic Attack gives readers a corrective: although such a device “represents a mystery to the layman, who w ­ ill think it expensive or not obtainable,” it was in fact quite the opposite.26 Similarly, 1951’s film Atomic Alert shows viewers that even school-­ age ­children are capable of operating, understanding, and mastering a Geiger ­counter.27 Geiger ­counters revealed the presence of a mysterious and invisible scientific force, giving radioactivity an audible and vis­ib­ le legibility. Especially ­after the disastrous ­Castle Bravo test in early 1954, ­there was growing concern that, as Ralph Lapp wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “radioactivity . . . ​ cannot be felt and possesses all the terror of the unknown. It is something which evokes revulsion and helplessness—­like a bubonic plague.”28 However, civil defense media producers asserted that in the presence of a Geiger ­counter, prac­ti­tion­ers of civil defense could mitigate their helplessness. Moreover, civil defense media also used Geiger ­counters to try to convince Americans that radioactivity was not dangerous, demonstrating that even in the absence of a nuclear explosion, radiation was a part of daily life. Background radiation, or the constant low-­level exposure from cosmic radiation and naturally occurring earthbound materials, makes a Geiger ­counter click. Even some man-­made everyday objects emitted mea­sur­able radiation. Luminescent watch ­faces, a consumer object familiar to many Americans, gave off increased levels of radiation.29 Civil defense producers capitalized on transforming high science into the everyday. Take the film You Can Beat the A-­Bomb, for example. ­After a friendly janitor happens upon a white-­coated scientist in his lab and sets off a ticking Geiger ­counter, the janitor is curious. “Say, what is that clicking?” he asks. The janitor is frightened when the scientist initially jokes, saying “you must be radioactive!” The tension is resolved quickly as the scientist explains that the janitor’s watch face is responsible for the clicking. Relieved, the janitor responds, “Well, what do you know about that? I’ve been carry­ing radioactivity around with me and d­ idn’t even know it!”30 In another framework the revela-

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tion might have terrified the janitor, a stand-in for the lay public. Indeed, the janitor’s first impulse was to run.31 Instead, by underscoring that most radiation was normal and thereby harmless, civil defense materials sought to empower and placate civilians. In the early 1950s, the science of nuclear fallout and health h ­ azards was still in its infancy. Although t­ here exists evidence that some of the scientists employed by the Manhattan Proj­ect during World War II w ­ ere aware of—­and troubled by—­the health risks of nuclear radiation, much of their concern was sidestepped in the interest of war­time expediency.32 As nuclear testing resumed ­after the war u ­ nder the guise of the newly created AEC, detailed radiological information was kept from press releases and public information. It was not ­until the advent of thermonuclear weapons, which significantly increased the range and intensity of radiological by-­products of explosions, that the AEC began a more systematic campaign to downplay or deny the h ­ azards of radiation.33 Prior to this point, however, the AEC was the only official source of information and expertise on nuclear science and had not yet encountered a high level of public skepticism. It is therefore no surprise that civil defense media would reinforce AEC messages in films such as You Can Beat the A-­Bomb and Atomic Alert. Civil defense officials operated with the best available information, all of which stemmed from a centralized scientific authority: the AEC. Many civil defense films also used footage from AEC nuclear tests to illustrate their messages and to establish scientific authority. The 1954 The House in the ­Middle, for example, shows clips of tests performed on mock structures at the Nevada Test Site. The narrative is explic­itly scientific, showing audiences the results of controlled experiments on familiar environments. Several of the tests show side-­by-­side comparisons of how structures outfitted with dif­fer­ ent variables could weather a nuclear blast’s heat wave. The variables, however, are quotidian, not technical. The tests compare fences with decayed wood surrounded by debris to freshly painted fences in clean yards. A home with “all the earmarks of untidy h ­ ouse­keeping” ignites in the blast, while the interior of an identical “spic and span” home survives largely unscathed.34 The lessons of The House in the ­Middle convey assumptions about class, g­ oing so far as to identify urban “slum areas” as particularly vulnerable in the Atomic Age ­because of lax h ­ ouse­keeping. And while the film does not offer the audience further specifics of the experiments, it uses scientific evidence to sell the idea that “a h ­ ouse that is neglected is a ­house that may be doomed in the Atomic Age!”35 The threat echoes a broader mandate of self-­help civil defense: t­ hose who neglect their duty to learn about nuclear safety too may be doomed. Official nuclear test documentaries can also be seen as part of the civil defense science-­education canon, even though they would have been seen by

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fewer Americans. In 1947, the US Air Force established a dedicated film studio to pro­cess film documentation of nuclear tests. Lookout Mountain Air Force Station operated in secret for over two de­cades, producing more than 6,500 government films all while hidden in plain sight in the Hollywood Hills of California.36 The films ­were created for restricted audiences of po­liti­cal and military officials and l­imited members of the press. Nevertheless, many of Lookout’s documentaries also illustrate an impulse to make nuclear science accessible and approachable. A literary scholar in analyzing Lookout’s film legacy remarked that “the most striking rhetorical feature of the voice-­over in ­these films is a relentlessly cheery use of similes and meta­phors to naturalize the uncanniness. . . . ​[A]gain and again, the exotic is put into downright folksy contexts.”37 Presumably, t­ hose viewers given clearance to see the films had some basic knowledge of nuclear weapons. Still, the air force documentarians felt the need to make information about the science more pedestrian, a tactic also used in civil defense films made for broader public consumption.38 Early 1950s educational films also portrayed the ­f uture peacetime possibilities of nuclear technology. Promising heady visions of nearly ­free electricity, medical miracles, countless industrial and agricultural applications, and personal con­ve­niences, ­these materials did not seek to train Americans in civil defense procedure.39 Instead, the materials attempt to correct nuclear science’s association with vio­lence and destruction—­“the shadow of the atom bomb”— by offering an alternative optimistic vision of the ­future.40 ­Later in the de­cade, such technoutopian boosterism became even more pronounced. The 1957 film The Atom Comes to Town, produced by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, spends thirty minutes describing the wide range of industrial, commercial, and medical uses of nuclear physics.41 This film, like ­others, also reminds viewers that new nuclear industrial sites could provide wealth and employment to eco­nom­ically depressed areas.42 As usual, the dialogue takes care to mention the importance of “the peaceful atom.” By focusing on the positive potential of nuclear science, the film attempts to rehabilitate the public image of nuclear science into something that could benefit society in the long run. ­Here too, producers used scientific authority to issue a corrective. Such nuclear information media could be seen as educational and lucrative. In 1953, General Electric (GE) produced A Is for Atom, a part of GE’s Excursions in Science film series.43 The fifteen-­minute film guides viewers through a primer on particle physics and its usefulness for war and peace applications, a ­f uture industry of which GE hoped to be part. The film also challenges viewers to ponder the f­uture consequences of the nuclear age. Although A Is for Atom was animated and at times humorous, GE targeted general adult audiences and even won several film awards.44 As part of the media announcements

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about the film’s release, GE was sure to mention that it was “reviewed and endorsed by the Atomic Energy Commission,” establishing its credibility as an official source of information.45 Fi­nally, teaching nuclear physics to laypeople removed some of the prestige, secrecy, and elitism that had come to be associated with nuclear science. In outlining the challenges of presenting science in popu­lar journalism, Stephen White, science reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that physicists “speak a strange language of their own,” and for a journalist to use “a technical word . . . ​hides the meaning for most readers.”46 Even if the theories explained in civil defense media w ­ ere introductory, they served to include more Americans in the knowledge of a technology that had come to define so many parts of postwar life in the United States. Civil defense media’s inclusionary, demo­cratized information not only educated but also gave more Americans the baseline knowledge to participate in debates over the role of nuclear weapons in American society. Over and over, civil defense officials insisted that survival was tied to nuclear knowledge. As A Is for Atom argued in 1953, “wisdom demands . . . ​that we take the time to understand this force.”47 Obviously, civil defense policymakers believed that scientific lessons could correct public misinformation. But more importantly, they thought that teaching or reinforcing nuclear knowledge in civil defense education empowered civilians. By including primers on the science of nuclear weapons, a field that was ­until very recently shrouded in secrecy, officials created the impression of open channels of communication between the state and its citizens even if that communication was tightly regulated and not altogether transparent. ­These materials attempted to de­moc­ ra­tize nuclear science and educate the general public so that it could make informed decisions about its own safety and survival. In the context of an overarching civil defense rhe­toric that conflated individual survival with national survival, scientific understanding became an integral aspect of civic inclusion and demo­cratic participation in the nuclear age. Put another way, policymakers told Americans that scientific knowledge could help them be better citizens.

Civil Defense and the Idealized Expert If civil defense media producers constructed an intentional image of nuclear science, they also constructed a careful image of scientists. The scientists featured in civil defense materials embodied the expertise of the FCDA: they educated the public and prescribed civil defense activities. The FCDA used the

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image of a scientist to bolster the credibility of its information and programs. However, as discussed ­later in the chapter, scientists held an ambiguous position in American public life. Thus, the FCDA was careful to feature scientists in civil defense media as relatable and benevolent, with no hint of elitism or questions of trustworthiness. ­These images appear again and again in official civil defense media throughout the 1950s, but their ideas w ­ ere solidified in the earliest civil defense productions, especially in film. The 1950 film You Can Beat the A Bomb provides a clear early example of expert authority being used to lend credibility to civil defense. The film begins with a nuclear science primer, ­after which it focuses on civil defense procedures. You Can Beat the A Bomb introduces viewers to a group of scientists who fall into categories familiar to civil defense media. First, a physicist (interacting with the aforementioned janitor), ­r unning tests next to a Geiger ­counter, explains the phenomenon of background radiation. This character is a practical scientist: he wears spectacles and a white lab coat and rec­ords data in a notebook. The scene takes place in a laboratory, complete with a periodic ­table on the wall and an array of ­bottles, gadgets, and supplies at the lab bench. Next, a second physicist explains how radiation might be used to improve industrial production. This time the scientist is in business attire, flanked by the ubiquitous backdrop of any theoretical physicist, a chalkboard. The film then introduces the “meter man,” who monitors the radiation. He uses an aerial map and a pointer to teach a room full of men who are presumably civil defense volunteers.48 You Can Beat the A Bomb reinforces the expertise of specialists while positioning them as helpful instructors. During the narrator’s voice-­over, the film shows stock footage of specialists of many fields using nuclear science in their workplaces. But t­ hose characters who speak deliver miniature lectures about vari­ous aspects of nuclear weapons science and civil defense preparation. Their speeches further emphasize the educational purpose of the film while giving a physical form to the omniscient, invisible narrator. Surrounding ­these men are visual clues to their authority: tools of the trade, official-­looking offices and desks, and visual aids. Their dress connotes their authority in other ways: a lab coat for the laboratory, a tie and shirtsleeves for the classroom, and fatigues for fieldwork. The men also speak with authority, educating stand-­ins for the general public: a janitor, a businessman, and volunteers. The men’s words are ­simple and frank, even when explaining complex concepts, but the audience is to understand that ­these men are knowledgeable and in charge. The second part of the film chronicles a fictional nuclear attack. The plot follows several families as they prepare, survive, and recover. For the remainder of the film, specialists are less central to the narrative. However, in each

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plotline a ­father figure assumes the authority of ­those experts who appeared ­earlier in the film. He issues instructions to his f­amily paired with technical explanations. While camped out in the basement awaiting news of the attack, one f­ather assures his wife and c­ hildren with a startlingly technical explanation, given the dire situation: “Since radiation travels in straight lines, I’d say the way I’ve fixed this basement gives us plenty of wall and earth and material between us and the pos­si­ble military objective.”49 In the end, e­ very ­family emerges unscathed. The transition from an expert scientist to an expert ­father illustrates what civil defense policymakers expected from e­ very citizen: a layman who took it upon himself to learn about nuclear physics, prepare for an attack, and lead himself and his f­amily to survival. For civil defense officials, the image of a good nuclear citizen blended ideals of ­family, nation, and science and ensured survival for all. Although the film was designed to be instructional and therefore sometimes overly explanatory, it reveals that as early as 1950, civil defense messages ­adopted a power­f ul mélange of scientific rationalism and civic duty. Other civil defense films utilized an omniscient male narrator in lieu of a vis­i­ble scientist. The 1955 film Operation Cue provides a good example of this technique.50 Operation Cue is a short documentary film based on the AEC’s Operation Teapot exercises, mentioned above. The color film takes viewers to the Nevada Test Site to observe “a program to test the effects of an atomic blast upon the t­ hings we use in our everyday lives.”51 Joan Collin, a female reporter, is the viewer’s guide. She tours the AEC’s setup for the test, including several model homes outfitted with appliances, furnishings, and perhaps, most grimly, mannequins to represent Mr. and Mrs. Amer­i­ca. That Collin self-­identifies “as a m ­ other and a h ­ ouse­wife” is notable. Although she dresses in slacks—­appropriate attire for a military test in the desert—­she is the only w ­ oman at the site. As she moves through the scene and narrates, she expresses specific interest in the effects of an explosion on textiles, foodstuffs, and other domestic items in the home. As she and an unseen male narrator explain the setup to test telephone poles, electrical towers, and gas tanks, Collin’s character makes intentional connections to everyday life above the test’s relevance to industrial applications. Meanwhile, her male counterpart wades into technical jargon. Between the male narrator’s discussion of transformer substations and petroleum delivery platforms, Collin muses, “thinking about news during an atomic attack, I asked about radio towers.”52 The focus on familiar domestic concerns in Operation Cue reflects concurrent FCDA initiatives that aimed to bring American ­women into the fold of civil defense practices. The most widely circulated program was Grandma’s Pantry, a campaign that encouraged ­house­wives to keep a seven-­day stock of

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Figure 5. ​“Fallout Shelter Supplies.” Beginning in 1955, the FCDA began promoting the special role that h ­ ouse­wives should play in preparing a home for nuclear attack. ­Here, a ­woman displays her home’s supplies, including long-­lasting canned and dried foods, a camping stove, and instructional pamphlets. Civil defense media encouraged w ­ omen to stockpile small creature comforts as well. This ­family’s shelter or cellar would have benefited from a Pyrex casserole dish, a Bobbsey Twins board game, and potentially a child’s Kiddie Bounce trampoline. Image courtesy of the National Archives and Rec­ords Administration; ARC #7386473.

food supplies on hand in the event of emergency (figure 5). Promotional material for Grandma’s Pantry combined nostalgia for past simplicity with modern rationality. In some illustrations the focal point of Grandma’s kitchen was an old-­fashioned wood stove, while other materials implored ­women to “be a modern grandma” by stocking one’s pantry with an extensive checklist of instant, canned, evaporated, and powdered foods. Although it hearkened back to an e­ arlier age, Grandma’s civil defense kitchen was thoroughly modern.53 The normative gender dynamics in Operation Cue and Grandma’s Pantry are representative of many civil defense guides and films, but Operation Cue also carefully constructs an image of scientific authority. The omniscient, invisible male narrator is the expert, his authority established by the first two minutes of the film when he delivers a mathematical explanation of the differences between a thirty-­k iloton atomic bomb and a twenty-­megaton hydrogen bomb.54 The narrator is assertive but friendly, informative but approachable.

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Collin’s journalist character interacts silently with a variety of workers onscreen, but the narrator is her primary costar. Despite his lack of visual cues, the narrator pre­sents the same attributes as the vis­i­ble scientists in civil defense films: intelligent, ­wholesome, and relatable. And as in the FCDA’s pre­sen­ta­ tion of nuclear science itself, the fictional characters are altogether normal. Both male and female roles in civil defense media represent normalized, familiar versions of gendered expert authority. The male characters—­seen and unseen—­carry easy authority as scientists, leaders, and heads of ­house­holds. It is no coincidence that civil defense films are narrated by men, although it must be granted that this was the norm for educational films of the era. While Collin’s character and the Grandma’s Pantry program do not embody science in the professionalized male sense, they too carry the weight of expertise. Collin and other fictionalized ­women in civil defense media are expected to be authorities of the home and domestic concerns. As other historians have demonstrated, ­these gender associations ­were part of conscious attempts to domesticate the idea of civil defense and make it seem more familiar to audiences.55 While highly gendered, ­these repre­sen­ta­tions also emphasized the need for technical and scientific knowledge. Images of technical and scientific authority—­however differentiated—­permeated civil defense media. T ­ hese depictions of expert men and ­women not only served as stand-­ins for the expertise of civil defense officials but also communicated expectations that American citizens would also take up the mantle of becoming experts themselves. Through public civil defense studies and instructional media, officials created an image of nuclear citizens who w ­ ere not only motivated to ensure their own survival as an expression of civic responsibility but also rationalized their actions through scientific understanding.

The Super and Scientific Pro­gress Several incidents over the course of the 1950s, however, suggested that living with nuclear science in the Atomic Age was not as ­simple or familiar as civil defense media suggested. News of major developments in nuclear weapons capabilities led to several new threads of public concern. President Harry Truman’s announcement of a crash program to develop “Supers” sparked immediate criticisms about what seemed like an acceleration of the pace of the nuclear arms race and the power held by high-­ranking science advisers. L ­ ater in the de­cade when the full scale and scope of the destructiveness of Supers became evident to the public, ­these concerns increased dramatically. Together, ­these developments contributed to a growing sentiment in American public

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culture that questioned the role of the scientist-­adviser in demo­cratic culture and in modern American society in general. Despite the cheerfully optimistic way that civil defense media presented nuclear science, ­these other developments began to cast a dubious shadow over scientific expertise. Shortly ­after the United States announced the discovery of a Soviet atomic test in the summer of 1949, scientific advisers in the federal government began to discuss ­whether the United States should pursue research in fusion-­ based nuclear weapons. During the Manhattan Proj­ect, nuclear physicists had postulated that fusion weapons w ­ ere pos­si­ble in theory, but the federally sponsored research agenda did not directly support their development during the war. Physicists assumed that fusion weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs, H-­bombs, superbombs, and thermonuclear weapons, would be many times more power­f ul than the atomic bombs used to end World War II. The potential scale difference from e­ arlier atomic devices gave fusion weapons another moniker: the Super. In the autumn and winter of 1949, a small group of scientific advisers and policymakers met in secret to explore the feasibility, wisdom, and morality of developing the Super.56 The AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, ultimately cautioned against the proj­ect, favoring programs that would continue development of less controversial atomic weapons. Nevertheless, Truman elected to begin a crash program to develop the Super. In his first official public statement on the decision on January  31, 1950, Truman called the program necessary in carry­ing out “the overall objectives of our program for peace and security.” Truman downplayed the exceptional nature of the Super in his statement, referring to it as the continuation of existing atomic research; in the 129-­word statement, he uses “continue” three times, along with “consistent” and “carried forward.”57 Truman’s strong emphasis on continuity in early 1950 could be a tacit acknowl­ edgment of the controversy b­ ehind closed doors. One of the reasons the GAC argued against the Super was the immorality of such a large weapon, seeing it as a radical—­and to some unnecessary—­departure from ­earlier bombs.58 And as physicist Herbert York pointed out much l­ater, although the first media reports about the Super began in November 1949, they came too late for genuine public debate to influence high-­level policy.59 As news of the Super’s development went public, American civilians began to articulate a concern that nuclear weapons—­and the secretive science they necessitated—­posed a threat to American democracy and the practices of citizenship. By the early 1950s some nuclear experts had become impor­ tant policy advisers, spurring criticisms of scientific elitism and oligarchy. As knowledge of the hydrogen bomb program became public, concerned citizens

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flooded the White House with correspondence. Many of t­ hese messages demanded more demo­cratic accountability, arguing that “no one man or small group of men have the moral right to make this decision for American citizens.”60 Some suggested a national referendum on the issue, thereby necessitating a greater availability of public information about the scientific and moral implications of the Super.61 An editorial in the Detroit News argued that “the very ambiguity of the secrecy which continues to hang like a shroud over ­matters of atomic energy and the direction of its employment is something to dismay all reflective citizens.”62 A number of prominent scientists expressed “similar concern about the dangers of making such decisions by a l­imited group of men ­under such secretive conditions.”63 However, ­because the Truman administration made the decision to move forward with the Super without public oversight, the calls went unanswered. Truman’s unilateral action would continue to be a source of tension between the federal state and its citizens for some time to come. At the same time as the Super announcement, a climate of domestic insecurity was mounting: the White House press corps continued to barrage Truman with questions about the recent Alger Hiss conviction, and Klaus Fuchs’s confession to atomic espionage came just days before Truman’s announcement. In response to the Fuchs episode, scientific advisers sent an evaluation of the security breach to the National Security Council (NSC), which met just before Truman’s press meeting on January 31.64 Given the context of t­ hese events and other escalating Cold War crises, Truman’s announcement emphasizing continuity seems intentionally calm and vague. Almost a month ­later on February  24, 1950, “what­ever ambiguity may have been contained in Truman’s January 31 decision was removed,” as Truman approved the Super’s accelerated development program. Notably, the same announcement launched the study that would become NSC-68. The United States tested its first thermonuclear device at the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952.65 The so-­called Mike-­shot was not an operable weapon, but it proved conclusively that large fusion reactions w ­ ere feasible. In fact, the size of the Mike explosion, approximately a thousand times as large as the Hiroshima explosion, closely met scientists’ predictions.66 Mike’s explosion was large enough to decimate its test site, Elugelab, turning the area from an island to an underwater crater mea­sur­ing over a mile in dia­meter. Building upon Mike’s success, the AEC moved on to test fusion in operable weapons applications. In the spring of 1954, the AEC ran a series of tests, code-­ named Operation C ­ astle, at Bikini Atoll. The first of ­these tests, Bravo, confirmed that hydrogen explosions could be harnessed for military operations.

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On March 1, Bravo detonated with a force of approximately fifteen megatons (equivalent to fifteen million tons of TNT), two and a half times its anticipated size.67 It was the largest weapon ever tested by the United States prior and since. For many members of the AEC, Bravo was the triumphant culmination of years of frenzied research and development. The Bravo test, however, had unforeseen consequences. Not only did the test prove larger than anticipated, but weather conditions also foiled fallout predictions, spreading radioactive debris over approximately seven thousand square miles of the surrounding area. Twenty-­eight American ser­vicemen and some two hundred indigenous residents had to be evacuated to safety elsewhere in the Marshall Islands.68 ­Later in the month, it became apparent that the fallout contamination had extended beyond the local residents. The Japa­nese tuna trawler Daigo Fukuryu Marū—or Lucky Dragon Number 5—­had witnessed Bravo from over seventy miles away and was showered ­later in the day with radioactive ash. By the time the ship returned to Japan a few weeks l­ater, the crew was ill enough to be hospitalized, exhibiting signs of radiation poisoning. Although approximately one thousand pounds of the ship’s contaminated tuna was confiscated and buried, some had already been sold, setting off a contamination panic in Japan.69 Throughout March, AEC leaders consistently downplayed the effects of Bravo’s fallout on local residents, American ser­vicemen, and the crew of the Lucky Dragon.70 By the end of March, however, national newspapers reported that the AEC had increased the danger zone radius by a ­factor of three for ­f uture tests.71 The AEC had learned from Bravo, even if the increased caution was only in an effort to curb ­f uture public relations prob­lems. The Lucky Dragon incident resulted in a variety of press reactions. In response to the miscalculation of the test, London’s Observer posited, “do the scientists in fact r­ eally know what they are d­ oing?” Such pointed accusations, however, did not appear in the American press.72 Throughout March, the Japa­nese government pressured the United States to admit that the Japa­nese fishermen w ­ ere not at fault and had not navigated into restricted ­waters and also requested remuneration for the country’s depressed fishing industry and medical treatment for the boat’s crew members. More than the health of the crew, however, American newspapers focused on the health dangers of the boat’s contaminated tuna. Before it served to raise awareness about the pos­si­ble ­human toll of nuclear testing, the Lucky Dragon came to be associated with a new increased concern for the lingering consequences of radioactive fallout and its per­sis­tence in the food chain. The reaction to Bravo and the Lucky Dragon incident touched a nerve in the public conversation about nuclear weapons. U ­ ntil Bravo, the tests conducted in the Pacific seemed isolated from ­human society, with the vast ocean

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offering a geo­graph­i­cal buffer between the tests and mankind. To the American public, the Pacific test sites seemed to be controlled laboratories many thousands of miles away. Bravo, however, cast doubt on t­hese assumptions. The global reaction to the incident, which tended to focus on the pos­si­ble effects on the food supply more than the h ­ uman toll, nevertheless illustrates a critical moment in changing public opinion of nuclear policy. As ­will be discussed in chapter 4, the perception of geographic and environmental vulnerability fostered the growth of the nuclear dissent movement in the late 1950s. More importantly, Bravo demonstrated the destructive power of new hydrogen weapons and the inadequacy of civil defense practices based on ­earlier atomic weapons. The scale of H-­bombs weakened the scientific foundation for civil defense practices. In the thermonuclear age, evacuation from a city’s center now demanded a much greater radius of area to be evacuated, larger safe zones away from the presumed epicenter, and lengthier travel to reach safety. The feasibility of evacuation practices had long been questioned, but the hydrogen bomb tests signaled that sheltering in place put too many “Americans in the sitting-­duck category,” as former Manhattan Proj­ect physicist Ralph Lapp put it in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Moreover, citing the unpredictable radius of radiation danger in the event of a thermonuclear attack, he suggested that “the mass removal of metropolitan populations to the suburbs or open country may be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.” Civil defense pro­g ress seemed to be limping forward “despite the vertiginous, almost exponential, rise in the ­hazards faced.”73 The threat of a hydrogen bomb attack undermined completed civil defense proj­ects as well. When the White House bomb shelter renovation that Truman had commissioned in 1949 was completed in the spring of 1953, it was already obsolete. As historian David Krugler shows in his book on civil defense in Washington, DC, millions of dollars went into a space that was “grimly exposed” to the power of hydrogen bombs.74 New York City’s carefully considered 1950 civil defense plan to build above­ground parking shelters and use subway infrastructure was severely outdated by 1953.75 Some even questioned the usefulness of conducting civil defense research at all. As novelist Ray Bradbury wrote to Life ­after reading a photo essay about nuclear testing in Nevada, “­shouldn’t it be underlined again and again that if a hydrogen bomb had been used ­there would have been no buildings, concrete or other­wise, left and certainly no Life cameras to rec­ord it?”76 In addition to disrupting civil defense logics, the new scale of H-­bombs collapsed the geographic delineation between safety and danger, survival and death. The memory of Bravo and the Lucky Dragon incident resounded throughout the remainder of the de­cade. In the weeks leading up to the 1956 presidential

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election between President Eisenhower and Demo­cratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, hydrogen bomb testing once again came to the forefront of public debate. In a nationally televised campaign spot on October 16, Stevenson declared that if elected, he would make a ban on H-­bomb testing a po­liti­cal priority. The campaign spot ran longer than any of Stevenson’s other ads, emphasizing the issue’s importance to his campaign especially in the last crucial weeks of his run. ­Later in the week, the New York Times reported that the platform “had emerged as one of the sharpest issues of the campaign.”77 The New York Times article framed the campaign testing issue as a direct consequence of the Bravo test in early 1954. Arguing that “the issue was first dramatically posed” to the general public with reports about the Lucky Dragon incident, the article went on to cite the dangers of specific radioisotopes, the possibility of ge­ne­tic mutation, and the split opinion of such topics within the scientific community.78 In focusing specifically on the ­hazards of strontium-90, a radioactive isotope product of fission reaction that lodges in the bone structure of animals, the article foreshadowed a major health concern that would come to the front of the antinuclear movement l­ater in the de­cade. In the end, the Bravo test had impor­tant consequences for public debates about nuclear science in American life. Bravo, the Super, and Lucky Dragon all became buzzwords in a growing discomfort with nuclear weapons development and policy and nuclear science in general.79 Bravo’s rise to the surface of the 1956 presidential campaign indicates, if nothing ­else, that scientific authority and nuclear policy remained a hot-­button issue in federal politics. However, by the mid-1950s the public conversation took a dif­fer­ent tone. The possibility of international control of nuclear weapons had fallen out of ­favor, although the possibility of cooperating with the Soviet Union on a test moratorium remained. More importantly, the public conversations about nuclear science began to focus more sharply on the dangers of fallout. Unlike e­ arlier nuclear fears, which centered mainly on the possibility of global annihilation through war, fallout was also a consequence of weapons research. Nuclear testing posed a threat to ­human life that did not require war to be destructive. Instead, fallout could be the dangerous consequence of the actions of one’s own state during peacetime. Fears about war did not abate, but fallout fears compounded them to create a new era in nuclear anxiety. By the mid-1950s, public awareness of the dangers of the H-­bomb began to contribute to a period that historian Paul Boyer has characterized as “an interval of diminished cultural attention and uneasy acquiescence in the goal of maintaining atomic superiority over the Rus­sians.”80 Of course, for some civilians, scientists, and policymakers, weapons advancement remained the key to national security and a robust scientific research community. But increasingly

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as the de­cade wore on, scientific experts and public intellectuals warned of the dangers posed by the pre­sent course of testing and development. As the dangers of fallout became a larger part of public discussion, civilians themselves began to use their understanding of nuclear science to push back against the actions of the state.

The Prob­lem of the Scientist As scientists and experts became a more vis­ib­ le part of public life—­and policy circles—in the years a­ fter World War II, their image in society escaped a stable categorization. They ­were at once considered eggheads, geniuses, dupes, Re­nais­sance men, security risks, bureaucrats, highbrow, lowbrow, and, very occasionally, ­human.81 Scientists, especially theoretical physicists, embodied cultural polar opposites: they w ­ ere both dangerous and helpful in the Cold War fight, intellectually in­de­pen­dent and tied to the state, nationalist and dangerously internationalist. And ­because they ­were leaders in their fields, their accomplishments ­were both lionized and vilified. While ­these contradictions can be frustrating to trace, especially at the height of Cold War anticommunism, the very ambiguousness of the cultural associations with scientists worked to undermine the scientific authority of the state. As the American public watched the hydrogen bomb proj­ect pro­gress from Truman’s announcement to the photo­g raphs taken at Enewetak released well ­after the fact, another drama was unfolding regarding the role of nuclear science in American democracy. Anticommunist watchdogs warned the American public that nuclear scientists themselves could have questionable loyalty to the nation and internationalist sympathies and w ­ ere vulnerabilities in the national security apparatus.82 Since World War II, several former members of the Manhattan Proj­ect had gone on to become high-­ranking executive branch advisers, and their public visibility made them easy targets of suspicion. In the early 1950s, the currents of scientific authority shifted within American society and politics at large. Nuclear science stood at the intersection of domestic and international policy and overlapped in complex ways with anticommunism, espionage, and loyalty concerns.83 Prior to the start of World War II, the theoretical physics community was spread among many centers of research in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca. The rise of the Third Reich and its expulsion of Jewish intellectuals launched a mass emigration of scientists to less hostile nations such as Britain and the United States, dramatically altering the geography of international physics. The outbreak of the war reor­ga­nized experts along national lines, especially as it became

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clear that theoretical physics could have military uses. Communication among researchers in dif­fer­ent nations was all but silenced. In the United States, the Manhattan Proj­ect retained an international makeup, as many prominent theorists ­were Eu­ro­pean émigrés. During the war the American nuclear program demanded loyalty from its scientists, what­ever their home nationality. Believing that the United States was in a fierce race to build a nuclear bomb before Nazi Germany, most émigré physicists w ­ ere e­ ager to put their skills ­toward the war effort. Yet throughout the war and a­ fter, intelligence officers w ­ ere deeply suspicious of foreign scientists. In the immediate postwar period, some Manhattan Proj­ect scientists became out­spoken po­liti­cal figures, expanding the bound­aries of their public authority in ­matters of nuclear science, politics, morality, and governance. The so-­called atomic scientists’ movement in 1945–1946 brought several groups of nuclear scientists u ­ nder the banner of advocacy for the international control of nuclear weapons. But as the Cold War intensified, the flexibility of domestic politics that facilitated such dialogue dis­appeared. By the late 1940s it became clear that nuclear research would continue, even in peacetime, in order to meet the new diplomatic needs of the Cold War. The shift significantly narrowed what the state considered acceptable po­liti­cal activity for physicists employed or sponsored by federal nuclear programs. Combined with the necessary secrecy of nuclear research, the public outspokenness of state-­employed scientists became severely ­limited by the end of the 1940s.84 In the Cold War state, nuclear research became easily intertwined with the fight against global and domestic communism in both constructive and damaging ways. Some of the earliest cases of anticommunist drama involved Manhattan Proj­ect scientists. As one historian argues, “scientists w ­ ere particularly vulnerable. . . . ​HUAC’s [House Un-­American Activities Committee] high-­ profile search for atomic spies within the Manhattan Proj­ect damaged the credibility of the scientific community by portraying it as potentially subversive.”85 Likewise, foreign-­born scientists with high security clearances w ­ ere easy targets in anticommunist crusades ­because of their nationality, ethnicity, religion, and profession. The media spectacles of the loyalty ­trials only further cemented the link between subversive politics and nuclear secrets in the public imagination.86 Moreover, the public held cultural assumptions about scientific theorists as having personality traits that made them vulnerable to un-­American influences. In the late 1940s ­under pressure from HUAC, the AEC began to make a categorical distinction in how it classified disloyalty among its employees: disloyal acts and disloyal thoughts.87 Theoretical physicists w ­ ere, by definition, thinkers. Anticommunist crusades began to criminalize thought, ushering in

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an era when thinkers could very easily be criminalized. Xenophobic anticommunism meshed easily with accusations of thought crime; as historian David Kaiser notes, critics made the ­simple connection that “theorists ­were Jews [and] Jews ­were Communists.”88 Seen as a broader indicator of the changing nature of American anticommunism, nuclear scientists stood at the forefront of the movement’s anti-­intellectual impulse. Nuclear espionage and fears thereof had existed since the Manhattan Proj­ ect. Yet the confluence of domestic politics and the rise of nuclear concerns in American life created an atmosphere where a new and complex image of the scientist could be constructed. Even before the Cold War arms race swung into full gear in the early 1950s, American intelligence agencies, perhaps unintentionally, had constructed a strong association between nuclear science and the communist threat. During the McCarthyist era, two high-­profile dramatic episodes involving nuclear scientists are worth examining in more detail: ­those of Klaus Fuchs and J. Robert Oppenheimer. It may seem easy to flatten both episodes as logical results of Cold War competition (for Fuchs) or the excesses of the Red Scare (for Oppenheimer). However, they serve very dif­fer­ent functions when examining their impact on public notions of scientific expertise. Fuchs was a German physicist working with the British contingent of scientists at Los Alamos during World War II. A ­ fter the war, he returned to G ­ reat Britain to continue working with its nuclear program ­until he was convicted in early 1950 of delivering nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. The Fuchs scandal erupted at a pivotal moment in early Cold War policy developments. The Soviet nuclear test in 1949 incited “a massive spy hunt” in an effort to discover why American intelligence estimates had failed to predict the pro­g ress of the Soviet Union’s nuclear program.89 When news of Fuchs’s espionage broke, it was an easy explanation. Yet Fuchs’s contemporaries debated the consequences of his espionage at the time, and scholars ­today continue to argue about the degree to which Fuchs’s intelligence helped or hindered the Soviet nuclear program.90 In the context of hardened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, however, Fuchs served to bolster several related symbolic functions of 1950s nuclear science. First, the Fuchs case reinforced the secretive nature of nuclear science: even if a scientist was not a spy, he held “atomic secrets” or “hot formulas” that could be damaging to the United States.91 Second, Fuchs’s disloyalty offered concrete evidence to many that nuclear scientists could not be trusted to serve the best interests of the United States. ­Later that year the Greenglass and Rosenberg espionage scandals erupted, confirming that the Fuchs incident was not an isolated case.

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Fi­nally, the Fuchs revelations lent additional justification to the accelerating nuclear arms race. Fuchs’s conviction came just days before President Truman announced the accelerated Super program, and while ­little evidence exists that the NSC’s hydrogen bomb discussions considered Fuchs’s actions, his association with the success of the Soviet nuclear program suggested that the Soviets would not have trou­ble developing a hydrogen weapon ­either. Indeed, according to Manhattan Proj­ect physicist Herbert York, many of the GAC’s conclusions about the development of the Super rested on strategic assumptions that the Soviet Union might develop a Super even if the United States did not.92 For the public not privy to such conversations, the close timing of the Soviet test, Fuchs’s conviction, and the Super announcement could not have gone unnoticed. The Soviet explosion and the Fuchs confession demonstrated to the public that t­ here was secret information to know, p­ eople who could and might spread it, and an imposing ­enemy who would put it to use. As the 1950s progressed, theoretical physicists continued to face anticommunist scrutiny and w ­ ere what one historian of science calls “the most consistently named whipping-­boys of McCarthyism.”93 Even the highest-­ranking scientific advisers could not escape suspicion: in December 1953 the AEC accused Robert Oppenheimer, renowned nuclear physicist, public intellectual, and top adviser, of being a security risk. During World War II Oppenheimer had directed the Los Alamos weapons development fa­cil­i­ty, eventually earning him the title “­father of the atomic bomb.” ­After the war he remained closely involved in nuclear policy ­matters, especially in his role as chairman of the GAC, where he served ­until 1952. Oppenheimer’s public spotlight increased dramatically ­after the war, establishing what some have identified as “a cult of personality.”94 Regarded as a brilliant scientist and wise adviser of amiable character, Oppenheimer achieved a cultural status that stood apart from the bumbling, socially inept genius that dominated the postwar image of theoretical physicists. His “nonscientific attributes”—he was very personable—­contributed most to his popularity.95 Despite having testified before HUAC in 1949 acknowledging his prewar association with members of the Communist Party, Oppenheimer’s celebrity and impor­tant advising position in the Truman administration sheltered him for a time from intelligence scrutiny.96 Still, given the increasingly fraught environment of domestic security and nuclear science in the early 1950s, Oppenheimer’s “combination of expertise with broad cultural and moral authority” could not easily persist.97 In late December 1953 the AEC sent a list of loyalty accusations to Oppenheimer, along with notice of the temporary suspension of his security clearance.

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Oppenheimer denied the charges, addressing them systematically in a response to the AEC. Both letters ­were published in full in the New York Times when the story became public the following April.98 Shortly thereafter Oppenheimer appeared in a hearing before the AEC’s Personnel Security Board, during which he was questioned about his past associations with members of the Communist Party and potential spies as well as his e­ arlier recommendation as part of the GAC against pursuing the development of the hydrogen bomb. In May, the board determined that Oppenheimer posed a genuine security threat, and in June the AEC permanently revoked his clearance. While the Oppenheimer hearings w ­ ere not open to the public, much of the drama played out on the public stage. Oppenheimer’s celebrity as well as the fame of t­ hose who testified against him and on his behalf made the saga that spring rich fodder for news media. But public opinion about communist allegations was slowly shifting. It should not be overlooked that the Army-­ McCarthy hearings, widely regarded as US senator Joseph McCarthy’s po­liti­ cal downfall, played out on national tele­vi­sion over the same months—­April to June 1954—as the Oppenheimer hearing unfolded. If figures such as Oppenheimer and organ­izations such as the US Army could be brought down by weak evidence, where was the limit? The public likely saw the two episodes as connected to one another. Although it was impossible in the summer of 1954 to know that McCarthy would soon be censured by Congress for his investigatory tactics or that, despite popu­lar support, Oppenheimer would withdraw from public life, a new po­liti­cal climate was emerging. The reaction to the AEC’s final verdict was mixed. As historian Spencer Weart argues, “the decision only meant that the physicist was expelled from the sanctum of military secrets, but the impact on public opinion was as g­ reat as if he had been condemned for treason.”99 In the aftermath of the scandal, members of the public, fellow scientists, intellectuals, and the media often framed Oppenheimer as an innocent victim of security excess and his accusers as unjust attackers with unseemly ulterior motives.100 That a figure so well known for his wisdom could fall so far for past discretions surprised and outraged many. On the other hand, some scholars characterize the popu­lar reaction differently, claiming that the hearing transcripts put Oppenheimer in a negative light to the public, stripping him of his public authority and thereby his popularity.101 From the end of World War II ­until the mid-1950s, the public face of nuclear scientists underwent a remarkable transition. While ­those scientists who ­were involved in the Manhattan Proj­ect during World War II ­were largely sheltered from public view u ­ ntil ­after the war, their role as government advisers and researchers was much more vis­i­ble beginning in the late 1940s, even if

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their work remained classified. By then, their loyalty ­trials had become highly publicized events. This relatively quick transition suddenly placed nuclear scientists at the center of many public debates. To some, nuclear scientists appeared to have unpre­ce­dented influence and access to secret information. Indeed, in many cases they w ­ ere the very creators of this information. In the context of domestic anticommunism, which targeted ­people who posed an ostensible threat to American democracy, nuclear scientists w ­ ere easy targets ­whether or not they ­were spies. Yet anticommunist politics is not the only framework with which to explore the changing public authority of nuclear scientists. One must not neglect how t­ hese individuals ­were intimately tied to nuclear proliferation and the advancement of weapons. The Fuchs confession, at the very start of the 1950s, coincided with a critical moment in nuclear proliferation: the American loss of its atomic mono­poly and the subsequent decision to develop the hydrogen bomb. Fuchs’s confession became a cautionary tale about the dangers of scientist-­spies in high places and lent concrete proof of the link between nuclear science, espionage, and Cold War competition. Unlike the secretive war­time development of atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs emerged on a more public stage. It was a technology that from the very start carried scientific and ethical prob­lems. By the time of Oppenheimer’s hearing in 1954, hydrogen bombs had been built and successfully tested, even amid several waves of controversy. The ambiguous reaction to Oppenheimer’s clearance revocation hints at a larger prob­lem surrounding nuclear science: even a trusted public intellectual could not escape the damaging uneasiness associated with nuclear science in American life. As David K. Hecht shows in his analy­sis of letters sent to Oppenheimer during and ­after the scandal, citizens mapped their “own concerns and anx­i­eties onto Oppenheimer’s image.”102 This phenomenon can be seen more broadly, as Americans also mapped their fears onto all m ­ atters involving nuclear science. The Oppenheimer episode also tarnished the prestige allotted to nuclear scientists who remained part of the scientist-­adviser circle. Edward Teller, known as the f­ ather of the hydrogen bomb, emerged from the scandal seeming to some outside the federal government as a villain who muscled po­liti­cal influence over scientific wisdom. Teller held a privileged position with access to elite decision makers long ­after Oppenheimer was stripped of his clearance. Yet his continued involvement with policymakers stood to further damage the federal government’s authority over nuclear science as well. If insider scientists could not be trusted—­either due to questionable loyalty or morality—­ could they possibly have the best interests of the state and its p­ eople in mind? Nuclear science was caught between competing needs: ­those of the state and ­those of civilians. By the 1950s, policymakers needed nuclear science to

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support Cold War strategic aims. Yet domestic politics made nuclear science a potential liability. Civilians too looked to nuclear science with uneasiness. Conditioned by domestic anticommunism and a growing concern with proliferation, civilians increasingly had difficulty looking to scientists as unquestioned experts. This tension over scientific authority and moral responsibility would come to define the debate over nuclearization for the remainder of the early Cold War. President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” campaign can be seen as part of an ongoing negotiation over the role of nuclear science in American public life. ­Earlier that year, Eisenhower received a NSC report on disarmament produced by a panel including Robert Oppenheimer (this was before his security hearing), Vannevar Bush, and Allen Dulles. The report made wide-­ranging recommendations about curbing the frightening trends of proliferation and weapons advancement, anchored by a belief that the first necessary change was to open the channels of communication with the American p­ eople about the “meaning of the arms race.”103 The report concluded that “in a democracy an informed public is the best safeguard against extreme public reactions.”104 The proposal became known as Operation Candor and was a long-­term goal for Eisenhower. Increased government transparency was not a new idea in the public sphere or in policy circles. Indeed, transparency had been a focal point for the atomic scientists’ movement in the mid-1940s and a concern for policymakers as they developed civil defense plans. Yet it was not ­until 1953, bolstered by the new specter of thermonuclear war, that a program for public candor found wider traction in Washington, DC.105 Eisenhower continued to work with advisers and speechwriters throughout the remainder of the year on a policy statement, despite the announcement of Joe 4—­the Soviet Union’s first thermonuclear test—­and escalating controversy within the administration about Oppenheimer’s loyalty. The United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City in December of 1953 gave Eisenhower an opportunity to air his proposal on a world stage. Along with public candor, Eisenhower suggested that a renewed focus on peaceful nuclear science could prevent a global catastrophe. At the same time, opposing forces worked to complicate the ­simple relationship Eisenhower outlined for ­future peace and nuclear research. By the mid-1950s, the state’s authority over nuclear m ­ atters was weakening due to rising concerns about fallout from nuclear weapons testing and the trustworthiness of ­those scientists employed by the state. Moreover, the federal civil defense program was consistently underfunded, making the protection of American civilians look like mere lip ser­vice. “Atoms for Peace” can be seen as an early attempt to control the public conversation about nuclear science

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and to maintain the state’s scientific owner­ship of nuclear information. Even though the program led to broad changes in the international exchange of nuclear science, its candor platform was vague and difficult to implement on the domestic stage. As the 1950s progressed, Americans began to turn away from the state’s scientific legitimacy. As the government’s scientific authority weakened in the face of the vari­ ous challenges of the 1950s Cold War landscape, Americans began to look to alternative sources of expertise to understand nuclear science and their hopes for survival. Despite efforts such as Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” campaign, a seed of doubt—or perhaps many seeds—­had been planted in American public discussion. As we ­shall see in chapter  4, public and unofficial scientific knowledge worked to erode the authority of the state as the best provider of scientific expertise. By the late 1950s a new wave of scientific actors took the stage, promoting nuclear dissent and disarmament demands and expressing disillusionment with Cold War policy in general.

C h a p te r   4

The Fallout from Fallout The Peacetime Threat

In June 1956 at the height of intense scientific debate about the dangers of fallout from nuclear testing, the Los Angeles Times printed a letter to the editor with an “Atomic Query.” In it, Korra Dane of San Francisco noted that citizens read reports “on the sidelines” about the awesome power of the testing in the Pacific. However, in a barrage of pointed questions, she wondered if anyone had yet studied the meteorological, geological, or environmental effects of nuclear testing. She concluded by asking “who has figured up the number of headaches and other ills to be suffered from the impact of pressure waves moving out upon us from t­ hese mighty detonations and impinging upon the sensitivity of the physical body and its ner­vous system? Who ­will give us such facts and figures that we may weigh and seriously consider the full import of t­hese atomic blasts out t­here in the Pacific?” Although her plea did not reflect a specialist’s understanding of nuclear detonations, Dane understood that such enormous tests could have far-­reaching consequences for the world. Her letter also did not specifically mention radioactive fallout. However, just as she was writing to the Los Angeles Times, public concern about fallout effects was growing. In the mid-1950s, fallout and nuclear testing became the locus of the same overarching concern as Dane expressed: a lack of accessible nuclear information was impeding the public’s ability to be informed and healthy citizens. For nuclear citizens such as Dane, the dearth of nuclear knowledge was impeding functional demo­cratic practice.1 99

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The economy of public information about the dangers of nuclear testing evolved quickly over the course of the 1950s, beginning with a series of specific events that fueled a broadened public debate. The disastrous ­Castle Bravo thermonuclear test at the Pacific Proving Grounds (PPG) in March 1954 in par­ tic­ul­ar catalyzed an outcry for reliable information about fallout from critical journalists, science advocacy groups, and attentive members of the public. The most influential American study on fallout, released by the National Acad­emy of Sciences (NAS) in 1956, gave the public a new vocabulary of information about the h ­ uman effects of fallout. In par­tic­u­lar, the report’s findings about the mutagenic effects of radiation—­that is, its ability to disrupt ge­ne­tic code—­ became a flashpoint of public controversy. This more nuanced and contested understanding of the spectrum of h ­ uman effects of nuclear fallout, both in war and in peacetime, changed how Americans learned to recognize nuclear dangers in everyday life. This broadened knowledge would frame public debates about a nuclear test ban for the remainder of the de­cade. In the years following Bravo, several prominent public figures emerged—­ and reemerged—as crusaders against nuclear weapons and the fallout threat. Activist scientists, many of whom had been silenced in the chilly McCarthyist years of the early 1950s, once again became vocal opponents of proliferation as the po­liti­cal climate began to thaw. Although they continued to be subjected to accusations of communist activity by their po­liti­cal enemies, activist scientists ­were critical contributors to public discussions about fallout and nuclear testing, and their arguments found support among segments of the American public. Scientists’ cautionary messages inspired individuals beyond immediate scientific circles to form national committees and or­ga­nize protests. Some groups, especially the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and several prominent pacifist organ­izations, succeeded in garnering further public support and amplifying the issue’s media visibility. The individualized nature of the dangers of fallout made nuclear policy unpalatable to Americans at the grassroots level as well. Concerned citizens began to see their personal health and safety—­and that of their c­ hildren and of ­future generations—­increasingly jeopardized by the militarized Cold War policies and the actions of the state. In the mid-1950s, fallout was a nuclear threat that even civil defense practices could not claim to mitigate. In fact, the threat of fallout had been revealed to be a constant condition of peacetime rather than an exclusive consequence of ­f uture war. More than any other aspect of the nuclear Cold War, the threat of fallout hit home hardest. Galvanized by interest in their own safety, a new set of Americans entered the public debate about nuclear policy. They appealed to federal leaders and agencies and articulated their concerns as ­those of engaged citizens. The public pushback

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against fallout was an ongoing expression of the changing po­liti­cal relationship between individual citizens and their state. As concerned citizens demanded transparency from the nuclear state, they also expressed suspicion about the politicization of the science surrounding fallout. Fallout’s dangers ­were difficult to articulate, mea­sure, and predict, and scientists, policymakers, and the media disagreed about how fallout research should be interpreted. The only ­thing clear was that fallout from nuclear explosions presented a threat, albeit an ill-­defined one. Without a clear official consensus to draw on, alongside broader public ambivalence about nuclear science more generally, many civilians turned away from a purely technical way of thinking about fallout. Instead, they began to cast fallout as a troubling moral issue that carried dire consequences for Americans and the nation as a ­whole. The awareness that nuclear testing could endanger all p­ eople thus gave Americans cause to think critically about individual and collective rights. Test ban advocates a­ dopted a language infused with ideas about ­human rights, national sovereignty, and global community. Increasingly, antinuclear advocates pressed for a new understanding of sovereignty that held nations accountable for global health—or, rather, held nations accountable to do no harm beyond their borders. The discovery of fallout’s global reach provoked renewed debate over the wisdom of nuclear policies and forced Americans to reconsider their position as citizens of the American state and as ­human citizens of the planet. Awareness of nuclear fallout spread differently in dif­fer­ent communities. Levels of access—to classified information, advanced scientific education, po­ liti­cal propaganda, and activist arguments—­conditioned how dif­fer­ent groups of Americans first learned about and then reacted to revelations about fallout. For the lay public, high-­level scientific research and policy deliberations often filtered into public forums in imperfect and incomplete ways. And although the intensity of po­liti­cal repression that characterized the early 1950s had partially subsided by the latter part of the de­cade, it persisted enough that many concerned Americans w ­ ere reluctant to make their claims in explic­itly po­liti­ cal ways. Instead, they turned to moral arguments that could obscure partisan leanings, at least partially. This chapter traces the unfolding drama of fallout awareness through the lens of popu­lar information while examining the varied repertoire of tools, information, and opinions that Americans used to inform their attitudes about nuclear testing. While it is impossible to perfectly characterize the breadth and variety of individual interpretations about and attitudes t­oward fallout, what follows attempts to complicate the history of fallout awareness by honoring the stories of a broader swath of ­those who lived through it.2

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Fallout Consciousness Looking back in June 1955 on more than a year of intense public argument over the lessons of the ­Castle Bravo test, longtime New Yorker writer Daniel Lang dubbed it “the shot that made the world fallout-­conscious.”3 In the weeks and months a­ fter the test, publicly available information about its radioactive contamination was primarily ­limited to official Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) press statements, which consistently downplayed the deleterious effects of fallout.4 American newspapers juxtaposed the rote statements of the AEC’s chairman Lewis Strauss and commissioner Willard Libby with the ongoing outcry from Japa­nese officials over the health of the Lucky Dragon crew and a seafood industry severely depressed by public panic over contaminated ocean fish. When crew member Aikichi Kuboyama died in September of radiation-­ related illness, the ­matter took on added ­human urgency. Yet the press also continued reporting on AEC officials who cast doubt on and at times outrightly denied the link between the test and the Lucky Dragon crew’s fate. On the day of Kuboyama’s death, the Baltimore Sun reported that John C. Bugher, the AEC’s director of the Division of Biology and Medicine, represented the ­whole of “American medical opinion” in his doubt that Kuboyama’s death could “be fairly or wholly blamed on radiation.”5 The same article disparaged the Japa­nese officials’ criticism of the AEC as evidence of communist infiltration.6 Despite the AEC’s attempts to manage the public narrative of Bravo and its aftermath, a growing number of critics mounted an assault on the official line. They warned of the dangers of scientific information charged with po­ liti­cal bias, bureaucratic partisanship, and classification restrictions. In November 1954 in their recurring “­Matter of Fact” column, Joseph and Stewart Alsop suggested that the lack of reliable information about fallout stood in the way of functional democracy, stating that even the Soviets had better access to scientific information about fallout.7 The Washington Post and Times Herald pushed harder the next month, claiming “­there is no danger so fearful as one on which t­ here are no hard facts.”8 Activist scientists also saw the connection. In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, critic Ralph Lapp aptly stated that “security through secrecy has largely failed. . . . ​It has isolated the American ­people from the facts and thus begun the spallation [the breakup of an atom’s nucleus] of the cornerstone of democracy—­freedom of expression. . . . ​The freedom to speak is useless when ­people cannot know what they are speaking about.”9 Indeed, since the AEC’s creation in 1946, it had operated with unpre­ce­ dented insulation from public oversight and scrutiny, despite periodic calls for more transparency in the years that followed. The criticisms from the Alsops

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and Lapp thus drew on a familiar rhe­toric that challenged secrecy in the Atomic Age. In par­tic­u­lar, the post-­Bravo challenges echoed the accusations of scientific oligarchy that emerged in the wake of President Harry Truman’s announcement in 1950 that the AEC would begin developing Supers. For most Americans, the Bravo test four years l­ater was the very public debut of the thermonuclear age. In the context of this new Cold War era, one that was ushered in with deadly disaster, the AEC and its mono­poly over nuclear information seemed to pose a dire and more urgent threat to American demo­cratic culture. In an attempt to reassert control over the public conversations about fallout, the AEC released The Effects of High-­Yield Nuclear Explosions to the public in February 1955, almost one year a­ fter ­Castle Bravo.10 The report summarized the broad effects of thermonuclear and atomic blasts with an eye ­toward educating the public about what they could do to protect themselves in the event that such weapons w ­ ere used in war­time. The first half of the report, a summary statement by Chairman Strauss, strikes an insistent corrective tone. Although Strauss reveals information about radioactive contamination, he peppers his summary with italicized phrases emphasizing that only ­those “persons in the area who took no protective mea­sures” ­were endangered by nuclear detonations.11 Similar to civil defense policy, Strauss places the onus of safety on individuals, not the AEC or other federal body. For other individuals far enough outside the area of detonation, Strauss insists, the exposure would be well within acceptable limits. The Lucky Dragon crew, who could not have known to take protective mea­sures, is not mentioned at all. In downplaying the danger of fallout, however, the AEC report did l­ ittle to temper public discussion and fear. The Los Angeles Times summarized the report’s primary points ­under the banner headline “AEC Reveals Horrors of H-­Bomb Explosion.” The above-­the-­fold article, “Fallout Could Kill Every­one inside Area of 7000 Miles,” also included a rudimentary map of fallout rings superimposed over southern California.12 Similar ominous headlines and graphics ran in papers across the country.13 The timing of the report’s release could not have helped the foreboding newspaper coverage: just as The Effects of High-­Yield Nuclear Explosions reached the public and the press, the AEC began Operation Teapot at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). This was the first testing series since Operation C ­ astle began with the Bravo shot the year e­ arlier, this time happening much closer to home. Consistent with other official AEC statements in the months a­ fter Bravo, The Effects of High-­Yield Nuclear Explosions elided concerns about any long-­term dangers of nuclear fallout. While the report admits that “­there is a wide range of admissible opinion as to the ge­ne­tic effects,” AEC experts did not find “any

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basis for serious concern at this time.” The report aims to dispel public concerns by describing the cumulative radiation exposure for each American from 1945 to 1955 as “about the same as the exposure received from one chest X-­ray.”14 The deliberate comparison to something familiar—in this case a routine medical diagnostic procedure—­gave a relatable scale to a topic that previously had none for most members of the public. By the 1950s X-­rays carried l­ittle public association with risk, despite well-­documented misuses and concerns from the medical community over the previous de­cades.15 Unsurprisingly, AEC officials and other fallout skeptics would extract incredible mileage out of the analogy; for de­cades, mea­sur­ing radiation by X-­ray became a routinized feature of public debates over fallout ­hazards. Nevertheless, for the remainder of 1955 fallout critics began to express significant concern over the ge­ne­tic consequences of radiation exposure in smaller doses.16 Outside the purview of the AEC, nuclear dangers w ­ ere taking on other legible forms. Coincidentally, the early media clamor for trustworthy information about fallout loosely coincided with the ten-­year anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the coverage of the anniversaries varied in tone and opinion, many of the features relied heavi­ly on visual artifacts of the war. For example, the New York Times ran a several-­page article about Hiroshima’s physical recovery from the ravages of the bombings.17 Early nuclear dissent activists, however, used the anniversaries as an opportunity to revive the traumatic memory of the bombings. Hiroshima Diary, a firsthand account of the months following the bombing by an injured Japa­nese physician, was released in En­glish for the first time in 1955, and reviews appeared in major outlets across the nation. Even more visibly, in May 1955 twenty-­five young female victims of the first atomic bombing w ­ ere brought to the United States to undergo cosmetic and reconstructive surgery. The so-­called Hiroshima Maidens and their advocate, Kiyoshi Tanimoto—­who had figured prominently in John Hersey’s Hiroshima chronicle—­received a ­g reat deal of press coverage thanks in large part to the interest of Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review. While some observers ­later noted that “working together in medicine [helped] to heal the animosity from a war that had ended 10 years ­earlier,” ­these press events also served to remind the public of the horrors of nuclear war.18 The program’s organizers had a history of peace activism, suggesting that the mission was not simply a feel-­good publicity stunt but rather an emotional appeal against nuclearization.19 In their appearances on tele­vi­sion, press events, and in print media from 1955 to 1956, the Hiroshima Maidens stood as physical manifestations of the atrocities of modern war. Although the ­women’s physical disfigurement was

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caused by thermal burning and other blast injuries—­not necessarily by radiation exposure—­they gave Americans a way to imagine the individualized ­human ways that bodies suffered in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. It is also impor­tant to consider that the victims w ­ ere not ­those from Tokyo or other areas destroyed by conventional bombing. The Hiroshima Maidens ­were victims of nuclear war, occupying a site of especially painful public memory of the past and bearing a warning for the f­ uture. Their stay in the United States coincided with renewed conversation about the ethical and medical consequences of nuclear war, a topic from which the Hiroshima Maidens could not be easily separated. Moreover, for observers who had traced the more recent plight of the Lucky Dragon crew, the evidence of continuing nuclear victimhood would have been glaring. In the long wake of ­Castle Bravo and the back-­and-­forth between the AEC and its critics, concerns about the health h ­ azards of fallout became nearly synonymous with the debate about the ­f uture of nuclear testing. But despite the increasing polarization of arguments about w ­ hether to continue testing or not, both pro-­and antitesting advocates called upon the same l­imited scientific data to bolster their case. In April 1955, a New York Times editorial chastised both groups: “on the ­whole, ­there has been a tendency on the part of ­those who would forbid further tests of atomic bombs to overstate their case and on the part of the AEC a tendency to interpret atomic explosions statistically to show that the world has nothing to fear from such tests.”20 Seeing officials and commentators competing for authority based on ­limited data, the overwhelming sentiment in national newspapers was confusion and frustration over whom to trust. For over a year ­after Bravo, activist scientists had lamented the “excessive atomic secrecy” of the AEC on the topic of fallout, but the content released in Effects of High-­Yield Nuclear Explosions did not meet many critics’ demands for transparency.21 Immediately a­ fter the report was released, the Atomic Scientists of Chicago “protested against the commission’s failure in the report to discuss the still more disturbing possibilities” of radioactive fallout as a long-­ term contaminant in Earth’s atmosphere and in h ­ uman biology.22 One month ­after the AEC released its report, the Federation of American Scientists (formerly the Federation of Atomic Scientists) called for a comprehensive international inquiry into the effects of fallout that could overcome politicization and policy interests. Many members of the national press agreed. The Washington Post and Times Herald published an editorial stating that “if it is not feasible to have a moratorium on the tests themselves, an international evaluation of data about fall-­out by competent scientists in the next best ­thing.”23 Echoing calls for the international control of atomic weapons in the years following World

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War II, the possibility of an inquiry led by the United Nations (UN) seemed by some to be one way to overcome the limitations of the AEC’s secrecy. In fact, a like-­minded proj­ect was already in the works. With the backing of the Rocke­ fel­ler Foundation and its extensive network of scientists, journalists, and government officials, a group of experts at the NAS spent 1955 examining the issue of radioactive fallout. NAS delivered The Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) and an abridged public version in June 1956.24 The press and public, both hungry for definitive information, eagerly awaited an unbiased scientific assessment of fallout. As an in­de­pen­dent nongovernment agency, the NAS appeared to fit the bill.25 But as historians Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Angela N. H. Creager have shown, BEAR was the product of compromise over years of internal debate within the scientific research community and careful cooperation with AEC scientists.26 However, thanks to favorable reporting in the press, BEAR emerged in public debates with an air of impartiality and trustworthiness. An editorial in the Daily Boston Globe remarked that the “notable facts” of the report “are its authority and its objectivity. No axes are ground. And no punches are pulled, e­ ither.”27 In the summary report’s introduction, BEAR’s authors emphasized that the report was explic­itly designed to educate citizens about the personal effects of radiation as well as the information to “help [citizens] participate more intelligently in making necessary public decisions about atomic energy.”28 The link between transparent scientific data, personal health, and demo­cratic participation underscored the report. While the BEAR report also detailed findings about pathology, agriculture, meteorology, oceanography, and nuclear waste, the NAS authors placed special emphasis on ge­ne­tics. As the summary stated, “the inheritance mechanism [ge­ne­tic system] is by far the most sensitive to radiation of all biological systems.”29 The report went on to explain that “­there is complete agreement among ge­ne­ticists . . . ​[that] any radiation dose, however small, can induce some mutations.”30 Accordingly, exposed persons did not have to have lengthy or severe exposure to suffer consequences. They may not fall ill to radiation diseases, but as parents they could pass on negative effects to their f­uture ­children and all subsequent generations. The press seized upon the report’s ge­ne­tics claims, largely sidestepping its findings in other fields. The New York Times committed nearly two full pages to printing the unabridged transcript of the BEAR’s section on ge­ne­tics. Notably, the lengthy transcript featured an unrelated inset reporting on the departure of some of the Hiroshima Maidens a­ fter their medical procedures.31 Yet even without the implicit connection to the Maidens, the substantial New York Times coverage of BEAR speaks to the degree of public attention cast

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t­ oward ge­ne­tic effects. Overwhelmingly, the popu­lar takeaway from the report was that any amount of radiation ­causes mutation and that mutation implies harm.32 In the report, BEAR’s authors qualified their findings by explaining, for example, that h ­ umans encounter radiation through a variety of sources unrelated to nuclear weapons, that not all mutations express themselves, and that fallout study is plagued by mea­sure­ment difficulties. However, the report’s ge­ ne­tic findings laid bare the dire need for ­f uture research, ending the summary section with the ominous recommendation “we ­ought to keep all our expenditures of radiation exposure as low as pos­si­ble. From the point of view of ge­ne­tics, they are all bad.”33 The NAS study and ­those that would follow it added nuance and complexity to the public understanding of fallout while ­doing ­little to ­settle disagreements between research groups. As the authors of this growing body of research ­were ­eager to admit, their studies about fallout and ­human health often raised more questions than they answered. Indeed, a refrain in BEAR had been the need for additional research.34 However, that the studies collectively opened space in the public dialogue to acknowledge information gaps and differences in interpretations demonstrates a radically changed landscape of public information about fallout.35 For the first time, fallout was widely discussed in public as something that had short-­and long-­term dangers to ­humans. Some public understanding of the short-­term effects of heavy radiation exposure had been part of the public dialogue at least since John Hersey’s 1946 publication of Hiroshima.36 But by the mid-1950s new consequences ­were creeping into public view, thanks in large part to extensive attention to BEAR. Less immediate consequences of radiation exposure could include individual somatic—or pathological—­effects such as the shortening of life expectancy and an increased risk of cancer. Ge­ne­tic mutations, the studies showed, may not affect an individual, but t­hese mutations could be passed on to their offspring and ­future generations. For a public that had primarily been exposed to warnings about radiation as a peril in the seconds, minutes, and hours ­after an explosion, the long-­term pathological and ge­ne­tic warnings ­were new.37 ­These dangers w ­ ere also what made the continuance of nuclear testing so potentially sinister: the consequences of ­these explosions would be felt for decades—­and perhaps centuries—to come.

The Politics of Fallout The same uncertainty that motivated scientists to continue studying the unknowns of fallout, however, made it easy fodder for politicization. In the final weeks of his 1956 presidential bid, Demo­cratic candidate Adlai Stevenson

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began to call for a cessation of thermonuclear tests. Responding to questions about why he would engage in such a contested debate so late in his campaign, Stevenson said that he brought the issue to the national po­liti­cal arena “when it became evident that public interest in the H-­bomb question was substantial.”38 His claims galvanized a heated response from the AEC, several leading physicists and biologists, and anonymous editorial authors.39 While many of t­ hese critics objected to the general premise that fallout constituted a major threat to h ­ uman health, o ­ thers denied Stevenson’s specific claims that American milk could be contaminated by fallout or that the Dwight Eisenhower administration was concealing the truth from the public. AEC chairman Strauss noted that Stevenson distorted the available data and argued that “Mr. Stevenson’s continuous efforts to frighten the public on the eve of election are not admirable.”40 Throughout the campaign, Stevenson had claimed that in making the test ban a campaign issue he “had no po­liti­ cal motives in mind . . . ​[­because] it was and is too serious for that.”41 But given the fraught politics attached to nuclear weapons for over a de­cade prior, it was difficult for Stevenson to escape accusations of partisanship when discussing thermonuclear bombs, nuclear tests, and fallout.42 As they always had, nuclear issues carried contested po­liti­cal meaning. The expanded swath of critical officials and scientists who entered the fray over fallout encountered a familiar set of Cold War po­liti­cal imperatives as well. Although the anticommunist fervor of the McCarthy years had subsided somewhat by 1957, the specter of oppression remained. When Warren Weaver, chairman of the NAS Committee on Ge­ne­tic Effects of Atomic Radiation, testified before Congress in early 1957, he repeatedly emphasized that scientists ­were being “patriotic” in their pre­sen­ta­tion of unbiased scientific findings.43 Warren wanted to assure his audience that scientific integrity was not at odds with the state’s priorities. However, in using such language, he reiterated the defensive posture that scientists and other researchers learned to adopt e­ arlier in the Cold War. Moreover, the availability of new seemingly unfiltered information on fallout placed in­de­pen­dent scientists at odds with the AEC, a power­ ful state body. Even when both sides agreed on the interpretation of data, the press framed the nongovernment studies as an antidote to untrustworthy AEC information. The public understood the controversy as one of insiders and outsiders jockeying for authority. But h ­ ere too, an outsider position left experts vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty. As one reader of several New York newspapers pointed out, the po­liti­cal views of the experts involved w ­ ere on constant trial. She regretted that even in the mainstream press, “anyone who opposes the tests is [seen as] e­ ither a fool or a Communist.”44 Clearly, anticommunist rhe­toric still held currency well into the late 1950s.

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Perhaps most visibly, the insider-­outsider drama played out in a 1957 argument between Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer and a commissioner of the AEC, Willard Libby. In April of that year Schweitzer, a well-­known theologian, physician, and missionary, issued “A Declaration of Conscience,” a speech condemning nuclear testing. In light of new scientific evidence and repeated warnings, he lamented that the situation had not “influenced public opinion to the extent that one might have expected.” Blaming a lack of public understanding, Schweitzer outlined the science of radiation and fallout, citing easy-­to-­understand statistics and using common language. Yet his argument carried heavy moral implications, calling nuclear testing the “folly for which humanity would have to pay a terrible price.”45 Schweitzer’s appeal was broadcast in approximately fifty countries but did not air in the United States. The New York Times coverage of the event ran aside a short blurb reporting on Secretary of State Allen Dulles’s announcement that the United States would continue its testing program ­until scientific information could conclude “such tests w ­ ere perilous to world health.”46 Despite its initially tepid reaction, the Saturday Review published the full transcript of Schweitzer’s broadcast several weeks ­later, and it gained repeated mention elsewhere in the weeks and months that followed.47 Many Saturday Review readers met Schweitzer’s statement with resounding approval. As supporter Elmer A. Hilker wrote, Schweitzer’s statement was “one of the most signal contributions that has been made by any publication that has come to my knowledge. The even, unexaggerated tone of the article, its lack of hysteria, its freedom from condemnation make it a masterpiece for molding public sentiment.”48 Another reader called the article “analogous to the literary masterpiece [Common Sense] written by Thomas Paine in January 1776,” once again invoking the spirit of the American Revolution as an analogy for the nuclear Cold War.49 Readers of the Saturday Review, which reflected Norman Cousins’s longtime liberal activism on nuclear m ­ atters, ­were likely predisposed to respond favorably to Schweitzer’s arguments. However, thanks to Schweitzer’s renown as a humanitarian and physician, his speech provoked a response from the AEC. In a public letter, Commissioner Libby chastised Schweitzer for exaggerating the threat and unnecessarily arousing public panic.50 Libby cited recent follow-up studies that gave more concrete numbers to the NAS’s original conclusions. T ­ hese studies demonstrated that the mea­sur­able radioactive exposure caused by testing at the pre­sent rate was less than that presently created by cosmic background radiation, which enters the atmosphere from outer space, and much less than medical X-­rays. The minimal radiological threat caused by weapons testing, Libby claimed, “need cause no alarm” and constituted no

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­ azard to ­human ge­ne­tic health.51 Perhaps even more so than X-­rays, which h individuals could avoid by choice or chance, cosmic radiation was an especially useful comparison for nuclear test supporters. Cosmic rays had been a constant throughout the history of the planet and had affected ­every organism that had ever lived. Clearly, they argued, low-­level radiation had not doomed the h ­ uman genome. Though it is likely that many Americans had not been aware of cosmic radiation prior to the fallout debates, the geologically normalized view of radiation had the potential to ­counter public fears. Schweitzer’s appeal, Libby’s response, and the broad controversy over fallout remained in the news cycle throughout the summer of 1957, thanks in part to a new series of AEC nuclear tests conducted at the NTS. Operation Plumbbob, in which twenty-­nine tests ­were conducted between May and October, was a firm reminder of which side of the debate the federal government was on. The AEC insisted that it must continue with testing ­until more damning evidence dictated other­wise. Libby, echoing ­others who pushed for a continuation of tests, claimed that testing was “vital to assuring the survival of the ­free world” and argued that postponing, canceling, or banning nuclear tests would appear as a dangerous sign of weakness on the international stage.52 At the same time as Plumbbob, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy held a second round of congressional hearings with hopes of resolving the controversy over the dangers of radioactive fallout. The congressional investigation’s caution and interest in the subject stood in stark opposition to the Eisenhower administration’s unwavering decision to move ahead with testing. Constituent Lorraine Klatzkin of Trenton, New Jersey, was disappointed by the po­liti­cal pro­cess, stating that she “was rather distressed upon reading ­today’s newspaper to find that the President (even though the Congressional hearings are not over yet) has already made up our minds for us about continuing the tests.”53 In addition, by 1957 several members of Congress had come out in support of limiting the AEC’s autonomy, which they paired with harsh critiques of the agency’s lack of oversight. At the international level, Plumbbob also provoked continued protests from nonnuclearized nations, protests that had to be managed through American diplomacy.54 Thus, even within the highest echelons of government and diplomacy, fallout was creating fractures and tension. During the Plumbbob series Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winner in biochemistry, joined the growing ranks of test ban advocates. In June 1957, Pauling publicized a petition with the signatures of two thousand scientists in support of an immediate ban on nuclear testing. A month e­ arlier, he had made controversial claims that ten thousand p­ eople had already died from or w ­ ere

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ill with leukemia due to already-­executed nuclear tests. He raised the issue “for both po­liti­cal and humanitarian reason,” arguing that the effect of fallout is “large enough [for] anyone interested in ­human suffering to be concerned about it.” By January 1958, Pauling had collected over nine thousand signatures from scientists around the world.55 Like Schweitzer’s ­earlier appeal, Pauling’s petition campaign demonstrates the power of marshaling scientific authority to create popu­lar appeal. Pauling targeted scientists to support his protest, explaining “that scientists have a moral duty to give their fellow citizens the benefit of their special understanding.” Further, Pauling invoked “a deep concern for the welfare of all h ­ uman beings” 56 to justify his message. Activists such as Pauling and Schweitzer infused their appeals with the argument that science—­and scientists—­were best equipped to manage a scientific controversy and educate the public. In the same way that weapons development had given nuclear scientists an entry into policy m ­ atters in the late 1940s, the fallout debate enabled some to become moral critics. Expert dialogue about fallout revealed the shifting terrain of public authority and thus blurred the boundary between science, ethics, politics, and culture.57 Taken as a w ­ hole, the 1957 debate over fallout demonstrates the gradual erosion of government-­employed scientists’ authority in ­matters of nuclear safety.58 The NAS studies and ­those that followed offered new information, seemingly outside the watchful eye of the government. In fact, BEAR and other in­de­pen­dent studies relied on the AEC for some of their data, a residual consequence of the AEC’s previous information mono­poly. At times, the in­ de­pen­dence and objectivity of the NAS came ­under criticism for this kind of indirect collaboration.59 However, scientific engagement with the fallout controversy established two rival camps for the remainder of the 1950s and into the next de­cade: researchers who aligned themselves with the AEC and their critics. Each new study or finding on fallout revived familiar responses from AEC officials, namely that weapons fallout was minimally harmful, was found only in minuscule amounts, and did not constitute a threat to public health worthy of investigation or alarm. Despite the ongoing discussion among experts and policymakers, the growing awareness of fallout galvanized broad public engagement in nuclear science. For the first time, the public had access to fallout information in clear laymen’s terms. And it was not long before concerned Americans began seeing themselves as subjects in a global scientific experiment. Schweitzer and Pauling found allies among members of the public who w ­ ere outraged by what they saw as the government’s willful misreading of scientific evidence.60 Even as Congress convened to try to resolve conflicting opinions about fallout dangers,

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constituents worried that “if the information disclosed by the ­investigation is disturbing, the Committee may be inclined to withhold that information from the public.”61 ­Whether or not Americans trusted the credibility of scientists and policymakers, the emergence of fallout as a field of scientific debate confirmed the idea that it was something to be concerned about.

Assessing the Personal Threat As the fallout controversy unfolded, Americans faced a conflicting set of frameworks for understanding the risks that nuclear testing might pose to Ame­ rican citizens. Concerned members of the public attempted to read past the politicized dynamics of insider and outsider Cold War science that characterized the debates between Libby, Schweitzer, and Pauling. But although popu­ lar understanding of ge­ne­tics and biological science provided a vocabulary for debating fallout, many Americans found scientific assessments unsatisfactory as well. The gaps and malleability of fallout data did l­ittle to render a clear solution to the issue. Increasingly, concerned Americans began to recognize the weaknesses of thinking about fallout safety in a purely technical way. Instead, more and more Americans began to think about fallout as an issue best characterized by ethical and emotional questions. As the 1950s went on, this line of thinking became evident in the growing concern for how fallout was already affecting bodies, in par­tic­u­lar ­those of c­ hildren. Fallout concerns took on a moral dimension that proved to be a persuasive force for bringing nonexpert Americans into the fold of nuclear testing protest. By the mid-1950s, ge­ne­tics had come to occupy a central place in public debates about nuclear fallout and weapons testing. The science of ge­ne­tics, however, was not an altogether new aspect of public scientific knowledge. In 1933, Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for identifying ge­ne­tic inheritance mechanisms in Drosophila (fruit flies). In 1946, H. J. Muller won the same prize for demonstrating that X-­ray radiation exposure increases the rate of ge­ ne­tic mutation. News of t­ hese scientific phenomena had occupied the pages of popu­lar print outlets for de­cades prior to the mid-1950s. For example, in March 1947 Life ran a feature photo-­essay on ge­ne­tics as the “young science [that] studies continuity of life.”62 Featuring a striking range of photo­g raphs, from microscopic cells to extreme close-­ups of Drosophila to f­ amily portraits, the article mixes scientific explanation with ­human interest. But alongside the familiar, the article notes that b­ ecause of the ge­ne­tic disruption caused by radiation, “the explosion of an atomic bomb is a ge­ne­ticist’s nightmare. Some of them think that the mutations among the Japa­nese exposed in Hiroshima

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and Nagasaki may plague the ­human race for thousands of years.”63 Less than a de­cade a­ fter the story in Life, the advent of thermonuclear weapons and the consequences of ­Castle Bravo had increased the urgency of this concern among scientists and the public alike. By the mid-1950s, ge­ne­ticists became even more vocal that any bit of radiation could cause ge­ne­tic mutation in germ cells, the vessels for transmitting genes to offspring. A parent exposed to radiation would never know ­whether a ge­ne­tic change had occurred and if it had w ­ hether it would be passed on to a child, would cause discernible prob­lems for that child, or would be carried on and appear several generations in the f­ uture. This effect, ge­ne­ticists claimed, was the case for any kind of radiation: that of nuclear fallout, background or cosmic radiation, or medical X-­rays. As experts and the news media reported on ge­ne­tics findings, they revealed a chronic difficulty in scientific interpretation in popu­lar discussions. Pundits used the conclusions of the 1956 NAS study, for example, to defend a variety of contradictory claims.64 Often, their disagreement boiled down to the m ­ atter of identifying a threshold for a permissible dose. The topic was highly fraught: for some critics, the permissible dose was zero. Given all the other ways ­humans encounter radiation, zero was a practical impossibility. However, it was a claim that aligned with findings that any amount of radiation can cause harmful mutations. For ­others weighing in, including many AEC officials, the permissible dose for the public aligned with that of workplace safety standards for nuclear researchers, a relatively higher mea­sure. What was the average observer to make of this? As one of the more centrist letters to the New York Times explained in June 1957, both the supporters and detractors of continued nuclear testing used the same data but interpreted it in dif­fer­ent ways.65 Indeed, the concurrent congressional hearings attempted “to bring out distinctions that must be made between fact and value judgment, and served to emphasize how difficult it is to give precise scientific definition to such words as ‘clean,’ ‘safe,’ and ‘hazardous.’ ”66 But with the potential stakes of fallout so high for all of humanity, it was virtually impossible to divorce ­these concepts from value, morality, and emotion. As more information emerged about fallout mea­sure­ments and pos­si­ble effects, it was clear that data could be manipulated to both downplay and emphasize public risk. Each side of the test ban debate defended its stance by using a global h ­ uman scale, but the differences in rhetorical strategies are notable. ­Those who saw testing as a geopo­liti­cal necessity or as altogether harmless described fallout data in terms of percentages, while ­those who advocated for an end to testing decried the consequences in terms of w ­ hole numbers. In other words, if testing was presumed to cause a 0.2 ­percent increase in babies

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born with a congenital disability, the number seemed quite small. However, applied to the world’s population, this might translate to three thousand affected individuals.67 By using numbers rather than percentages, test ban advocates grafted ­human f­ aces to cold statistics. Applied to a global population, even small percentages could take ­human form in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. For other observers, the rhetorical meaning was obvious: AEC officials used the more ambiguous term “populations,” while their opponents used the word “­people.”68 For some Americans, however, the bleakness of the situation made “any discussion of how many are killed or injured, or how their number compares with the number of victims of more familiar ­hazards[,] . . . ​completely irrelevant.” The author, William T. Evans of San Jose, California, continued in a letter to President Eisenhower: “the point is that the damage is done by our deliberate action. ­There is a random se­lection of casualties and yet we would not think of holding a lottery to select even one victim to expose to the testing of any other type of new weapon, regardless of the presumed importance of such testing. We must have the moral maturity to see that it makes absolutely no difference ­whether we can identify the victims of our pre­sent nuclear tests, or w ­ hether they are alive now, or are yet to be born, genet­ically defective, in the distant f­ uture.”69 Similarly, a group of concerned citizens wrote to several African American newspapers to heed the warning of “scientists who say that the loss is too ­g reat and that all testing should stop.”70 Or as a Newsweek reader wrote, “once upon a time, war affected only t­ hose in the line of fire; now it reaches unto the third and fourth generations.”71 ­These Americans wrote in ways that they hoped would cut through the hair-­splitting over thresholds to get to the heart of the ­matter of unacceptable risk. The argument against nuclear testing, however, did not focus on only concern for f­ uture generations. Antinuclear advocates argued that fallout endangered the health of Americans living at the time as well.72 The public used scientific information made available to them by the fallout studies to focus on a specific public health concern: the radiological contamination of American food products. More specifically, fallout anxiety found expression in the controversy surrounding strontium-90 in commercial milk and wheat supplies in the mid-1950s.73 Strontium-90, a radioactive by-­product of nuclear fission reactions, became the poster child for the unseen and long-­term consequences of atmospheric fallout. B ­ ecause of its relatively long half-­life of 28.8 years, strontium-90 emits radiation in the atmosphere, solids, and w ­ ater longer than many other by-­products of nuclear explosions. Over the course of the 1950s, debris from the NTS containing strontium-90 dusted the American heartland and was ab-

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sorbed by crops and grazing animals. In par­tic­ul­ar, Amer­i­ca’s dairy cows ingested contaminated grasses and passed on the radioactivity to commercial milk products. The level of contamination was typically trace. However, strontium’s affinity to calcium meant that living ­things could easily pro­cess it as they pro­cess calcium. In ­humans, strontium can be integrated into bone tissue, which is not easily regenerated or replaced through normal bodily functions. Thus, once in bones, it cannot be flushed out easily by the liver or kidneys.74 Unbeknownst to the public, as early as 1953 the AEC had been secretly studying the movement of radioisotopes in the environment, specifically focusing on strontium-90.75 By the time strontium-90 entered public debates about fallout, it was known to cause leukemia and bone cancer. The 1950s fervor about strontium-90 was exacerbated by a number of ­factors. B ­ ecause it persisted in the h ­ uman environment longer than other radioisotopes, it provided a concrete method of quantifying the changes wrought by nuclear tests on h ­ uman biology, even if the long-­term effect of fallout was not yet totally understood. The issue took on additional urgency when in early 1957 a Columbia University team published findings in Science that the bodies of c­ hildren with still-­developing bones held much higher concentrations of strontium than ­those of adults.76 Scientists reasoned that ­children, especially ­those who had been born since the start of the Atomic Age, may be in unique danger. This concern for ­children catalyzed a series of additional studies. Most notably, the St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI) began collecting ­children’s deciduous teeth in 1958 to gauge how much strontium was collecting in ­human bones.77 The so-­called Baby Tooth Survey was a noninvasive experiment in h ­ uman biology and gathered samples from Americans c­ hildren—­and their parents—­eager to participate in advancing scientific research. The materials used to advertise Operation Tooth w ­ ere lighthearted and child-­oriented, featuring laughing cartoon ­children with missing front teeth (figure  6). In exchange for their teeth, child participants ­were granted a club card and a button declaring “I gave my tooth to science.” The collection materials made ­little reference to fallout dangers, although somewhat incongruously, some featured a tooth fairy sprinkling magic dust made up of stylized atomic diagrams. CNI had an ambiguous relationship with test ban activism. As sociologist Kelly Moore has shown, CNI was committed to a neutral “information provision model” in its communication with the public, but its leadership had strong ties to activists with more obvious agendas.78 Regardless of CNI’s strug­gles to manage its public image, the Baby Tooth Survey revealed a desire among a concerned public to engage with fallout research on their own terms. As Dr. Eric Reiss would put it several years into the experiment, “a community can by its own efforts and resources learn how

Figure 6. ​Promotional materials for Operation Tooth, 1958. To participate in the Baby Tooth Survey, families ­were asked to indicate geographic residence and give information about milk consumption. Image courtesy of the Harold Rosenthal Papers, box 2, University Archives, Washington University, St. Louis.

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much [s]trontium 90 is in the bones of its kids. You ­don’t have to wait for Washington or anyone ­else to point the way.”79 Yet strontium-90 aroused concern from the general public for other reasons as well. Strontium’s presence in milk—­a foodstuff assumed to be w ­ holesome, healthful, and pure—­seemed especially sinister. Milk’s ubiquity in American diets as a staple f­ amily food raised an urgent alarm. “Through food,” as environmental historian Kendra Smith-­Howard puts it, “radioactive residues could penetrate what had become the very symbol of the American way of life: the suburban home.”80 When homogenized with ideas of suburban f­amily, milk’s cultural meaning became a sign of abundance and pro­gress. In the face of fallout, however, milk became a threat to the sanctity of the American home. Thanks to the rise of industrialized agriculture and the national distribution of food, fallout that contaminated food staples in the heartland could make it to breakfast ­tables across the nation. Fallout’s presence in foodstuffs was a reminder of the ubiquity of atmospheric fallout; not even the suburbs could escape this postwar threat. But perhaps more importantly, fallout in food, especially strontium in milk, threatened the health of Amer­i­ca’s ­children.81 Advertisers had long framed milk as a critical component of a growing child’s diet, but the strontium controversy raised doubts about its safety. Scientist-­activists emphasized that ­children would bear the heaviest burden of nuclear test dangers ­because they had spent their entire lives in fallout’s shadow, suggesting illness ­later in life and a shortened life expectancy in addition to the pos­si­ble effects on f­uture generations. For some American parents, this threat to their families was the most convincing reason to halt testing. When asked about his involvement in antinuclear protest, prominent pacifist Albert Bigelow noted that “it is now the l­ittle ­children, and most of all the as yet unborn[,] who are the front line troops.”82 In April 1958, constituent Stephen Pfeiffer sent a snapshot to his New Jersey senator. The backside of the photo­g raph, which captures a smiling young girl playing on a suburban sidewalk, carries only the caption “for the sake of my niece, Jessica and the world’s c­ hildren stop bomb testing.”83 Lois Grebbs of Sandy, Utah, feared for her c­ hildren’s “­little bodies, and the bodies and minds of all the l­ ittle ­children who have been exposed to this terrible condition.”84 Appearing alongside a letter to the editor that blamed a rash of juvenile delinquency on working m ­ others, the positioning of Grebbs’s letter implicitly suggests that fallout was perceived as yet another condition of modern life threatening the 1950s American ­family. Concerned parents also sometimes interpreted fallout science with layers of fear and emotion that employed painfully eugenicist and ableist language. Irene Burke, a letter writer to the Los Angeles Times, was outraged that her and

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her husband’s f­ uture “­children might be monsters or freaks.”85 Suddenly as parents began to think of ­future ­children as pos­si­ble “mutants or monsters” or “monstrosities and low grade morons,” the science-­fictional images of irradiated creatures appeared disturbingly close to home. One m ­ other in Green Valley, California, suggested that ­children born with ge­ne­tic differences should be called “ ‘Libbyans’ or some such appellation” to bring public scorn onto policy­ makers who supported testing such as AEC commissioner Libby.86 The imagination of disfigured bodies, however horrific, galvanized everyday Americans in a new way. Moreover, Americans who responded in ­these ways w ­ ere employing a baseline understanding of fallout, however imperfect the ­imagined outcome. They understood that its entry into their homes and the bodies of their c­ hildren posed an especially egregious threat. But as Associated Press science writer Alton Blakeslee ­later reported, parents often overreacted to the scientific reports about fallout, noting that “the scientist’s phrase of ‘might be hazardous’ is sometimes taken to mean any amount w ­ ill be hazardous.”87 Perhaps unintentionally, Blakeslee was raising a point that mirrored similar debates in elite scientific circles: a risk assessment about dosage and exposure. Nevertheless, the nuances did not often seem to concern outraged parents. Fi­nally, the milk contamination controversy reinvigorated a long-­standing dialogue about access to safe food as a basic demo­cratic right, occupying an impor­tant site of postwar po­liti­cal activism. Since the Progressive Era, food safety had been on the agenda of consumer rights organ­izations. Milk in par­ tic­ul­ar had a long history of engaging citizen consumers, especially ­women. In fact, several prominent members of local consumer groups collaborated with scientists to form the CNI.88 Still, the fallout contamination in milk took on characteristics unique to the Atomic Age. Unlike ­earlier fights over bacterial contamination and antibiotic usage, fallout in milk was a consequence of state-­created conditions. For t­hese fallout activists, the culprit was the state, not industry. Fallout as a food contaminant brought consumers into direct conversation with federal policymakers over ­matters of rights and responsibilities. Indeed, fearing consumer boycott, the dairy industry even led some of ­these charges against the AEC. As historian Lizabeth Cohen has put it, in this era “po­liti­cal practice and American values, attitudes, and be­hav­iors tied to mass consumption became intertwined.”89 Radiologically contaminated milk, as a consumer good that could potentially imperil citizens, was a power­ful locus for po­liti­cal action. Given the power­f ul misgivings about fallout, the American public must have been heartened by the Eisenhower administration’s decision to agree to a temporary test moratorium with the Soviet Union and ­Great Britain beginning on October 31, 1958. The relief was short-­lived. ­Because all three nations

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ramped up weapons testing in the months leading up to the planned moratorium, atmospheric fallout was at its highest level yet in the year that followed. Indeed, the United States alone conducted seventy-­seven nuclear tests in first ten months of 1958, slightly more than the previous four years combined.90 Yet, nearly all of the previous several years’ studies on fallout had drawn conclusions based on the assumption that testing would continue at a constant rate.91 Ironically, the moratorium announcement worked against the goals of advocates who wished to see global fallout levels lowered through the cessation of testing. Americans greeted rising fallout levels with alarm, and food contamination scares once again made headlines and came u ­ nder investi92 gation in Congress. That elevated fallout levels continued a­ fter the moratorium began also reminded the public that fallout was invisible and per­sis­tent and would be a troubling presence for years to come even if the moratorium was extended in­def­initely. In the late 1950s, activists and everyday Americans alike latched onto a new and broadened understanding of fallout dangers and used it to make claims in the civic sphere. The strontium-90 controversy could not have emerged without the newly available and rapidly evolving fallout research. But with an eye t­ oward consumer safety and public health, activist research teams carved out new public authority to explain scientific research on fallout. Their messages transformed the public perception of fallout from a scientific debate to one with worrying consequences for individual lives. As concerned Americans began to assess the dangers to themselves and their families, they understood that the conditions of the fallout threat ­were a product of their government’s actions. As the fallout debate and the test ban question moved from outside the narrow realm of scientific argument and into the civic sphere, Americans began to understand the controversy as one that carried po­liti­cal ramifications. As more and more Americans objected to the presence of fallout in their lives, they gave voice to a broader critique of the nuclearized state. To fearful Americans, the new face of fallout—­something that seemed to lurk in ­every corner of the planet—­was becoming an unacceptable consequence of Cold War geopolitics. Although scientists on both sides of the controversy continued to admit that ­there was much science could not yet definitively explain about h ­ uman health and fallout and its ubiquity, perceived danger, and effect on the general public, fallout caused more and more Americans to adopt a no-­risk attitude ­toward nuclear testing. Even without knowing with certainty how h ­ umans would suffer in the long run, concerned individuals coalesced around demands for a ban on nuclear testing. Perhaps the unknown in this case was even more of a catalyst than the hard scientific fact (figure 7).

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Figure 7. ​Pages from Facts about Fallout, a FCDA pamphlet published in 1955. Although the pamphlet aims to quell fears by stating that “radioactivity is nothing new,” the pamphlet also reinforces that which makes fallout so insidious: that it evades the detection of all ­human (and canine) senses. National Archives and Rec­ords Administration; ARC #306714.

Activism and Public Pushback Personal concern about the dangers of fallout manifested a range of responses and actions. Americans talked with their neighbors, boycotted certain consumer products, sought out the newest scientific research, wrote letters to elected officials and editors of newspapers, formed awareness committees, and participated in nonviolent demonstration. Protest could be found from the most local grassroots level up to the level of national civic organ­izations. Meth-

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ods, desired outcomes, and constituency varied, but at the root of all ­these responses was a discussion of democracy. ­Those involved in antinuclear protest connected the prob­lem of fallout to issues of repre­sen­ta­tion, public access to information, and governance while embracing strategies of civic protest. The prob­lem of fallout gave Americans a new and urgent means for discussing how nuclear weapons ­were transforming the relationship between citizens and their state. When Albert Schweitzer had warned the public of “the greatest and most terrible danger” in April 1957, he argued that a nuclear test ban would only be pos­si­ble if informed citizens agitated it from the grass roots. Armed with the knowledge of the dangers of nuclear testing, he wrote, public opinion was power­ful: it “stands in no need of plebiscites or of forming committees to express itself. It works through just being ­there.”93 For Schweitzer, once a citizenry was convinced of the needs for a test ban, policy would follow. He believed in the power of a government’s accountability to its citizens and saw public education and discussion as part of that proj­ect. Other public figures recognized that debates about fallout and a test ban revealed fractures within the American system of participatory democracy. During a heated televised debate between Linus Pauling and Edward Teller in 1958, the moderator introduced the m ­ atters of fallout and disarmament as “an enormous burden” b­ ecause “it is the very essence of democracy that the p­ eople are sovereign in determining the policies to be pursued with re­spect to their [weapons’] ­f uture use. It is apparent that we are appallingly unprepared to make t­ hese decisions.”94 The public forum was thus devised as a way to make sense of an enormously complicated m ­ atter so that citizens would be able to make informed po­liti­cal choices. In his Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists review of Ralph Lapp’s 1958 The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon, Gene Marine linked the fallout controversy and American democracy more explic­itly. Marine praises Lapp’s narrative as presenting “the central question on whose answer may depend the survival of our democracy.”95 Lapp’s story, Marine contended, uses a narrow group of actors to bring attention to a prob­lem that ­faces all Americans. “In a democracy, the decision-­making pro­cess belongs to you and me,” he wrote. “That pro­cess . . . ​is directly dependent on the circulation of accurate information. . . . ​The impor­tant ­thing about the voyage of the Lucky Dragon—­aside from the effect on the par­tic­ul­ar h ­ uman beings involved—is that it forced, ultimately, information that was and is so vital to the decision-­making pro­cess.”96 For Marine, the guardians of that vital information ­were both obscured from public view and guilty of obscuring information. Citing phi­los­o­ pher Charles Frankel, Marine says that the Lucky Dragon incident demonstrated that “the overhanging prob­lem . . . ​is the drift of decision-­making authority

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into key positions that are anonymous, the development of an institutional structure that denies the individual genuine options, and the increasing inadequacy of our inherited mechanisms of public discussion and consent to control this situation.”97 The fallout controversy not only revealed a problematic relationship between the public and the AEC but also signaled a wider crisis in the state of American demo­cratic culture. By 1957, a growing contingent of citizens agreed that per­sis­tent gaps in common knowledge about fallout w ­ ere impediments to building consensus among the public. Although Schweitzer’s speech transcript in the Saturday Review was by no means the only major public contribution to the fallout and test ban debates, its reception among readers demonstrates some of the ways a single appeal circulated at the grass roots and catalyzed broader activism. ­After Schweitzer’s appeal was published, Americans across the country wrote to the magazine requesting copies of the article and the series of editorials that followed. Their requests ranged from small—­a few copies to be distributed to close friends and f­amily—to larger and more or­ga­nized. “A Declaration of Conscience” was read in a wide variety of venues from churches and synagogues to high school history classes to bridge parties.98 ­Others saw it as an ideal document to send to their elected officials, or as B. J. Arsnato of Akron, Ohio, put it, the statement “should be required reading for all; not least for [AEC chairman] Admiral Strauss and the golfer with the fatuous smile who unfortunately graces the White House.”99 Partisan jabs aside, Arsnato’s impulse to share the document with federal leaders suggests that some concerned Americans believed that federal officials w ­ ere too insulated from public commentary. Many Saturday Review readers identified the importance of grassroots education and lamented that too many Americans remained unaware of the dangers of testing. Some readers worried that the Saturday Review’s readership was too narrow and suggested that Schweitzer’s statement be republished in newspapers, ­Woman’s Day, or Reader’s Digest. As Beth Campbell of Vernon Center, New York, argued, “if the message is meant for us, seems to me it ­ought to be in a publication read by more of us.”100 Phillip Hildreth, a real estate agent in Tucson, Arizona, addressed the issue by starting what he called “a sort of one man crusade on a purely local level.”101 Hildreth made what Cousins called an “excellent radio statement” when interviewed by a local station. Hildreth planned to or­ga­nize other publicity on tele­vi­sion and radio and in print in the Tucson area. “Perhaps,” he admitted, “it’s silly. . . . ​With all the national publicity what can a l­ittle local bit hope to accomplish? Perhaps nothing. However, the man you meet on the street or talk to at the bank has greater real­ity than someone hundreds or thousands of miles away. It is my hope that some of this

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(close-­at-­hand, ­people talking to ­people) real­ity may rub off onto the subject” of fallout.102 Hildreth, like ­others, believed in the power of civic discussion—­ even at the individual and local levels—to engage and motivate action. In hundreds of letters sent to Cousins at the Saturday Review, Americans identified a need to form committees and mobilize educational groups. In the summer of 1957 Albert V. Baez, a physics professor at Stanford University, had attracted almost three hundred citizens of Palo Alto to the first meeting of an ad hoc organ­ization, the Peninsula Committee for the Abolition of Nuclear Tests. ­Because Baez was a Quaker and came from a ­family of pacifists, he had avoided involvement in Cold War arms development in his professional life. However, his research into X-­rays made him well connected in the San Francisco Bay Area scientific community. The committee enlisted help from local newspapers, peace groups, w ­ omen’s organ­izations, and Baez’s scientific colleagues. Leaders boasted that the committee’s first meeting was well attended, despite being “on a night when a local school issue of g­ reat importance was being discussed elsewhere.”103 Antinuclear activism would come to run in the ­family: the next year Baez’s d­ aughter, Joan, who went on to assume an activist position herself, performed her first act of civil disobedience by refusing to participate in her high school’s civil defense drill.104 Test ban activism found a home among pockets of Americans outside of the Saturday Review’s readership as well. In par­tic­ul­ar, fallout concerns gave ­women, even ­those defined by their roles as ­mothers and ­house­wives, cause to stake a claim in national policy through grassroots organ­izing.105 In a 1956 campaign recording for Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roo­se­velt spoke for all “­women, who are the natu­r al conservers of ­human life,” and believed that ­women “­will realize that [a test ban] is almost the most impor­tant ­thing to the peace of the world and the existence of the ­human race in the ­f uture.”106 In June 1957 Mrs. John W. May and Mrs. Martin Davis, self-­described as “two young Connecticut ­mothers,” formed the Connecticut Committee to Halt Nuclear Testing. May and Davis gathered approximately two thousand petition signatures in just two weeks, then delivered the petition to the White House and walked the halls of Congress to spread their message.107 On the north side of Chicago, nine w ­ omen or­ga­nized special parent-­teacher association meetings to discuss fallout’s effects on c­ hildren.108 Fallout thus became an arena within which ­women claimed po­liti­cal authority. By the early 1960s, ­women’s antinuclear activism would expand considerably and consolidate ­under broader organ­izations such as ­Women Strike for Peace.109 Larger national organ­izations also tapped into existing activist networks to act against nuclear testing. Beginning in the mid-1950s, established interfaith and pacifist organ­izations took up the cause of a nuclear test ban. Organ­izations

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such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Ser­vice Committee (AFSC), the War Resisters League, and the ­Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom collaborated to lead vigils, stage protest marches, and or­ga­nize publicity campaigns across the nation. Many of ­these organ­izations ­were well established before the advent of nuclear weapons but found common cause against war and the machinery of the Cold War. Although supported by church congregations and subsidiary groups throughout the country, the national leadership of t­hese organ­izations was remarkably tight-­knit. Prominent organizers in many groups included well-­known social activists such as A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Clarence Pickett, Norman Thomas, Dorothy Day, and George Willoughby. The organ­izations overlapped and grew out of one another, often with executive committees convening at the same building in Center City, Philadelphia.110 ­Until mid-1957, however, many of ­these national committees operated at the edges of mainstream liberal politics. Their weeks-­long vigils at the NTS and in Washington, DC, in addition to occasional run-­ins with local law enforcement at protests and a tendency to be framed as Soviet sympathizers made them targets for public criticism.111 Cousins and Pauling had been targets of conservative attacks for years, and although they ­were not leaders of pacifist organ­izations at that time, their association with antinuclear politics made it difficult for activist organ­izations to escape the same scrutiny. But in the wake of renewed attention to the fallout controversy, prominent peace group leaders saw an opportunity to amplify their message. In April, they formed a several-­plank program to raise public awareness of the dangers of nuclear testing. The meeting formed the ad hoc kernels of two permanent committees that would go on to rally broad-­based antinuclear support: the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Committee for Non-­ Violent Action (CNVA).112 Over the subsequent months Clarence Pickett, executive secretary of the AFSC, and Norman Cousins worked to gather the support of a wide range of public figures. ­These included not only the usual ensemble of pacifist leaders but also ­those representing the business community, academia, and science organ­izations. The casting was a deliberate effort to place the organ­ization into the mainstream American consciousness. Moreover, Cousins’s connections in the publishing world would help to ensure that SANE garnered publicity. Over the summer of 1957 the committee deliberated about how to deliver its message to the American public. Many members supported disarmament and broader geopo­liti­cal goals, but the pro­cess for achieving success in t­ hese arenas would be complex and inaccessible to the general public. Instead, the committee devised an initial campaign for a nuclear test ban.

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In November 1957 SANE made its public debut when it published a full-­ page ad in the New York Times, declaring boldly that “we are facing a danger unlike any danger that has ever existed.”113 Si­mul­ta­neously declaring its establishment as an organ­ization and its pledge “to the cause of peace with justice on earth,” SANE attracted more attention than perhaps any other campaign since Schweitzer’s appeal ­earlier that year. While SANE’s ­later ads would employ startling graphics, the November publication was dense with text and included a preprinted letter to President Eisenhower advocating for a test ban that readers could clip, sign, and mail to Washington, DC. And as would become the norm for ­later publications, the ad prominently displayed the names of its signatories. This first appeal carried with it the endorsement of a host of ­house­hold names, including Pickett, Thomas, and Lewis Mumford, as well as antinuclear journalist John Hersey and Eleanor Roo­se­velt, who was by then the chairwoman of the international ­Human Rights Commission. The committee’s intention of consolidating burgeoning public concern about fallout worked. The November ad quickly positioned SANE at the vanguard for the test ban movement. Although not completely separate from the AFSC and previous protest organ­izations, SANE became more prominent than its pre­de­ces­sors. In assuming the leadership of fledgling groups such as Baez’s Peninsula Committee, the Emergency Bay Area Fallout Committee, the Connecticut Committee to Halt Nuclear Testing, the San Diego Society to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and o ­ thers, SANE became a uniting organ­ization that could garner national mainstream attention. Newspapers across the country reprinted the November SANE ad and the series of ads ­those that followed.114 By the summer of 1958, SANE had a membership of around twenty-­five thousand ­people in 130 chapters across the nation.115 By 1959, widespread advocacy for a test ban had expanded outside the bound­aries of American scientific, intellectual, and religious circles and had come to incorporate the voices of grassroots Amer­i­ca. As with e­ arlier campaigns against nuclear testing, SANE’s campaign encountered re­sis­tance. Some journalists thought that the campaign’s claims ­were too emotional and sensationalist.116 In April 1958, Time published a feature article titled “How Sane the SANE?” that characterized the organ­ization’s objectives as being the same as “what the sworn enemies of religion, liberty and peace itself ” hoped to accomplish.117 Some individuals disagreed with SANE’s risk assessment and believed that Americans—­children included—­had more to fear from the fall of democracy in the world than fallout from peacetime testing.118 However controversial, SANE’s 1957 ad cemented the connection not only between fallout and a test ban but also with world peace through disarmament.

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Although SANE’s influence in late 1950s antinuclear activism is undeniable, it is also impor­tant to identify ways that the committee drew upon similar attitudes emerging from other corners of American public culture. In the months leading up to its first publication, SANE’s leadership made a conscious decision to frame a test ban as a moral question, not one explic­itly tied to a scientific or po­liti­cal arguments. But as we have seen, by the summer of 1957 some out­spoken American citizens had already been adopting a moral framework for understanding the fallout threat rather than one based on frustratingly contradictory scientific explanations. Likewise, concerns for ­children, nutrition, and American food products had been a part of public discussions since at least late 1956, when Adlai Stevenson incorporated the concern into his bid for the presidency. For the next several years, concerned parents voiced fears about the health of their ­children and their ­children’s ­children. Another full-­page SANE ad in April 1958 consolidated preexisting concerns, demanding that “we must stop the contamination of the air, the milk ­children drink, the food we eat.”119 In this sense, some of SANE’s success can be attributed to its ability to amplify grassroots claims about individual safety and federal responsibility. As attention to fallout ran the gamut from individual grassroots activism to power­ful national organ­izations, its discussion repeatedly returned to a paradox in demo­cratic governance in the Atomic Age: how could a demo­cratic state sacrifice the safety of its subjects with the very activities that leaders claimed would guarantee public safety? Self-­help, the dominant rhe­toric used to prescribe safety for civilians in the event of an attack, could do nothing to protect Americans from the dangers of nuclear fallout from weapons testing. As public pressure for a test ban mounted, policymakers instead turned to other strategies in an attempt to manage public opinion. Arguing that they ­were acting in the interest of public safety, many federal leaders defended the continuation of nuclear testing by framing it as a Cold War necessity.120 Tests, they argued, allowed the United States to maintain a diplomatic upper hand on the international stage. The possession and development of nuclear arms ensured civilian safety b­ ecause the threat of massive retaliation was the only way to prevent global war. ­These leaders use a familiar language of arms race competition to suggest that the status quo be maintained. Indeed, their rhe­toric made ­little distinction between the cessation of tests and disarmament more broadly. Similarly, they used familiar tropes of McCarthyism to accuse test ban supporters of naïveté, a lack of patriotism, and communist sympathies. While ­these strategies found resonance among some American citizens, the po­liti­cal weight of anticommunism had subsided

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somewhat by the end of the de­cade and no longer carried the threat of show ­trials and public hearings. By reviving e­ arlier arguments about testing, nuclear diplomacy, and Cold War urgency, test supporters suggested that l­ittle had changed in the years since ­Castle Bravo. When well-­known nuclear officials such as Edward Teller or Willard Libby discussed the science of fallout, they stuck to a remarkably consistent message throughout the late 1950s: fallout is not especially dangerous. For them, fallout was an acceptable—­and almost negligible—­risk that did not outweigh the need to maintain a diplomatic course or merit a change in policy. ­Those Americans who supported continued testing used this kind of logic to underpin how they understood the diplomatic situation of the late 1950s as well. They framed the Soviet Union as si­mul­ta­neously calculating, unreasonable, unpredictable, and irrational. Diplomatic agreements for nuclear de-­escalation hinged on trust, something that many Americans ­were not willing to grant to Soviet leadership. Indeed, in public opinion polls conducted prior to 1958, Americans “strongly [opposed] unilateral American [test] cessation while generally approving, by fairly large majorities, a multilateral agreement.”121 As official talks for a test ban gained ground in the final years of the 1950s, the most troubling point of contention was w ­ hether an effective verification system could hold nations to their word, a clear indicator of a similar culture of mistrust characterizing diplomatic decision making. In the context of the global Cold War, the cases for continuing and halting testing ­were both power­f ul. The ­g reat dilemma of fallout was that the unknown—­and what could never be known—­g reatly outweighed certainties. Proponents of continued testing and weapons development argued that nuclear research kept Americans safe by keeping them at the forefront of the arms race. It was unknown ­whether a war would ever come, but pre­sent global safety was a more impor­tant goal than guarding f­ uture individuals against a small chance of harm. What was certain was that if a war should come, many millions would suffer. As one source indicated, “it is in­def­initely preferable to ­gamble with the atomic unknown than to ­gamble against what the Kremlin would do if it ever got a nuclear stranglehold on the world.”122 Nuclear advocates frequently argued that any resulting contamination would still be better than upsetting a fragile nuclear stalemate and bringing the world into nuclear holocaust. Yet an increasing number of Americans used a similar logic to argue just the opposite. For proponents of a test ban, the only certainty was that nuclear tests caused ge­ne­tic changes, however imperceptible or dormant. The possibility of war was unknown and prob­ably unknowable. As writer and science

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phi­los­op­ her C. P. Snow would put it in 1960, “between a risk and a certainty a sane man does not hesitate.”123 In their formal and informal organ­izing, Americans implemented a range of critiques and protest methods. They ­were responsible for organ­izing educational campaigns, circulating and signing petitions, participating in nonviolent demonstrations, sending civilian diplomats to the Soviet Union, and even filing lawsuits against the federal government.124 Through ­these actions, a growing number of Americans protested against nuclear policy and demanded that a new relationship be built between the citizen and the state, one that could better protect civilians and was better suited to the new demands of the Atomic Age. For many Americans concerned about testing, it was clear that if the United States had chosen to fight the Cold War as a means to assure democracy and freedom in the world, the nation would also have to reconcile how demo­cratic governance was changing on the domestic front. Indeed, one of SANE’s 1958 ads ran with the title “No Contamination without Repre­sen­ta­tion,” calling upon a power­f ul tradition of protest against the abuses of government.125 Armed with the knowledge of the threat to personal health, civilians suggested that nuclear policymakers no longer had claims to preventing danger. In fact, it seemed that they had created the unacceptable consequences of war in peacetime. As New Jersey resident Edith McGrin wrote in 1957, “the times are so urgent that the same old way of trusting in armed might must give way to an entirely dif­fer­ent approach.”126 For ­these Americans, the AEC seemed to be sacrificing the health and safety of ­future individuals for a militarized logic that seemed increasingly illogical. Nuclear strategy thus became the shared territory of scientists, peace activists, consumer watchdogs, and a host of new Americans brought into the dissenting fold. The push for a test ban seemed to stand in direct opposition to the core of American Cold War strategy even as Eisenhower and his advisers wrestled with how a ban might be incorporated into their diplomatic policies. The test ban debate thus revealed fractures in American citizens’ willingness to support the Cold War state. As such, their protests—­whether rooted in consumer, ­human, or philosophical rights—­were a po­liti­cal expression of nuclear citizenship.

­Human, Nation, Globe The public debate over fallout and the American nuclear weapons program also incited discussion about citizenship on a wider scale. To understand even the most basic scientific princi­ples of fallout was to recognize the shared experience of e­ very citizen of the planet. Fallout gave activists a means for discussing

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rights on a global scale, paralleling and reflecting the postwar conversation about ­human rights and international governance. As antinuclear advocates defended the rights of individuals to unencumbered access to safety, they raised difficult theoretical questions about sovereignty, authority, and geography. In other words, concerns over fallout gave individuals a new way to conceptualize the relationship between individuals and their local, national, and global communities. On November 12, 1957, the CNVA met in New York City to discuss ­f uture direct-­action disobedience campaigns. Meeting just weeks a­ fter the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, Earth’s first artificial satellite, Reverend A. J. Muste declared that “World War III has already started.” With “the decision to respond to the Rus­sian satellite launching by a stepped up arms competition,” he continued, “we may now have passed from the Cold War stage in which the possibility of peaceful settlement was always in ­people’s minds to the stage where an all out arms race can no longer be halted.”127 Moved by what it identified as a new chapter in the Cold War—­and witnessing growing public support for its ­sister organ­ization, SANE—­the CNVA began planning an intervention that far exceeded the scope of its ­earlier protests. Targeting the next series of nuclear tests, slated for Enewetak Atoll in April, the committee would sail a ship into the heart of the PPG. The CNVA’s ketch, the Golden Rule, set sail for Hawaii in February 1958. The committee publicized the voyage widely, g­ oing so far as to publish in newspapers across the country an open letter to President Eisenhower outlining its plan and also attracting the attention of media, government agencies, and civilians.128 Beset by mechanical prob­lems and last-­minute AEC regulations, ­stopped by court injunctions, and chased briefly by the Coast Guard, the ship unsurprisingly never made it to the PPG. Despite its failure to interrupt the test series, the Golden Rule provoked widespread public discussion, much of it denouncing the act of disobedience. But like the spread of American fallout, the fight against nuclear weapons testing had grown beyond national borders. Although Americans understood fallout to be a prob­lem that affected the entire planet, issues such as food contamination demanded a regionally specific focus on North Amer­i­ca ­because they ­were products of testing at the NTS. But the largest weapons, ­those producing the most fallout, ­were tested at the PPG in the US-­controlled Marshall Islands. As the location of Ivy Mike, C ­ astle Bravo, and 104 other nuclear tests between 1946 and 1963, the PPG was significantly more contaminated than anywhere on the North American continent, and its fallout shadow was more expansive. But the PPG’s location apart from the American homeland raised significant questions about US responsibility to other nations and the world. If the fallout from American nuclear tests

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could not be contained by American borders—or, in the case of the Marshall Islands, an American trust territory—­what responsibility did the United States have to protect the health and well-­being of ­those in foreign lands? The public debate about the meaning of fallout gave such ideas about sovereignty and geography a new meaning.129 Debates over the po­liti­cal and cultural meaning of national sovereignty had come to define philosophical discussions about the postwar order, especially evident in the establishment of the UN. However, in 1945 UN delegates also included a provision for “commissions in the economic and social fields and for the promotion of ­human rights.”130 ­After several years of deliberation, the UN H ­ uman Rights Commission issued the Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Over the following de­cades the UDHR would undergo several revisions, which further delineated conditions that nations must provide for individual citizens, but maintained the centrality of “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the ­human ­family.”131 Historian Samuel Moyn has rightfully argued that the concept of ­human rights was not an “especially prominent idea” in the early Cold War era, despite the resurrected importance of the UDHR in the 1970s and since the end of the Cold War.132 However, debates over fallout and nuclear testing complicate the story slightly. Even if the UDHR—­and the ideological foundations of the UN more generally—­did not create a revolutionary framework for understanding sovereignty and ­human rights in the 1950s and 1960s, ­these concepts appeared with frequency in how Americans discussed the moral consequences of nuclear testing.133 Across the test ban debate, it is evident that nuclear weapons gave concerned Americans—­citizen and activist alike—­a new framework for thinking about the global h ­ uman community and the responsibilities of nations. ­After a brief flirtation with the possibility of UN control of nuclear weapons in 1946–1947, the management of nuclear arsenals became the power of individual nations. However, the idea of the UN as a peacekeeping organ­ization carried symbolic weight for both sides of the test ban debates in the United States. Many federal officials maintained that continued nuclear testing was essential to maintaining a balance of world power. James J. Wadsworth, former NSRB civil defense planner and at the time a US delegate to the UN, argued in 1956 that nuclear testing “contributes to the maintenance of international peace and security, which is a basic [UN] Charter goal.”134 But by the mid-1950s, test ban advocates began using the framework of sovereignty to dispute a nation’s right to conduct nuclear testing. Nuclear fallout had the potential to jeopardize the citizens of other nations, thereby compromising ­those nations’ ability to protect their own citizens and maintain autonomy out-

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side their borders. Critics saw the incongruity inherent in si­mul­ta­neously promoting the UN, an organ­ization that upheld the sovereignty of nations, with emitting dangerous substances into the global atmosphere, thereby imperiling all nations. Test proponents, who insisted that nuclear testing created no additional health risk, naturally dismissed this viewpoint. Nevertheless, prominent test ban advocates continued to use the language of sovereignty to argue that nuclear tests disregarded other nations’ rights and norms of international law. Writing to Senator H. Alexander Smith, George Willoughby, the Quaker activist who would go on to man the Golden Rule, claimed that “it is no more moral for Amer­ic­ a to threaten the lives of other ­peoples through the danger of fall out than it would be for our country to invade another country destroying life and property.”135 By framing fallout clouds as military forces invading other nations, dissenters further blurred the lines between testing as peacetime procedure and an act of war, one of the formal responsibilities of a sovereign entity. ­Legal scholars who had been studying the international consequences of nuclear testing agreed in their own terms, stating the difficulty in establishing that a “geographic quarantine and the physical consequences of thermonuclear tests in the Pacific . . . ​are at a variance with the solemn treaty obligations.”136 Other Americans echoed this rhe­ toric in laymen’s terms. In response to a press release announcing the mission of the Golden Rule, an editorial in the Denver Post called on international law, arguing that “certainly no government could possibly justify forcible removal [of the ketch] on any l­ egal ground; the ­waters of the Pacific are not the property of any country.”137 The territorial ambiguity of oceanic spaces highlighted the troublesome nature of nuclear testing even without an expert background in international law. At the same time as test ban advocates insisted on the global reach of fallout, some also extended the argument to decry the unequal geographic spread of fallout. Using a conception of ­human rights that would have sounded much more familiar to Americans several de­cades l­ater, test ban advocates pointed out that the burden of heavier fallout fell disproportionately on citizens of countries not involved in the Cold War arms race. Immediately ­after the C ­ astle Bravo test, its unexpectedly large fallout radius forced the relocation of not only American ser­vicemen but also several hundred Pacific Islanders living on nearby islands. The AEC spun this situation into a narrative of happy relocation benefiting t­hese residents; a Baltimore Sun article claimed that the relocated Marshallese “never had it so good” ­because of their access to modern housing and better land.138 But the incident demonstrated that geographic proximity to tests became evermore dangerous with the development of H-­bombs. In regard to the American tests in the Pacific, the Soviet tests in Kazakhstan, and

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the British tests in Australia, assumptions that the regions ­were “empty” w ­ ere highly racialized and disregarded local inhabitants.139 By the time the French nuclear program began testing nuclear weapons in the Sahara in 1960, civil rights and antinuclear advocates alike w ­ ere already using the language of nuclear colonization to protest the abuses of indigenous residents in the Global South.140 The dire consequences for nonnuclear nations w ­ ere nowhere more popularly evident for Americans than in the 1957 book and its 1959 film adaptation of On the Beach. The plot follows the last living p­ eople on Earth in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Marooned in Melbourne, Australia, the survivors wait impending death as the radioactive fallout from the war slowly works its way south through the world’s wind and w ­ ater currents.141 Although relying on “World War III” as the catalyst for global annihilation, the drama demonstrates that by the time of the film’s release, fallout had been cemented in the public imagination as a force that could reach the farthest corners of Earth. Writing to the Pittsburgh Post-­Gazette, Helen F. Dice claimed that the film “forces on our unwilling minds the consideration of the possibility of annihilation by the explosion of nuclear weapons, e­ ither directly or as the result of radiation.”142 The narrative si­mul­ta­neously indicts the logic of the arms race while serving as a warning about fallout even in places that have not experienced an attack or perhaps even a test. For test ban advocates, it was easy to connect issues of national sovereignty, international law, and geographic disparities to the rights of individual ­people. As Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, wrote in early 1957, “it is traditional for a nation to accept hardships and risks to defend its national in­de­pen­dence and to further what it considers its national interests; but can a nation—­any nation—­claim the right to impose without consultation, hardships and risks on all other nations? Not u ­ nless its paramount aim is the common interest of all mankind; not ­unless it accepts its responsibility to all men, and not only to its own p­ eople.”143 Fallout weakened the claim that nuclear testing was essential to “the common interest of all mankind.” Indeed, the permeability of geographic bound­aries gave test ban advocates a way to portray fallout as a ­human issue above the concerns of individual states. As longtime antinuclear advocate Walter Lippmann argued, “when all the other nations are liable to the same harm, we have no right, without their consent, to impose the risk upon them.”144 SANE claimed that “none of the differences separating the governments of the world are as impor­tant as the membership of all ­peoples in the h ­ uman f­ amily.”145 More broadly, however, Americans wondered, as Mrs. H. B. Hoffman of Pasadena wrote in 1955, “What pos­si­ble justification can we have for so jeopardizing the ­f uture of the ­human race? ­Isn’t

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this ultimate proof that we must give up our reliance on instruments of death and destruction and replace fear with faith in the instruments of life?”146 A kind of nuclear globalism thus emerged out of fallout tensions. Concerned with the well-­being of the global population, test ban seekers understood the issue as one that was beyond the immediate needs of nation-­states. Once fallout entered the atmosphere, they argued, it became a prob­lem above the control of any state and therefore demanded a supranational or stateless solution. In ­doing so, test ban advocates re­imagined the po­liti­cal contours of the global Cold War. It is perhaps unsurprising that many of the most prominent public figures in the movement for a test ban had supported some version of “one world” government or international control of nuclear weapons during the immediate postwar years. The ­human right to safety and unhampered good health was fundamental to arguments in defense of a test ban and, for many advocates, disarmament in general. Fi­nally, some American test ban groups took the logic one step further, questioning the very utility of the nation-­state in the Atomic Age. The CNVA called upon moral and ­legal authority: “we believe that the natu­ral rights of humanity are above the law of any national state.”147 And as the November 1957 SANE ad put it, “ the sovereignty of the ­human community comes before all ­others—­before the sovereignty of groups, tribes, or nations. In that community, man has natu­ral rights. He has the right to live and grow, to breathe unpoisoned air, to work on uncontaminated soil. He has the right to his sacred nature. If what nations are d­ oing has the effect of destroying t­ hese natu­ ral rights, ­whether by upsetting the delicate balances on which life depends, or fouling the air, or devitalizing the land, or tampering with the ge­ne­tic integrity of man himself; then it becomes necessary for ­people to restrain and tame the nations.”148 Concern for the effects of fallout thus created a new politics, one that questioned national authority in the interest of ­human rights on both the individual and global scales. The same dialogues that connected nuclear fallout to issues of ­human rights and sovereignty in a global context also threw into relief the growing disjuncture between the American state and its citizens. While many of the more philosophical aspects of the test ban debate focused on American tests in the Pacific, the AEC continued to test smaller atomic weapons at the NTS. The Nevada tests ­were literally and figuratively closer to home; they w ­ ere understood to be the source of the radioisotopic contamination of milk and baby teeth and genomes. For concerned Americans, the NTS was a proximate reminder of the federal government’s dubious claims that its nuclear arsenal kept its citizens safe. So long as the United States continued to conduct tests, the nation’s sovereign responsibility to protect its citizens was in question. The test

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ban debates thus provided Americans with a new framework for thinking about individual rights and governing responsibilities. All the same, the fallout controversy did not incite a revolution to cast off the authority of the state. It did, however, foster significant and power­ful currents of doubt as to w ­ hether ­there was room for nuclearization in American democracy. Within several years of the NAS study and the grassroots fallout fervor that followed, nuclear test ban advocates had gained a foothold in American public culture. Policymakers and officials who supported continued testing doubled down, relying on tried-­and-­true arguments for deterrence-­based national security. Ultimately, the test ban debates revealed a fundamental disagreement over what constituted safety for the nation and how to achieve it. ­Behind closed doors, Eisenhower and his national security officials weighed the possibility of a test ban for much of the l­ater 1950s, but l­ittle of t­ hose deliberations made it into public knowledge ­ until a temporary moratorium was announced in Au149 gust 1958. However, what­ever pro­gress the moratorium promised was dashed in the early 1960s when testing resumed in the face of escalating confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the idea of a permanent test ban had gathered enough resonance through the late 1950s and into the early 1960s to culminate in the ­Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. By the early 1960s, the nuclear test ban movement had subsumed disparate sources of concern from a broad contingent of American and international critics. Activists hoped that a test ban would be a first step ­toward longer-­term goals, including nuclear disarmament, pro­gress t­oward decreasing fallout levels, and an assurance of world peace. The push for a test ban also revealed the shifting terrain of cultural citizenship. Nuclear fallout changed the way Americans understood their role as subjects of a nation, what they expected from federal leadership, and the role of global authority in negotiating ­these relationships. Thus, using familiar discourses about rights, power, and responsibility, test ban advocates constructed a new definition of nuclear citizenship. Public engagement with the fallout issue had no small part in making a test ban come to pass. Fallout galvanized citizens like no other aspect of the nuclear threat and gave Americans a language for expressing ideas of ­human solidarity. According to test ban advocates, nuclear weapons testing si­mul­ta­neously united all ­people across borders and problematized the po­liti­cal structures that separated them. The awareness of fallout gave civilians cause to doubt the wisdom of Cold War policymakers in areas outside of nuclear weapons testing as well. Chapter 5 ­will examine how public faith in civil defense waned concurrently in the late 1950s and early 1960s even as federal support for civil defense reached its zenith.

C h a p te r   5

Atomic Amer­i­ca The Expert Public and Nuclear Dissent

In March 1960, Eileen D. Peck of Watertown, New York, wrote a letter to Governor Nelson Rocke­fel­ler. Peck and her husband had been following Rocke­fel­ler’s campaign for fallout shelters closely but had developed several questions. “If the fallout is so heavy that we must have such shelters,” Peck wondered, “­won’t the earth be contaminated—­and all the foods grown in the soil? Also w ­ on’t the animals be poisoned so as to be unfit for consumption?” By the early 1960s, civil defense and concerns about fallout had become thoroughly aligned, thanks in large part to official civil defense campaigns to promote fallout shelters. Yet the public availability of information about the dangers of fallout that emerged in the second half of the 1950s—­ much of which originated from outside the control of the Atomic Energy Commission and civil defense offices—­had also created a public that was much better equipped to recognize the contradictions undergirding civil defense recommendations. Though Peck hoped that her “fears [­were] the result of too much science-­fiction,” her query speaks to a growing skepticism about civil defense efforts. A ­ fter all, as she wrote, “if we, in our shelters survive a heavy fallout, then emerge, only find that the only unpoisoned edibles are each other—­well! I think one might say it would be an unhealthy situation.”1 American interest in civil defense waxed and waned against a backdrop of increasing public knowledge about the dangers of fallout and a rapidly changing Cold War threat environment. When international crises erupted, public 135

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calls for civil defense mea­sures increased and then fizzled as tensions subsided.2 When the Cold War seemed to be heating up in the early 1960s, the renewed clamor for effective civil defense programs was predictable. In September 1961 ­after months of observing a crisis escalate in Berlin, 53 ­percent of Americans reported that they expected a war within five years, up from only 19 ­percent just two years e­ arlier.3 By then, however, the face of what a f­ uture war might look like had changed dramatically from early 1950s assumptions: the thermonuclear revolution and massive stockpiling of weapons expanded the scale of war dramatically. As President John F. Kennedy told the nation that “we seek peace—­but we ­will not surrender,” observers noted the mounting dangers.4 A letter writer to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked, “Does anyone doubt that a [military defense of Berlin] would result in the obliteration of Berlin and most of the cities of the northern hemi­sphere? But still the two ­great political-­military machines scream forward ­toward a fatal rendezvous on the highway of history.”5 Imagining that “fatal rendezvous” had grown more troubling with ­every passing year. In 1960’s On Thermonuclear War, RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn claimed that in a worst-­case scenario, American casualties could reach 160 million—at a time when the entire population was just ­under 180 million.6 Kahn’s controversial claim was certainly on the high end of the hundreds if not thousands of official and unofficial casualty predictions available to the American public during the 1950s and 1960s. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) was for a time a primary source for such estimates. But it became obvious that even rosy predictions—20 million hy­po­thet­i­cal deaths in 1956’s nationwide test exercise—­still might lead to panic.7 Although the national office continued to run annual drills, casualty predictions quietly slipped from public materials by the ­later 1950s. Casualty estimates from other sources ran the gamut from gross underestimations to hyperbolic exaggerations. But the grim task of evaluating hy­po­thet­ic­ al casualty rates belied the fact that so many variables outside the control of the military—­time of day of the attack and weather patterns, for example—­could account for a margin of error in the millions. For some experts, the shocking casualty predictions only amplified their calls for more effective civil defense, a program that had been consistently underfunded and hamstrung by its federalist mandate throughout the 1950s. Kahn himself argued that broad-­based civil defense and other mea­sures could reduce the predicted casualty rate to as low as three million.8 Edward Teller, a staunch advocate for expanding arsenals, also advocated for civil defense throughout the Cold War.9 Kahn and Teller saw civil defense as an asset to deterrence and an additional way of “hardening” not only military assets but



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also the civilian population. By 1960 rising diplomatic tensions, fears of the United States “falling ­behind” in the arms race, a pos­si­ble increase in the likelihood of war, and a new administration on its way to Washington all seemed to point to an opportunity to reimagine a more effective civil defense plan for the United States. In his first year in office, President Kennedy gave considerably more support to national civil defense and public safety than had his pre­de­ces­sors. Kennedy was able to secure a hefty bud­get line for a new civil defense mandate, including a nationwide survey of current and potential nuclear shelters. His open letter in a September 1961 issue of Life magazine promised Americans that “the government is moving to improve the protection afforded you in your communities through civil defense.”10 When Kennedy spoke of civil defense, however, it was not a ­matter of military strategy or deterrence theory. Rather, his messaging invoked ideas of community, responsibility, and personal protection. It was a rhe­toric revived from the earliest days of nuclear civil defense in the United States. However, despite new funding, renewed press attention, high-­profile speeches, and a revamped program, Kennedy’s civil defense efforts could not get off the ground. How, then, do we explain why a public that had generally supported the idea of civil defense throughout the 1950s could turn away from it at a time when nuclear war seemed most imminent?11 Put more simply, why did Americans reject civil defense?12 This question has come to define the historical examination of Cold War civil defense. In the concluding chapter that follows I ­will take cues from ­these ­earlier assessments, but I push the question further: how did Americans citizens come to formulate new visions for collective survival in the Atomic Age? And how did the experience of living ­under the looming threat of nuclear death for over a de­cade rewrite what Americans expected of their nation? Framed as such, we can begin to understand nuclear survival as a story not exclusively of empty promises or bad faith policies but also urgent civic negotiation. Public faith in civil defense strategies had declined drastically by the early 1960s. By then, the public had been long aware of the dangers of testing fallout, the harsh realities of thermonuclear warfare and massive retaliation strategies, and the inadequacy of policies purported to ensure survival. Indeed, policymakers faced mounting criticism of civil defense policies: at best, the scale of the national civil defense program was insufficient. Echoing calls from as early as the late 1940s, some Americans continued to demand large-­scale federally financed survival assurances. When critics cast civil defense in its worst light, however, federal civil defense policy seemed negligent and intentionally deceptive. Some of the same individuals and groups that had objected

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to nuclear weapons testing in years past came to find civil defense just as reprehensible and mobilized accordingly, using forms of passive re­sis­tance and active protest. But the public pushback against civil defense was not simply an attack on federal officials and civil defense planners or on the practical sufficiency of their efforts. As civil defense once again took a prominent place on the public stage in the early 1960s, the conversation became entrenched in moral, philosophical, and even existential issues. The details of civil defense policy—­public versus private shelters and debates over survivability and its relationship to nuclear diplomacy—­revealed uncomfortable tensions in how Americans i­magined the ­f uture of their nation. In assuring Americans that they could survive nuclear war through proper civil defense and in framing civil defense practices as a civic duty, federal leaders had built a fragile and contingent link between survival and good citizenship. For over a de­cade, policymakers had urged Americans to participate in civil defense to ensure their own survival. Indeed, even in the early 1960s policymakers clung to an idea that emerged over a de­cade ­earlier that “­there need not be a Hiroshima, USA.”13 But by the end of the 1950s, it had become apparent that if a war came many Americans would not survive ­whether they met their end in the fireball, from postattack radiation, or, as new currents of public discussion raised, at the hands of their defensive neighbors. Nor would such a cost be distributed equally over differences in geography, race, and class. Civil defense, critics charged, only served to reify structures of exclusion. As soon as a significant portion of Americans no longer believed that the state’s solution to collective survival was tenable, they began to put their own safety above the needs of the state, often in or­ga­nized and sophisticated ways. Without a guarantee of survival, the promise under­lying nuclear citizenship broke down: if the state could provide no legitimate means of protecting its civilians, notions of civic duty could no longer compel civilians to participate in civil defense. Despite the fact that federal leaders continued to promote civil defense as a mea­sure of civic responsibility, many civilians separated the rubric of citizenship from planning for survival. They sought survival through other means, most often by pushing back against the state apparatus that created the threat in the first place. Feeling unwilling to effect or incapable of effecting meaningful change in policy, some went further and simply declared that survival in the postwar world was no longer desirable. If nuclear war came, they did not want to live to see it through. Between skepticism about civil defense, ambivalence over the meaning of nuclear science and nuclear weapons in a democracy, and deep-­seated concerns about fallout for the nation and the world, t­ here ­were a number of dif­fer­ent ways Americans became antinuclear advocates.



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For many critics of nuclearization, the only guaranteed method to ensure survival was peace. But “peace,” of course, was a nebulous term. At times peace meant disarmament, the abolition of weapons of mass destruction, or a weapons test ban. At other times peace meant restoring diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union or ending proxy conflicts. In all of ­these scenarios, however, nuclear weapons—­the teeth to the Cold War conflict—­were defined as the key prob­lem. Viewed in this framework, the existence of nuclear weapons began to erode the logic of international diplomatic policy and public safety programs at home.14 The crises in Berlin and ­later Cuba seemed to prove the illogic of nuclear war rather than being a rationale for civil defense and survival procedures. In addition, antinuclear sentiment explains why public pressure continued for a test ban treaty, partially realized with the ­Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) of 1963. Many advocates saw the LTBT as a stepping-­stone ­toward total disarmament while also resolving the immediate peacetime worry over fallout contamination from testing. But the growing antinuclear movement also explains why civil defense lost mainstream support from the public and policymakers. By the early 1960s, Americans increasingly expressed a vision of nuclear citizenship that renounced the nuclear entirely, calling for peace, not civil defense or deterrence but rather peace, as the antidote to the prob­lem of survival in the Atomic Age.

Civil Defense Policies in the 1950s Throughout the early 1950s, federal civil defense policy was mired in partisan maneuvering, funding ­battles, and a lack of direction.15 The FCDA had strug­ gled to find authority within the federal government since its creation in 1951. Congress consistently neglected to fund its programs, despite giving lip ser­ vice to their importance, in ­favor of financing offensive weapons programs. As had been the case prior to the FCDA’s establishment, state and city leaders continued to complain that the federal government was giving l­ ittle attention to their localized needs. Some federal leaders also worried that the FCDA appeared to be relegated to the periphery of federal power. The FCDA’s relocation to B ­ attle Creek, Michigan, in 1954 only furthered its apparent distance from the operations and authority of the federal government. Indeed, the logic ­behind the relocation was to move the office away from Washington, DC’s target zone so that the FCDA could continue operations if an attack occurred. However, some critics argued that the move would be “a tragic error . . . ​ and to so widely separate it from all [other agencies in Washington] would only increase the gap that already exists.”16 The FCDA’s position within the federal structure thus was constantly in flux during ­these years.

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Over the course of the 1950s, federal strategies for civil defense protection took several forms. At its inception in 1951, the FCDA endorsed a program focused on a national system of public bomb shelters. Despite Director Millard Caldwell’s advocacy for shelters, the program proved wildly unpop­u­lar in Congress. The cost of such a program would be exorbitant, but public sheltering was also at odds with the idea of self-­help civil defense, a logic that emerged out of necessity in the years leading up to the creation of the FCDA. Caldwell’s previous position as a segregationist governor of Florida also proved to be a liability for the early FCDA and a federal government negotiating the civil rights movement.17 For a host of reasons, public bomb shelters never got off the ground, and the FCDA looked to other options. Between 1953 and 1954 as part of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “New Look” and ­under the leadership of newly appointed director Val Peterson, the FCDA shifted ­toward massive urban evacuation as a primary civil defense strategy (figure 8).18 New weapons drove a final nail in the coffin of shelter strategy: the size and power of thermonuclear blasts seemed to render the bomb shelter useless. Unlike bomb shelters, evacuation was appealing to federal lawmakers b­ ecause it maintained an emphasis on self-­help and individual responsibility while placing the planning burden squarely on the shoulders of local officials. The thermonuclear revolution, however, also opened evacuation-­based civil defense strategies to significant criticism. In the face of large thermonuclear explosions with a wider blast radius, evacuation plans stood ­little chance of success. Even allowing for an optimistic estimate of advanced warning, it was clear that civilians living close to the epicenter of a nuclear strike would have to cover too much ground too quickly to escape harm’s way. This was to say nothing of the complex logistical effort necessary to coordinate a large urban center’s evacuation with its surrounding regions, areas that would suddenly need to support a massive influx of refugees. With a few notable exceptions, evacuation planning demanded energy and time that large cities chose not to commit to the cause. In the event of a nuclear strike, city centers ­were, as had long been assumed, doomed. Led by Representative Chester (Chet) Holifield, dissenters in the House began to introduce legislation to rethink national civil defense as early as the spring of 1954. As he neared the end of his first term, President Eisenhower also recognized that “our w ­ hole civil defense effort needs both strengthening and modernizing. This need arises not from any increase in international tensions but, rather, from the recent spectacular developments in weapons and methods of delivery.”19 A year ­earlier in 1955, Eisenhower had created the Advisory Committee on Government Organ­ization to study the orga­nizational structure of civil defense and how it could be better integrated into federal functions.20

Figure 8. ​Cover of 4 Wheels to Survival informational pamphlet. This evacuation guide encourages Americans to keep their f­ amily automobile in good operational order so it can be used not only as transport but also to provide temporary shelter, radio access, and a stockpile of supplies. While this and similar pamphlets remained in circulation for years, the thermonuclear revolution quickly rendered evacuation-­based civil defense moot. Federal Civil Defense Administration, 4 Wheels to Survival (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1955). Image courtesy of the Ohio History Connection, State Archives Series 151, https://­ohiomemory​.­org​ /­digital​/­collection​/­p267401coll32​/­id​/­2162.

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Following the committee’s recommendations, Eisenhower invited the director of the FCDA to f­uture cabinet meetings and called for federal changes that would enable the FCDA to have “the prestige and effectiveness . . . ​equal to the heavy responsibility it holds.”21 He called upon Congress in 1956 to continue reviewing national programs and to propose appropriate amendments to the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950. Eisenhower’s civil defense rhe­toric in ­these years largely sidestepped the logistical prob­lems of evacuation as well as the concurrent upsurge in public awareness of the dangers of fallout. The congressional hearings that followed, however, took on headfirst the issues of nuclear war, public safety, evacuation, and sheltering. In 1956 and 1957, Holifield revived congressional hearings on the issue of civil defense, based at least in part on his belief that evacuation planning was infeasible. The lengthy and sometimes contentious hearings constituted a wide-­ranging assessment of civil defense strategies, especially in light of thermonuclear war and fallout considerations. Following the hearings, he introduced legislation that provided at least $20 billion to invest in a national shelter program. By the end of the year the FCDA aligned itself with Holifield’s recommendation, proposing its own $32 billion shelter program. Having thoroughly repudiated the effectiveness of evacuation, civil defense officials returned to a focus on shelters, a program that had proven so unpop­u­ lar just five years e­ arlier.22 The ongoing Cold War arms race also served to condition calls for improved civil defense capacities. In 1957 the Soviet Union successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile, followed by the successful launch of Sputnik 1 in October. ­Earlier that year, Eisenhower commissioned Horace Rowan Gaither, a trustee of the RAND Corporation, to lead a committee to reassess broad defense strategy. The resulting Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age, known as the Gaither Report, concluded that not only did the United States lag ­behind the Soviet Union in weapons capabilities, but also “passive defense programs now in being and programmed for the f­ uture w ­ ill afford no significant protection to the civil population.”23 Although the report is generally associated with the reification of deterrence theory and “missile gap” thinking, it also acknowledged that “active defense cannot alone provide adequate protection to the civilian population.”24 Although not as high a priority as offensive capabilities, the report recommended that the United States funnel $25 billion in federal funding into fallout shelter construction and an enhanced urban defense system.25 Yet despite the findings of Congress, the FCDA, and Eisenhower’s own exploratory committee, the president ultimately rejected an expansion of the civil defense program. Instead, to eliminate “a serious overlap among agen-



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cies carry­ing on [civil defense] leadership and planning functions,” Eisenhower consolidated the national-­level civil defense program in 1958, relocating it to the Executive Office of the President ­under the name Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM).26 The move constituted fiscal pragmatism—it was likely the most eco­nom­ical option on the ­table—­and was part of a larger mission to make federal agencies more streamlined and efficient. In practice, the reor­ga­ni­za­tion also clarified and ­limited the pro­cess by which states and localities could receive federal funds for civil defense personnel, administrative costs, and education. Shelters, however, ­were not forgotten entirely. The OCDM’s foremost accomplishment in its first year was the release of the National Plan for Civil Defense. One of the forty ele­ments of the plan was the National Shelter Policy, which initiated several exploratory studies while “urging that the property owner provide fallout protection on his premises.”27 While the OCDM reported an initial increase in public attention to the issue of civil defense and shelters, a substantial federal expenditure on a shelter-­building campaign was not to be. For fiscal year 1960 the OCDM was only awarded $2.5 million for shelters, all of which was earmarked for prototype development. By comparison, the Department of Defense (DOD) spent $41.2 billion on military functions that year.28 While the Gaither Report had suggested that passive defense play a secondary role, this is not the bud­getary relationship the committee had in mind. The reor­ga­ni­za­tion of civil defense into the OCDM sounded the death knell of evacuation strategy and heralded the reemergence of shelter strategies. But unlike in ­earlier years, by 1957 official civil defense efforts turned to an emphasis on fallout shelters: areas of refuge designed to protect civilians from the effects of fallout during and ­after a strike. Fallout shelters could not withstand significant blast pressure, but they could offer radiological safety for civilians outside the immediate zone of destruction. The Gaither Report noted that fallout shelters—­not blast shelters—­yielded the best return on investment, mea­sured by a technocratic calculation of civilian lives spared versus dollars spent (figure 9).29 Even still, the report held a grim view of the ­whole enterprise. “Of all programs,” the committee cautioned, “none offers absolute protection, and even with a prohibitively expensive program we must anticipate heavy casualties if we are attacked.”30 As fallout shelters came to eclipse all other forms of civil defense strategy in the years that followed, strategists used their insufficiency and high cost to bolster support for deterrence and active defense mea­sures. As civil defense recommendations officially transitioned from bomb shelter to evacuation to fallout shelter, l­ ittle changed in the rest of the established

Figure 9. ​“Shelter Programs: Effectiveness vs. Cost,” inset from Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age [the Gaither Report]. This chart quantifies the differences in cost and effectiveness across three types of hy­po­thet­i­cal attacks and four levels of shelter hardening (including both fallout shelters and dif­fer­ent grades and locations of blast shelters). While the report’s writers recommend an extensive national fallout shelter plan, they note the diminishing returns—­ measured in lives saved versus cost—of more expensive blast shelters. Security Resources Panel of the Scientific Advisory Committee, 1957. Declassified in 1973.



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lexicon of civil defense. Even for Holifield and other advocates of an expanded federal system of civil defense, self-­help had remarkable staying power. ­After breaking from Eisenhower’s administrative lead, the FCDA still called its 1956 shelter plan “subsidized self-­help.”31 By the late 1950s, civil defense materials echoed self-­help materials from ­earlier in the de­cade: educational materials told Americans that it was their responsibility as citizens to construct fallout shelters in their own home at their own expense. Civil defense once again took on a new bureaucratic form ­after John F. Kennedy became president. Kennedy, who had decried the so-­called missile gap between the Soviet Union and the United States during his presidential campaign, also entered office with an aggressive stance on civil defense. In May of his first year in office, Kennedy stated that “one major ele­ment of the national security program which this nation has never squarely faced up to is civil defense.”32 Two months ­later as a response to the rapidly escalating crisis in Berlin, Kennedy once again reor­ga­nized civil defense activities within the DOD as the Office of Civil Defense (OCD). Against the backdrop of stepped-up militarization and defense spending in July 1961, Kennedy said flatly that to ignore civil defense “would be a failure of responsibility.”33 A majority-­Democrat Congress readily approved Kennedy’s $207.6 million supplementary bud­get request for civil defense. In its reconstituted form, the OCD tried to take on an air of authority that its pre­de­ces­sor agencies had failed to gain. Its orga­nizational home within the DOD suggested that “civil defense must be an integral part of the total national defense.”34 Moreover, federal civil defense operations ­were brought back to Washington, DC, ­after years in ­Battle Creek. ­These logistical changes carried the symbolic value of reinvigorated prioritization and a sense of urgency. In its first year, the OCD launched an ambitious plan to identify, procure, and stock 235 million fallout shelter spaces by 1967. Civil defense administrators hoped to meet this goal by identifying existing shelter spaces and establishing a series of incentive programs designed to encourage shelter construction in federal buildings, civic spaces, and private structures. In its first year, over half of the OCD’s nearly $248.6 million in expenditures went ­toward shelter surveys and stocking supplies in existing spaces.35 The same year, the OCD designed and awarded contracts for the production of 1.4 million metal fallout shelter marker signs, the ubiquitous black and yellow Cold War icon that would persist on public buildings for de­cades to come.36 In an appeal to the public for his new program, Kennedy published an open letter to American citizens in Life in early September 1961. “­There is much that you can do to protect yourself,” he wrote, “and in ­doing so strengthen your nation.” The same issue of Life ran a series of articles and photo­g raphs about

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f­ amily fallout shelters and made the controversial claim that ninety-­seven out of one hundred Americans could be saved if they built shelters. Using familiar rhe­toric that conflated self-­help civil defense with civic duty, Kennedy called upon the American public to continue to build ­family fallout shelters.37 His ongoing emphasis on shelter construction created a marked rise in public interest in civil defense during the five-­month crisis in Berlin. However, Kennedy’s plans created deep rifts in public opinion, and over the coming months much ink would be spilled over the benefits and costs of fallout shelters. Aside from reinvigorated rhe­toric, Kennedy’s civil defense plan led to ­little recognizable operational change during the summer of 1961 and a­ fter. Critics accused the Kennedy administration of being “caught off guard [and] unprepared for the type of confusion and fear that has spread across the country” following the president’s speeches on the need for civil defense.38 This renewed public interest could have led to an energetic reconsideration of civil defense in the United States, but as historian Kenneth D. Rose puts it, “­these halcyon days [of civil defense] would be short-­lived.”39 In the months and years leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil defense took largely the same form as it had since its inception: a federal advisory program that remained almost entirely dependent on civilian participation guided and funded by local agencies. And as in years past, critics—­both ­those in support of an expanded civil defense program and ­those who wanted to abandon it outright—­continued to identify civil defense as an ongoing unmanageable bureaucratic prob­lem.

Authority over Survival Across the 1950s and into the Kennedy years, civil defense agencies strug­gled to maintain authority as credible resources for ensuring survival. In the span of just ten years, the evolution of nuclear weapons systems forced federal civil defense officials to make significant changes to their overarching recommendations. The moves from bomb shelters to evacuation to fallout shelters demonstrates how much trial and error was involved in early civil defense policy. But as official policy changed, leaders tried to find creative ways to adapt an existing philosophy of self-­help civil defense rather than abandon it entirely. As policymakers developed new incentives and arguments to try to engage the public in civil defense practices, they faced increasing criticism. What­ever weaknesses existed in civil defense planning, ­after all, would account for the deaths of millions of Americans if war should come. The unequal burden of loss of life became a source of resentment and protest. As Senator Stephen M. Young argued in 1960, “public apathy . . . ​is rapidly burgeoning into widespread pub-



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lic resentment.”40 From apathy to outright refusal, Americans mounted a growing critique of the logic of civil defense recommendations and the authority of t­ hose formulating and endorsing them. Civil defense leaders throughout the postwar period faced the perennial prob­lem of convincing the public to participate in training and educational programs. However, try they did. In fiscal year 1959, its peak year of publication distribution, the OCDM distributed 106,127,403 guides, handbooks, exhibits and posters, promotional pamphlets, training bulletins, and reports. This number presumably does not include printed material made available to private publishers to reprint and distribute, as had been common in the early 1950s. Between 1950 and the end of fiscal year 1961, just over 500,000,000 publication copies had been distributed or sold.41 Despite countless pamphlets and printed lit­er­a­ture distributed to millions of Americans, many of which recommended ­family fallout shelters, few Americans took the initiative to prepare their own homes with shelters.42 It is difficult to gauge how many Americans stockpiled food and supplies, an even lower cost of entry into civil defense preparation. It is likely that more than a few Americans kept extra cans of food and containers of ­water on hand, but such actions are lost to the historical rec­ord. What the archival rec­ord does reveal, however, is a constant and persisting call from civil defense leaders for more Americans to participate in civil defense. Effective civil defense depended on the participation of a critical mass of Americans, a quota that policymakers never seemed to be able to meet. For policymakers, public apathy was the largest impediment—­and the easiest scapegoat—­for the failures of the program. By the late 1950s civil defense planners began defending their public safety policies in a new way, identifying them as explic­itly utilitarian. They advocated for what they saw as the best pos­si­ble solution for the greatest number of ­people: the promise that some, if not all or most, of the American public would survive a nuclear war. Eisenhower made repeated claims during the final years of his presidency that “fallout shelters offer the best single non-­military defense mea­sure for the protection of the greatest number of p­ eople.”43 ­These messages, however, belied the real­ity that Americans—­certainly millions of them—­would die in the event of a prolonged war. Still, accepting casualties as a given, policymakers insisted that nuclear war could be won. How, given that Americans increasingly understood that nuclear war could only be won at the expense of millions of American lives, did civil defense proponents try to convince Americans to build f­amily fallout shelters? A number of states proposed or passed tax incentives for individuals, businesses, and industries that constructed fallout shelters. Several cities and states also had mandatory civil defense drills, but even so, participation tended to be inconsistent.

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Indeed, even in urban high-­rises with active building civil defense committees, business operations trumped participation in citywide drills. In 1961, RCA’s civil defense warden directed employees on several floors of Rocke­fel­ler Center to sit out New York City’s scheduled citywide drill. Instead, the warden asked employees to “carry on your business as usual [but] stay away from the win­dows, please,” so as to not draw attention to their nonparticipation.44 Even government workers in Washington, DC, arguably the individuals at the top of federal protection ledgers, had a poor track rec­ord for participating in civil defense drills. In 1955, Congress and the US Supreme Court remained in session for the annual nationwide Operation Alert exercises.45 Other states took more drastic legislative action to spur public participation in civil defense. In a controversial 1959 platform that gained national attention, New York governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler proposed legislation that would require ­every property owner in the state to build his or her own shelter. The controversial program received significant re­sis­tance from New York City residents and legislators in Albany.46 While Rocke­fel­ler abandoned the initial legislation, the state assembly eventually passed a $100 million proposal mandating that all public schools build fallout shelters. A host of students, parents, teachers, and school administrators met this law—­and similar ones outside of New York—­with equal vehemence, citing it as a misuse of public funds, criticizing its potential to “delude p­ eople into accepting the inevitability of disaster,” and condemning its general “psychological impact.”47 Far from calming public anx­ie­ ties, such programs seemed only to exacerbate public mistrust in civil defense strategies. Some state-­level leaders vigorously promoted the feasibility, desirability, and value of building home fallout shelters in an effort to raise public opinion of civil defense. Several governors built fallout shelters in their executive mansions, emphasizing their affordability—­they built theirs to thrifty OCDM specifications—to ­counter claims that leadership was out of touch with the financial constraints of average Americans.48 To illustrate the comforts and features of shelters, Governor Rocke­fel­ler held a press event in a mock shelter in a bank’s shop front win­dow on 6th Ave­nue in New York City. Seated next to a first aid kit, a lantern, and canned food—­and in another staged scene, next to two ­children tucked into bunk bed cots—­Rockefeller smiled as observers peered through the win­dow. A few weeks ­later, he appeared in a similar space for an interview on the ­Today Show. Public officials all over the nation held similar press events to promote civil defense infrastructure.49 Yet for many Americans, the most basic prob­lem with ­family fallout shelter policy was its cost.50 One parent asked, “When you have to choose between



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building a shelter which might save your ­family in a pos­si­ble attack, and sending your son to college, what do you do?”51 Despite building costs quoted in civil defense publications, the cost of f­ amily fallout shelters varied enormously. Official federal civil defense materials estimated that an inexpensive but effective shelter could be built for $150.52 A few months ­later, the Buffalo Eve­ning News declared that the OCDM estimates in 1959’s The ­Family Fallout Shelter for hiring a contractor to build a four-­person shelter were underpriced by a ­factor of almost three. On a do-­it-­yourself basis, the Buffalo Eve­ning News found, the OCDM’s estimates w ­ ere 60 ­percent too low.53 Even if Americans chose to build a shelter, to some it seemed like wasted square footage. In response to this specific concern, in 1960 the American Institute of Decorators devised a multipurpose “rumpus room” shelter designed to be used for exercise and play during peacetime. It was estimated to cost $2,500 at a time when the median home value in the United States was $11,900.54 Even for Americans who might be able to afford the space and means to build or buy a shelter, many chose not to do so. In one case, a Detroit real estate com­pany that outfitted a housing development with top-­of-­the-­line shelters had difficulty convincing buyers of their utility. A news blurb reported that “house­wives . . . ​thought the shelters stuffy, oppressive, useless, and a waste of money.” When the builders began marketing the shelter spaces as wine cellars, however, “sales zoomed.”55 While the builder in the lighthearted “Wine before Bombs” article seems to have made lemonade from lemons, it is worth considering that some Americans simply did not want to be reminded of the potential horrors of war in their own home.56 Economic and practical concerns about civil defense weighed especially heavi­ly on urban Americans. Some rental residents worried that landlords would not abide by regulations and provide tenants with shelters or would pass on the costs of constructing such areas to tenants by raising rents. Cities faced another irony too: the areas of the nation with the densest population w ­ ere the presumed likeliest targets. As an engineer in New York state pointed out, urban Americans needed more fortified shelters that ­were much more expensive to build. He cited Jamaica, New York, about ten miles from Midtown Manhattan, as an example. Only “a hardened, hermetically sealed shelter would serve the purpose,” he argued, and such shelters would come at a much greater cost to t­ hese residents. In other words, survival would be significantly more expensive to ensure for ­those who lived in cities than for t­ hose who lived outside of them.57 As another civilian asked, comparing inner cities with their wealthier suburbs, “are poor districts less worth ‘saving’? . . . ​What about New York City? Is it written off ?”58 At a moment when the racial and economic

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disparities between American cities and surrounding areas ­were widening, ­these ­were questions that officials in Albany and Washington, DC, simply could not answer.59 For Black communities, especially ­those in American cities, skepticism about nuclear survival had a long pre­ce­dent.60 Despite the appointment of civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune to the FCDA’s advisory council in the early 1950s, the FCDA’s rec­ord on racial equality was tarnished from the start by the segregationist attitudes of its first director, Millard Caldwell. When Caldwell was sworn in as director of the FCDA in 1951, Clarence Mitchell, director of the Washington, DC, NAACP Bureau, warned that the American ­legal system would not work “quickly enough to overrule capricious decisions based on race that Mr.  Caldwell might make.”61 The NAACP’s campaign against Caldwell’s appointment catalyzed the earliest or­ga­nized protest against the FCDA, especially in large cities.62 As the de­cade went on, the FCDA, the OCDM, and the OCD produced advisory materials that depicted almost exclusively white, suburban, and middle-­class citizenry. Meanwhile, civil rights continued to constitute a major criticism of civil defense policies, and outcry over the empty promises of survival for Black Americans persisted well into the 1960s.63 Concerns about racial exclusion and urban disparities plagued ­every phase of civil defense planning over the course of the early Cold War: from the specter of segregated bomb shelters during and ­after Caldwell’s tenure to the geographic, economic, and housing disparities that rendered evacuation and fallout sheltering all but impossible for urban residents, it was clear that “Jim Crow would survive a nuclear attack,” as historian Laura McEnaney has written.64 By the end of the 1950s, Black activists had established a clear link between the civil rights strug­gle and the failings of civil defense. Although other groups have taken a central place in the history of civil defense protest, early Black activism was foundational to positioning survival as a ­matter of rights and equality.65 American cities continued to provide the backdrop for or­ga­nized civil defense protest as it emerged among other critical groups through the 1950s. Indeed, public spaces became vis­i­ble grounds for testing the authority of federal civil defense planners. Beginning in 1954, the FCDA instituted annual Operation Alert (or Opal) drills, which simulated a nationwide attack and w ­ ere designed to put emergency response systems into practice. But ­these exercises quickly became a flashpoint for protest. As early as 1955 pacifists, ­labor leaders, and ­others ­were arrested for noncompliance during ­these annual mandatory drills, something that continued for the rest of the de­cade. Their demonstrations in public spaces—on city streets, in front of Atomic Energy Commission facili-



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ties, and on military sites—­made for small-­scale media spectacles that served to amplify the protesters’ messages. Activist organ­izations celebrated the efficacy of such nonviolent demonstrations, chronicling attendance statistics, arrest reports, and public reactions in publications to further their cause.66 But by the late 1950s, or­ga­nized civil defense protest began to emerge from still other corners of society. Mary Sharmat and Janice Smith, two New York City ­mothers, protested the city’s 1959 Operation Alert drill, highlighting the danger that militarization posed to their young ­children. Soon thereafter, the pair formed the Civil Defense Protest Committee (CDPC), an organ­ization that galvanized a power­f ul contingent of angry parents. Using their ­children’s playgrounds and schools as rallying points for planning a protest against the 1960 drill, the CDPC marshaled an image of fiercely protective maternalism, one that transcended partisanship or geopo­liti­cal concerns. That year, the committee’s members ­were part of the almost two thousand civilians, parents, and ­children who occupied New York City streets and parks in passive re­sis­ tance to the take-­cover o ­ rders.67 The presence of ­children was notable: the protesters “guessed correctly that the police would not want to take parents, complete with c­ hildren, playpens, trikes, bikes, and assorted childhood paraphernalia, into custody.”68 In the following years, other w ­ omen’s organ­izations, notably W ­ omen Strike for Peace (WSP), would pursue similar tactics to combat nuclearization.69 The organ­izations that used maternal prerogative to protest civil defense promoted themselves as everyday w ­ omen who ­were other­wise unmotivated by po­liti­cal issues. Although it was supported in vari­ous ways by members of the established War Resisters League and the W ­ omen’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the CDPC adamantly chose a centrist position, wanting to “give a place in the movement to all brands of po­liti­cal beliefs.”70 Indeed, they believed that ­mothers and ­house­wives lent an air of moderation to civil defense protests. ­These mainstream activists often distanced themselves from organ­izations such as the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), which frequently had to fend off accusations of radicalism.71 SANE too was acutely aware of the value of a centrist image: a 1961 civil defense vigil planning memo noted that in terms of dress, demonstrators ­were “urged that we do not want to set up barriers to getting our point across. (Please, no slacks on girls or w ­ omen; no guitars!).”72 The predominantly white membership of organ­izations such as the CDPC also allowed their cause to escape any po­liti­ cal association with civil rights activism, despite the explicit connection the NAACP and other Black critics had made years before. In distancing themselves—in conscious and unconscious ways—­from the trappings of leftism,

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radicalism, and civil rights protest, ­these mainstream civil defense protesters found success in broad appeal, one they presumed would not alienate more conservative segments of the public. Increasingly, civil defense protesters also found sympathy and support among elected officials. In early 1960, New Jersey governor Robert Meyner called out civil defense leaders for “fostering a cruel deception on the American ­people” that under­ground shelters could provide a legitimate defense against a nuclear attack.73 This oft-­quoted phrase, along with other pithy statements made by high-­profile officeholders about the absurdity of civil defense policy and current strategy, lent mainstream authority to civil defense protest groups: within several months, the CDPC, the Committee for Non-­Violent Action, and ­others w ­ ere using Meyner’s words in their promotional lit­er­a­ture.74 ­Later that year, other officials joined the chorus of dissenters. Among them was ju­nior Demo­cratic senator Stephen M. Young of Ohio, who repeatedly referred to the national civil defense program as a “billion dollar boondoggle.”75 By the time Kennedy was entering office, civil defense protest had already made inroads across the po­liti­cal and activist spectrum.

Rejecting the Nuclear Absurd Alongside the civil defense protest that emerged in the early 1960s, a concurrent thread of public discussion wrestled with the philosophical and cultural meaning of survival in the Atomic Age. Although the federal state framed the ­family fallout shelter as a symbol of national survival, critics of civil defense raised uncomfortable questions about individual survival at the expense of ­others.76 As the general public became better informed about the dire consequences of a nuclear war by the late 1950s, it was clear that civil defense would not guarantee survival for all Americans. And even if one ­were to survive, would the world that remained a­ fter a war be a world worth inhabiting? T ­ hese dark discussions not only made Americans question the utility of civil defense but also undermined public faith in diplomatic strategies that purported to keep Americans safe. By the early 1960s, the American public increasingly believed that survival could not be ensured by ­either civil defense or deterrence policies and was vocal in opposition to both. Although federal planners seemed to come to an uneasy consensus about ­family fallout shelters as the best option for national civil defense, the public remained unconvinced. For many, shelters revealed uncomfortable truths about American individualism. As Rose has explained at g­ reat length, “shelters . . . ​produced their own fallout, attracting a torrent of criticism and making them popu­



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lar objects of vilification.”77 As Americans rehearsed—or, more commonly, ­imagined—­their retreat into a fallout shelter, a painful question arose: What would become of the neighbors and countrymen left ­behind?78 If, as policymakers emphasized, building a shelter space was a part of good citizenship, w ­ ere ­those who did not or could not prepare un-­American? Should individuals feel any responsibility for the greater community, ­whether immediate neighbors or strangers at the shelter door? T ­ hese questions delineated a line between insiders and outsiders, one that proved deeply troubling to some Americans. If the shelter debate drew bound­aries between good nuclear citizens and bad ones, the shelter door became the meta­phoric object that separated ­these groups. ­Because supplies—­food, ­water, clean air—­and space within the shelter ­were precious, the shelter door served as a fortified barrier against outsiders and other resource users. By the late 1950s, firearms took a place on the supply list for an adequately stocked shelter. Edward A. Hawkes, a ballistics engineer, suggested that shelter builders needed “a suitable weapon of defense for our American homes” to “cope with the lawless ele­ment” a­ fter a nuclear attack.79 A 1961 Time magazine story titled “Gun Thy Neighbor?” recounted a Chicago man’s desire to “mount a machine gun at the hatch to keep the neighbors out if the bomb falls. . . . ​If the stupid American public w ­ ill not do what they have to do to save themselves, I’m not g­ oing to run the risk of not being able to use [my] shelter.”80 The possibility of neighborly vio­lence, layered onto the vio­lence of a nuclear explosion itself, in public discussions revealed a more sinister version of self-­help civil defense.81 The discussion of firearms contributed significantly to the development of ideas of “shelter morality,” a fiercely debated topic, but many noted more than a hint of the absurd in such conversations.82 Indeed, if official civil defense missives suggested that good nuclear citizens ­were ­those who prepared to retreat to their shelters in the event of a strike, critics argued that perhaps it was ­those Americans ­behind the shelter door who deserved derision. Fictional accounts, articles, and editorials focused on the shelter door as a portal of moral corruption, one that made t­hose who crossed the threshold willing to turn on their neighbors and fellow ­human beings. As Norine Zimburg of Flushing, New York, wrote, the “desensitization of ­human response to one another is morally insulting.”83 In 1961 The Twilight Zone, a popu­lar tele­vi­sion show known for exposing the unsettling aspects of h ­ uman nature, seized on the theme of shelter morality. The resulting episode, called “The Shelter,” portrays a well-­respected neighborhood doctor who is forced to make the difficult decision to lock his neighbors and their ­children out of his ­family’s shelter during an attack. As his neighbors desperately pound on the locked door and fight among one another, they confront the awful awareness that shelters may

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allow some “to survive, but with blood on [their] hands.” When the attack proves to have been a false alarm, the trauma of the event leaves all involved questioning h ­ uman morality in the Atomic Age.84 Official rhe­toric about the continuity of American life a­ fter an attack—­after citizens emerged from their shelters—­exacerbated this tension between the individual, the community, and the nation. Throughout the 1950s, federal officials reminded the public that the objective of civil defense was not only survival but also recovery ­after the attack. Using familiar Cold War language about preserving the American way of life, officials vowed that civil defense would help Americans win the ultimate conflict: the triumph of demo­cratic society over communism. But national recovery would depend on a ­great deal of cooperation between t­ hose who survived, a condition that stood in stark contrast to the individualist conflict that could occur at the shelter door and the millions of Black Americans who might be excluded from shelters entirely. ­These concerns w ­ ere not altogether separate from the critique that civil defense was a distraction from the failings of democracy at home. When a Rocke­ fel­ler constituent wrote that the government should “concentrate more on trying to get this democracy and ­people out of the holes—­rather than into the holes,” he echoed a common refrain.85 Some Americans recoiled at the veiled vio­lence depicted in official civil defense materials. In an attempt to appear grounded in fact and reason, civil defense films and print publications often included images of the destruction of ­actual homes, property, and mannequin stand-­ins for American p­ eople. But such images w ­ ere far from reassuring. Indeed, as McEnaney points out, “the FCDA’s po­liti­cal viability and public ac­cep­tance depended on such scary reenactments, but the reportage could be only so vivid u ­ ntil it had the potential to 86 backfire.” Applying the knowledge that they had gathered over the last de­ cade about the effects of nuclear war, the science of fallout, nuclear strategy, and the logic of preparation, Americans reached troubling conclusions about the short-­and long-­term feasibility of civil defense strategies. In d­ oing so, they cast doubt on the very premise that the nation could survive, recover, and rebuild. And even if it could, many asked, would it be a world one would want to occupy? Between years of civil defense pamphlets and films, mock attack scenarios, cinematic musings, and popu­lar fiction repre­sen­ta­tions, Americans had an extensive repertoire of images and information to draw upon. In the most immediate sense, one’s ability to survive the first minutes of an attack depended on the serendipity of space and time. Individuals could not control or reliably predict how close they ­were to a target at any given point in their day-­to-­day lives. If, as would be true for many millions of American



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urbanites, a civilian was close enough to a ground zero, no protection short of access to the very best—or fortunately positioned—­blast shelter would ensure survival. Yet ­because officials instructed individuals to build their ­family shelters as opposed to the state providing them, access was almost never a given. Local officials also worried that the public might overestimate a shelter’s level of protection, w ­ hether from blast, fire, or fallout. In New York state, civil defense officials issued a 1961 order “to prevent deceptive and fraudulent advertising and to protect the public from being victimized by such advertising,” raising the question of ­whether or not an average civilian could assess the effectiveness of any type of shelter.87 Even if officials ­were able to predict how much advance warning they could offer to American civilians, survival depended on the time it took to move indoors or under­ground. Civil defense films and publications showed families taking cover together, an unlikely condition in a society in which c­ hildren, parents, and extended families so frequently spent their days apart. Shortly ­after he left office in 1961, Eisenhower voiced misgivings about this point specifically, stating that if he had a shelter available to him in a time of crisis but his f­amily was not ­there, he “would just walk out. [He] would not want to face that kind of world.”88 It was also difficult to predict what conditions would be like in the hours and days following an attack. Although official policy held that civilians should stock their shelters with two weeks of supplies, many individuals assumed that it would be much longer before the world above was inhabitable again. In the days and weeks following an attack, w ­ ater, food, fuel, and medical supplies would be difficult to come by, even if preattack stockpiling programs w ­ ere adequate. Moreover, public utilities could not be counted on to survive unscathed. Communication systems might be damaged, especially without reliable electricity. In the weeks and months ­after an attack, survivors would experience a host of other difficulties. American foodstuffs would likely be tainted by radiation, and the transportation networks used to deliver them might not be operable. American industry would take time to rebuild. And in the end, recovery programs relied heavi­ly on the successful assurance of continuity of government. In other words, coordinated national recovery would depend on the survival of a critical mass of governing leaders. Although the federal government invested g­ reat sums of money in building emergency seats of government outside of Washington, DC, it could never be guaranteed that officials would survive or that martial law would not take the place of demo­cratic governance.89 The under­lying fear of postattack authoritarianism had colored civil defense planning from its earliest days in the late 1940s, but that fear never was completely mitigated.

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Without national and global systems of communication, governance, or information, what would it mean to be American once one emerged from a shelter? Would democracy or communism survive at all to claim the mantel of Cold War victory? Moving to evolutionary and geologic time, widespread nuclear war would have unpredictable consequences for planet Earth. Like the changes potentially wrought by nuclear testing, war would cause changes in global biology. Changes caused by ge­ne­tic mutation in plants, animals, and ­humans could persist for generations to come. Some suspected too that global nuclear war might upset meteorological, seismic, or oceanic systems, long foreshadowing the nuclear winter theories that emerged in the 1980s.90 More bleakly, fallout shelters took on a meaning associated with moral decline. As Rose points out, many Americans began to think that “fallout shelters represented a devolution of the ­human species, and that humanity’s long climb out of the dark caves was now being reversed.”91 Officials tried to spin the vision of the aftermath of nuclear attack not as decay but instead as a return to the traditions of Amer­ic­ a’s mythical past. In 1961 Steuart L. Pittman, head of the OCD, wrote that “it is a strange anomaly of the nuclear age that as our po­liti­cal and economic interdependence and centralization are increased by advancing technology, we must at the same time prepare for the possibility of a sudden decentralization and a sudden revival of local self-­reliance more characteristic of the e­ arlier frontier days of our Nation. The surviving towns and cities following a nuclear attack would indeed be frontiers in a communal and national life which energetic leaders would put together again.”92 The rhetorical usefulness of virtuous frontier nationalism aligned well with the postwar romanticization of the American West. Yet images of the frontier did not always mesh well with civil defense practices. In outfitting their prototype shelter, the American Institute of Decorators used a wall­paper print reminiscent of Paleolithic cave drawings, a touch that did not sit well with one critic. “If William Tecumseh Sherman thought war was hell,” they wrote, “he had not seen a fallout room designed to keep a ­family healthy, if insane, following nuclear explosions and attack.”93 It seems unlikely, but the designers’ bizarre decorative choice could have been a tacit gesture to a recurring thread of nuclear critique: that nuclear weapons, seemingly a symbol of humankind’s pro­g ress, could ultimately be the source of humanity’s regression. ­These immediate and longer-­term considerations led some Americans to conclude that the postattack world would be brutish, difficult, and dangerous if humanity survived at all. In addition to firearms, imaginings of postattack scenarios also featured looters, thugs, and cannibals. When the Sunday eve­ ning drama anthology series Play­house 90 televised a version of Pat Frank’s postapocalyptic novel Alas, Babylon, in April 1960, it cemented ­these images.



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“I never realized how horrible it would be ­until I saw the play last night,” a viewer noted.94 Another was horrified but not surprised by “the rapid loss of elemental ­human decency by the survivors.”95 As one New Jersey resident darkly put it, “my life is not so precious to me that I should survive to see the mass murder all about me, for surely I would have to come up sooner or ­later [from a shelter] and count my dead. And t­ here ­will be dead and the near dead and ­those longing for death. If this happens to my country it w ­ ill have happened to other countries, other ­people, not just my ­people. I have no desire to live in a world screaming with pain.”96 In imagining the bleak realities of the world a­ fter nuclear war, survival took on disturbing new consequences. Perhaps worst of all, critics claimed, civil defense and its impossible promises gave Americans false hope. A New York City resident wrote in 1960 that “­there is only one incontrovertible fact—­there is no protection pos­si­ble against nuclear attack. The alternative is peace, and it is indeed cruel and irresponsible to delude the public into thinking other­wise.”97 This line of thinking, which gained currency over the course of the 1960s, reflects a growing distrust of federal leadership. The idea that politicians orchestrated a g­ rand deception of the public in the interest of secretive international goals has had a lasting influence on how historians and ­later generations of Americans remember civil defense in the early Cold War. Even if individuals accepted the promises of self-­help civil defense, survival was never completely within their control. Coincidences of place, time, privilege, and a host of other contingencies could m ­ atter much more. Increasingly, as Americans realized that the likelihood of survival was out of their hands, they refused to buy into civil defense plans that purported to ensure it. As one constituent wrote to Governor Rocke­fel­ler, “cut out this shelter racket and stop wasting our money on it. And please stop thinking that we are a bunch of morons to be led around by the noses.”98 Although civil defense policy encouraged Americans to think about what they, as individuals, could do to ensure their own survival, many found civil defense to be a constant reminder of the prob­lems of larger national and international conflicts. Most explic­itly, they began to question the strategic logic of deterrence, which directly linked the fortunes of citizens to that of the nation and the world.

Deterrence or Provocation? Public opinion regarding civil defense programs also tracked against the late 1950s evolution in deterrence strategy and the rhe­toric with which officials spoke about nuclear policies. By the time Truman left office, the NSC-68 logic

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of arms buildup had solidified, although the goal of pressuring the Soviet Union to roll back its expansionist tendencies had failed. Over Eisenhower’s two terms in office, his administration debated and refined the nuances of massive retaliation—­a strategy that in theory prevented an ­enemy attack through the promise that any initial strike would be met with a retaliatory counterstrike that inflicted intolerable damage. As an organ­izing princi­ple, massive retaliation encouraged the stockpiling of weapons and the continued development of delivery systems including nuclear submarines, bombers, and medium-­range and intercontinental ballistic missiles. By the end of the 1950s with the advancement of missile delivery systems and nuclear-­armed submarines and bombers, this triad was firmly established.99 The advent of thermonuclear weapons and an expanded range of ways to deliver them changed the calculus of war and deterrence theory alike. By the end of the Eisenhower administration, the arsenals of both the United States and the Soviet Union had grown to the point that through stockpiling and the dispersal of warheads, they could leverage credible secondary strikes even a­ fter devastating first blows—­a condition known by then as nuclear plenty. No longer could first-­strike deterrence provide a guarantee against a prolonged, destructive engagement, and as such nuclear strategists worked to develop theories to accommodate t­hese new conditions. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, strategists and advisers from diverse corners concluded that a foreign policy that rested on deterrence through massive retaliation posed too much risk and created geopo­liti­cal destabilization rather than stabilization. One way to adapt existing arsenals, they argued, was to move t­oward a policy that emphasized limits on war. ­These limits included refraining from targeting civilian populations and using smaller nuclear warheads to destroy military installations. ­Doing so would bolster the credibility of a nation’s threat posture and provide an incentive for an ­enemy to adopt the same limits. If the latter aspect was successful, it would provide a higher degree of protection for American civilians should general deterrence fail.100 Critics of American nuclear strategy had long objected to massive retaliation as a guiding policy philosophy, arguing that it used civilians as bargaining chips in a high-­stakes game of chance. Should deterrence fail, American civilians would most certainly pay the price ­whether by blast and fire or indirectly through fallout. But as new versions of deterrence theory gained attention in the early 1960s, the meaning of deterrence (and the possibility of its failure) took on new complexities. On one hand, counterforce strategy, which focused on bombing only military targets, presented a less horrific kind of war with fewer civilian casualties and a theoretical limit to prolonged conflict. In 1960, Kahn famously insisted that given an adequate civil defense program, the ma-



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jority of Americans would emerge from the war and “the survivors ­will not envy the dead.”101 On the other hand, such theories seemed to gesture ­toward policymakers’ renewed willingness to engage in nuclear war if it came to that. Even in a “no cities” mode of war, some civilians would unquestionably perish, leaving more to deal with the radiological aftermath. By the late 1950s in response to changing strategic circumstances, policymakers had begun to explic­itly link the language of deterrence to civil defense policy. The flurry of civil defense studies that appeared following the 1956 Holifield hearings contributed to this shift, clearly identifying civil defense as an equal or nearly equal pillar to strategic offense and military defense in national security. As the Gaither Report put it, “Active defense cannot alone provide adequate protection to the civilian population. . . . ​[A] shelter program . . . ​ would forcibly augment our deterrent power.”102 But ­because the outcome of deterrence strategy weighed so heavi­ly on the fortunes of the civilian population, deterrence theory took on new meaning for everyday Americans.103 With arsenals on both sides of the Iron Curtain capable of “overkill”—­the capacity to destroy an ­enemy many times over—­the promise of civil defense began to pale in comparison. By the time Eisenhower reor­ga­nized civil defense agencies in 1958, survival, if it had not been already, became an issue more often discussed in hy­po­thet­ i­cal and grossly general terms: 10 million p­ eople ­were predicted to die in one scenario, 40 million to 120 million in another scenario.104 In the ­earlier days of the Atomic Age, “national survival” was a ­matter of protecting key cities and resources to ensure continuity of government, the economy, and, more amorphously, the American way of life. But by the early 1960s, the rhe­toric had changed: “­under certain ghastly circumstances, [civil defense] might save millions of lives—­and the nation.”105 By this time national survival meant something quite dif­fer­ent: having a larger percentage of one’s civilians survive a war than one’s ­enemy. Collateral damage was a given. The question became which nation can survive better. If a war should start, civilians would certainly die. Despite such grisly truths, policymakers doubled down on using civil defense to assure a concerned public. In the early 1960s, policymakers went to g­ reat lengths to frame deterrence—­ and its connection to civil defense—as something familiar and intelligible to the average American. President Kennedy often used the word “insurance” in the place of “deterrence” when addressing the public, perhaps as a way to distance the idea from its geopo­liti­cal significance. He repeatedly referred to civil defense as “survival insurance.”106 Insurance was a concept that would have been familiar to Americans with homeowners’ insurance or life insurance policies. So, when Kennedy published an open letter to the public in Life in

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1961, his plea that the public “prepare for all eventualities” dovetailed with established ideas of protecting one’s f­ amily and assets in the event of a catastrophe of any kind.107 Officials also used the term “blackmail” to discuss changing ideas about nuclear strategy. Blackmail, which also had familiar connotations outside the realm of high politics, was an easy idea to apply to the sometimes convoluted logic of nuclear deterrence. However, unlike insurance, “blackmail” is a loaded term, carry­ing more menacing connotations of corruption. As the po­liti­cal scientist Richard Betts puts it, “to most p­ eople, deterrence sounds far more innocent than blackmail.”108 When the press and the general public used the term “nuclear blackmail,” they almost always used it to describe Soviet actions. The willingness to call Soviet strategy blackmail fit into the framework of Cold War moral competition. But a Cold War critic could just as easily apply the term as judgment of American diplomacy. In this way, the term “blackmail” could also complicate the vision of the United States as a victim of senseless bullying, revealing that it too may be a perpetrator of blackmail. Despite officials’ rhetorical manipulation of survival planning and deterrence policies, however, the public debate over civil defense revealed its strategic contradictions.109 For civil defense supporters, shelters had both a practical and a strategic value. Practically speaking, shelters w ­ ere physical fortifications, designed to save lives during a crisis. Since at least the early 1950s the public, the press, and policymakers openly spoke about civilian targets. Indeed, a 1952 civil defense poster series had warned “make no m ­ istake . . . ​civilians can be 110 bombed!” Although the emphasis changed from blast shelters to fallout shelters over the course of the 1950s, the practical value remained. More meta­ phoric but just as power­f ul was the strategic importance of shelters and civil defense: as policymakers viewed it, the act of building shelters could signal to an ­enemy that the United States would not easily be defeated. As the conservative National Review put it in 1961, “the better our protection against nuclear blasts, the less effect Khrushchev ­will produce by threatening nuclear war.”111 In this strategic light, civil defense, like the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles, could be seen as a deterrent. Yet the act of equating civilian lives and property with the military arsenal sat uncomfortably within the public discussion of civil defense. In 1959 T. E. Phipps, an analyst from the Mas­sa­chu­ setts Institute of Technology, worried that “a ‘defense race’ . . . ​could be as unstabilizing to deterrence as an arms race.”112 A few years ­later a Life editorial argued that “­there is unwisdom, if not added danger, in an overambitious shelter program. . . . ​[I]t might accelerate the arms race.”113 Civil defense, it seemed, could just as easily work to escalate tensions as it could to calm them.



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Civilian commentators ­were also concerned about how a robust shelter program could change officials’ attitudes t­oward nuclear war in the first place. On one hand, civil defense bolstered the credibility of the US strategic posture. As another National Review article in f­ avor of shelters argued, “if it comes to [war], the President w ­ ill find it easier to touch the red button if he knows that the destructive consequences of a nuclear exchange have been, in our country, greatly reduced by the shelter program.”114 The psychologist Erich Fromm, however, was troubled by the strategic consequences of credibility, arguing that “what we gain in po­liti­cal deterrence we pay for in increased probability of war.”115 Some citizens agreed. As a Long Island resident put it in the early 1960, “shelters w ­ ill encourage nuclear war, rather than deter one.”116 Some commentators went further, suggesting that civil defense undermined the very logic of deterrence. A letter writer to the Christian Science Monitor argued “that to invest in [fallout] shelters is to admit to the collapse of the doctrine of deterrence by nuclear weapons. The supposed entire justification for nuclear weapons is that they ­shall never have to be used. To build shelters is to admit, however indirectly, that the deterrent does not deter.”117 As part of  a  strategic posture, civil defense was remarkably flexible but at times contradictory. Americans had been conditioned for over a de­cade to believe that national security was based on preventing the use of nuclear weapons entirely, and many still believed that nuclear war was a condition to be avoided at all costs.118 One civilian critic wrote in 1960 that “­there could be no ‘victory’ in such a war and . . . ​we have a responsibility to all the ­people of the world and to ­future generations to see that no such war occurs.”119 Rather than making the public more comfortable with the idea of deterrence, by the late 1950s and early 1960s civil defense served to remind Americans that war was pos­si­ble and that their lives w ­ ere fragile contingencies in a larger po­liti­cal strategy. Given ­these misgivings about the strategic result of civil defense, many Americans came to the same conclusion as antinuclear advocate Linus Pauling when he wrote that “I feel sure that more American lives would be saved by devoting our funds to steps to decrease the probability of war than by devoting the same funds to civil defense.”120 Indeed, 40 ­percent of Americans polled in 1961 believed that the government was “spending and wasting too much money” on civil defense.121 Ultimately, to debate w ­ hether civil defense served as a deterrent to or a provocation for war was to reveal the difficulty in calculating Cold War strategic assumptions. Deterrence peacekeeping relied on the predictability of Soviet leaders’ actions. But 1950s anticommunist crusades had cast Soviet leaders and their operatives as duplicitous, wily, and altogether unpredictable. Would

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Premier Nikita Khrushchev bother to launch an attack on the United States if he knew he could only kill some fraction of Americans who h ­ adn’t prepared? Would Americans’ participation (or nonparticipation) in civil defense even be a point of consideration? More troubling, civil defense as deterrence could only succeed if other variables of Cold War weapons competition remained static. By the late 1950s ­after a de­cade of rapidly evolving weapons conditions, it seemed unlikely that the nuclear threat landscape would stabilize. Civil defense policies would need to map onto a logic of deterrence that was a constantly moving target. Regardless of its deterrent value, some Americans questioned w ­ hether nuclear war could be prevented at all despite the best intentions of policymakers. As even Kennedy told Congress in 1961, “the history of this planet, and particularly the history of the twentieth ­century, is sufficient to remind us of the possibilities of an irrational attack, a miscalculation, an accidental war . . . ​ which cannot be ­either foreseen or deterred.”122 By the late 1950s, popu­lar media reminded Americans that nuclear war could be started due to miscommunication, technological malfunction, h ­ uman error, or errant h ­ uman evil. Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, published in print in 1959, recounted in gripping detail the aftermath of a global nuclear holocaust instigated by a navy maneuver gone awry.123 A similar mishap drives the slow apocalypse of 1959’s film adaptation of On the Beach. As one character speculates, the ­human race was meeting its end ­because “some poor bloke saw something on a radar screen . . . ​ so he pushed a button and the world went crazy.” Within a few years, the trope of accidental nuclear war had solidified in popu­lar culture. In the final scene of the dramatic film Fail-­Safe, the president of the United States admits with regret that “we let our machines get out of hand.” The satirical counterpart to Fail-­Safe, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, takes the technology-­gone-­wrong theme even further: a deadly combination of volatile personalities and the ­human strug­gle with technology brings the world to nuclear holocaust.124 Thus, the American public imagination could easily envision nuclear war as a possibility even if strategists ­were able to accurately deduce Soviet plans. By the early 1960s, doubts about the efficacy of civil defense policies, deterrence theory, and nuclear survival in general had gained significant traction. Like ­those Americans uncomfortable with the idea of citizens as agents of deterrence, an increasingly vocal contingent of nuclear cynics concluded that the only way to ensure survival on a local, national, or global scale was by pursuing peace. As many Americans pleaded, “our way to real safety is Peace. Please sir, concentrate your efforts on converting our defense efforts to peaceful ones.”125 Peace, of course, had a fluid, changing definition. For some, peace meant the



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restoration of diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union and the end of militarized proxy conflicts. As a real estate man­ag­er in New York City put it, “I for one would rather take a chance working out an agreement with the communists than building a shelter with the dim hope of surviving an atomic war.”126 For ­others, however, global peace in the f­ uture would depend on the eradication of weapons that made global catastrophe pos­si­ble. Recalling the painful lessons from On the Beach, Milton Heimlich of New Rochelle, New York, argued that “we desperately need peace and security . . . ​and nothing is g­ oing to give it to us but abolition of the atom bomb.”127 For ­these individuals, true peace could only come with the ­wholesale elimination of nuclear weapons.

And Then Came Cuba The first two years of John F. Kennedy’s presidency ­were years of crises, or “twilight regions between peace and war.”128 When Khrushchev blockaded West Berlin in June 1961, Kennedy threatened war to defend NATO allies. In the year that followed, seeing no immediate resolution to ongoing negotiations over a permanent test ban and an increasingly insecure international environment, the Soviet Union and the United States ended the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing that had been in place in 1958. Then, in October 1962 tensions came to a head over the clandestine placement of Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba. During ­these hottest days of the early Cold War, “all Americans got a taste of life on death row.”129 The Cuban Missile Crisis exists in textbooks and public memory as a turning point in the early Cold War; a terrifying moment that, once resolved, contributed to a significant lessening of Cold War extremism. Viewing the crisis as a watershed moment, however, obscures the threads of continuity that persisted both before and ­after the crisis itself. Indeed, historians have had a ­g reat deal of difficulty accounting for the reaction of the average American to the crisis ­because public opinion polling was spotty and inconsistent.130 However, Americans’ opinions about civil defense offer a win­dow into how civilians interpreted the meaning of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the context of the broader Atomic Age. First, one must look to the year leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The renewed public interest in civil defense and shelters that followed Kennedy’s response to the Berlin crisis in the summer of 1961 was relatively short-­lived. As mentioned above, the administration was caught off guard by the unpre­ ce­dented public fervor over shelters.131 Although Kennedy had promised Americans that ­every civilian would soon “know what steps he can take without delay to protect his ­family in case of attack,” it took over a half a year for

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the federal government to provide an instructional booklet on shelters.132 By that time, the tensions in Berlin had diminished, much of the public debate about the morality of shelters had died down, and interest in the program had waned. Unsurprisingly, by the time Kennedy announced the Cuban quarantine ­later that year, only a tiny percentage of Americans had built a shelter. For t­ hose who had not, it seemed too late to do so.133 Cognitive dissonance may also help explain why so many Americans supported the idea of civil defense in multiple public opinion polls but did not act on t­ hese feelings. As McEnaney notes, “it was one ­thing, ­after all, to endorse anticommunism and military readiness, and quite another to build h ­ ouse­hold 134 monuments to such ideologies.” Several years of debating shelter morality, as another historical observer puts it, “prompted far more introspection than excavation.”135 And while anecdotal accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis “emphasize a sense of dread and doom,” the public opinion polling data that is available suggests that most Americans took the crisis in stride and “presented no evidence that p­ eople ­were traumatized or debilitated by worries over the crisis.”136 If anything, the Cuban Missile Crisis further undermined the reputation of civil defense. The few Americans who still supported the idea of a civil defense program ­were horrified that the public and the leadership remained apathetic and uninterested. One 1962 Thanksgiving radio editorial in Fort Knox, Kentucky, derided “empty slogans or emotional chaos” and “pseudo-­intellectual banter between coffee drinkers or bar flies” that stood in place of “a central body . . . ​with sufficient authority and resources” that could address the prob­lem of national public safety.137 ­These ­were the same calls that proponents of public safety had been using for years, and the crisis did l­ittle to alter them. The years ­after the Cuba Missile Crisis witnessed a continued decline in po­ liti­cal ­will to support civil defense initiatives. While not in direct attribution to the crisis itself, the annual nationwide Operation Alert program was canceled in 1962. Local civil defense offices also faced instability in the wake of the crisis. Portland, Oregon, a city that regional and national authorities championed as a leader in metropolitan civil defense planning throughout the 1950s, canceled its entire civil defense program in 1963. Having never needed to execute its plans in war­time, the city’s civil defense planners celebrated the end of the program with a sheet cake bearing the words “a good job well done” (figure 10).138 For many Americans, the choice to participate in or disengage from civil defense was made long before the Cuban Missile Crisis. By 1962 civil defense had under­gone several moments of renewed public interest, but the mounting criticism against it had all but discredited it as a program worth salvaging.



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Figure 10. ​With a sheet cake bearing a civil defense logo and the words “A Good Job . . Well Done,” officials celebrate the end of the Civil Defense program in Portland, Oregon, in 1963. In the years ­after the Cuban Missile Crisis, local, regional, and state authorities across the country scaled back their civil defense operations significantly. Image courtesy of the City of Portland (Oregon) Archives, Office of Civil Defense Phasing Out Party, A2012-005, June 25, 1963.

Faced with a staggering strategic complexity and the bleak prospect of war and its potential aftermath, many Americans simply checked out. This is not at all to say that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not incite real fear and worry. But the Americans who had chosen, for one reason or another, to opt out of civil defense prior to the crisis ­were unlikely to take up its banner in the final hours.

Peace and a Test Ban The experiences of the Berlin and Cuban crises—­and the perceived failures or insufficiency of civil defense programs—­served to compound ongoing public ambivalence about nuclear weapons in American life. Debates about civil defense became a conduit for heated and painful conversations about American community, morality, and governance. Public concern about survival in the Atomic Age increasingly moved beyond discussions about the efficacy of fallout shelters or nuclear testing effects. Instead, public criticism came to focus on nuclear weapons themselves as what jeopardized peace. By the early

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1960s, the idea of peace had become inextricably linked to nuclear weapons. Yet beyond that link, peace was a remarkably flexible concept. Although a broad informal co­ali­tion of Americans advocated for peace in ­these years, l­ittle consensus existed about how to achieve it. More radical critics used peace as a stand-in for outright nuclear abolition. For many ­others, however, peace had become synonymous with disarmament or de-­escalation. Although such rhe­ toric was most vis­i­ble in or­ga­nized antinuclear campaigns, even President Eisenhower had been a long-­term advocate for arms control.139 Taken together, years of public agitation for a test ban, disillusionment with civil defense, and the close calls of the early 1960s seemed to set the stage for a new chapter in the Atomic Age. Historian Lawrence Wittner goes so far as to argue that “antinuclear sentiment eased the dangerous international confrontation, slowed the nuclear arms race, and provided the basis for the unpre­ce­dented nuclear arms control agreements that w ­ ere to follow.”140 In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, American citizens’ calls for peace would only translate into an incremental gain: the ratification of the LTBT. A significant subset of antinuclear critics in the early 1960s began to employ the language of peace in their calls to “ban the bomb.” When the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing collapsed in 1961, Kennedy’s decision to resume testing incited power­f ul protests across the nation. For several years SANE and the American Friends Ser­vice Committee had been staging marches for peace on Easter, modeled on larger “Ban the Bomb” events in Britain, Japan, and Denmark.141 On Easter in April 1962, approximately twenty thousand Americans walked, drove, and rallied for peace in several areas of New York City, Long Island, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Connecticut, and likely elsewhere.142 As joint demonstrations, such protests highlight the unifying power of rhe­toric such as “ban the bomb.” Protesters at the 1962 Easter sunrise ser­ vice at the Hollywood Bowl carried signs with slogans lambasting civil defense and nuclear tests while advocating for a stronger United Nations (UN), “ban the bomb,” and of course peace (figure 11).143 ­Children continued to figure prominently in early 1960s ban-­the-­bomb demonstrations as well. At the march in Chicago, ­children participated while holding balloons reading, “we want to grow up, not blow up.”144 The multiple calls embedded in ban-­the-­bomb marches coalesced around the vague idea of abolition but grew out of demands for a test ban that had been growing since the mid-1950s. As Wittner argues, the popu­lar focus on banning the bomb was a trade-­off: so thoroughly had antinuclearism become a mass movement that ­earlier orga­nizational objectives had been cast aside in f­ avor of a more inclusive goal.145 Nevertheless, within the broad umbrella of “ban the bomb” and peace, American protesters found space for many threads of antinuclear argument.



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Figure 11. ​With signs reading “CD Means Criminal De­cadence,” “Speak and Act Publicly for Peace: Prevent WWIII,” “No Tests East and West,” and “Ban the Bomb,” protesters at the Hollywood Bowl Easter Sunrise Ser­vice in 1962 bring together a variety of antinuclear demands. Image courtesy of Los Angeles Times Staff, © 1962. Los Angeles Times.

The antinuclear protest of the early 1960s faced an uphill climb. Unsurprisingly, orga­nizational leadership continued to field per­sis­tent accusations of communist motives. As the abolition movement became an umbrella cause that subsumed more specific critiques, it also made “ban the bomb” messaging vulnerable to specific arguments in ­favor of continued nuclear testing or bolstered civil defense initiatives. Undoubtedly, the growing movement added fuel to more mainstream discussions about milk contamination and the hand-­ wringing over shelter morality. In a more practical sense, the federal government adopting a policy banning nuclear weapons in general would have been a dramatic departure from established policies that allocated significant resources to build up stockpiles of increasingly destructive weapons. Despite recurring deliberations between Soviet and US officials throughout the 1940s and 1950s, ­little pro­gress had been made t­oward arms control resulting from disagreements over monitoring and verification, distrust, and, as some have suggested,

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bad faith.146 By the time Kennedy entered office, the United States possessed over twenty-­two thousand nuclear weapons in its arsenal.147 Although appeals for general disarmament marshaled a pithy slogan with a potential for broad appeal, “ban the bomb” messaging garnered ­little policy consideration. Ban-­the-­bomb activism reflected in large part a long-­standing current in American public opinion: pressure for a ban on nuclear weapons testing. Even as they wrestled with a volatile international situation that dominated official policy ­toward nuclear testing, decision makers within the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations ­were acutely aware of public attitudes at home and abroad.148 Although American public opinion polling about testing fluctuated between 1958 and 1963 in response to global crises and shifting federal policy, the percentage of Americans in support of ending testing never dropped below 25 ­percent and reached as high as 77 ­percent in late 1959.149 By late 1962, support of a test ban was becoming increasingly mainstream. Immediately ­after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Norman Cousins, the leader of SANE, was tapped by Pope John XXIII to serve as an intermediary between Kennedy and Khrushchev to revive the relationship between the superpowers and restart test ban discussions. That Cousins served in this intermediary capacity for several months is truly remarkable, given SANE’s politics and Cousins’s out­ spoken criticism of nuclear weapons since the first moments of the Atomic Age. As the United States, the Soviet Union, and G ­ reat Britain neared an agreement on a test ban in mid-1963, Cousins worked with long-­established antinuclear groups to promote public support of the treaty.150 In August 1963 ­after more than eight years of difficult negotiation in the UN, Geneva, and Moscow, the United States, ­Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the LTBT of 1963. The treaty banned testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater, with its “princi­ple aim the speediest pos­si­ble achievement of an agreement on general and complete disarmament . . . ​which would put an end to the armaments race and eliminate the incentive to the production and testing of all kinds of weapons, including nuclear weapons.” Notably, the agreement did not prohibit ongoing weapons testing under­ground. However, it did make a significant step ­toward a secondary goal: “put[ting] an end to the contamination of mans [sic] environment by radioactive substances.”151 The LTBT was the culmination of years of grassroots protest, antinuclear organ­ izing, and scientific concern about the ­human effects of fallout. As the treaty moved from Kennedy’s desk to Senate ratification, the American public supported ratification by a large majority.152 The treaty passed in the Senate easily and went into effect in October. The public reaction to the LTBT was generally positive in the United States. An editorial in the New York Times noted of the treaty that “­there must be more



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steps on the long journey to world peace, but the next may be a ­little easier ­because of this one.”153 ­Others saw the LTBT as a vindication of Adlai Stevenson’s failed 1956 presidential bid, which was derailed in part by his support for a nuclear test ban. Stevenson was appointed ambassador to the UN in 1961 and was instrumental in continuing to press for a ban in his years in that post. As his supporters wrote in the fall of 1963 as the LTBT gained endorsement, “the United States has caught up to your thinking.”154 WSP sent flowers to Stevenson’s office, and the New York Post proclaimed it was “Adlai’s hour.”155 When the US Senate fi­nally ratified the LTBT in September, Stevenson was relieved. “I have been working for an agreement to stop nuclear testing since the 1956 Presidential campaign,” he wrote, “so this is a happy day for me. And I think this first step on the long, rocky road to safety and sanity is an historic day for the world.”156 For Stevenson, the test ban was a watershed moment in the journey t­ oward peace, what­ever that may be. Stevenson was not alone in the hopes that the LTBT would herald more sweeping agreements that worked ­toward peace via disarmament. Since its founding announcement, SANE had advocated for a test ban as a step t­ oward peace. In its first public pronouncement in November 1957, SANE’s leadership argued that “the abolition of testing gives us a place to begin on the larger question of armaments control.”157 Likewise, many activist scientists who had raised the alarm about nuclear testing in the mid-1950s had viewed a test ban as a critical path ­toward disarmament. Yet as historian Paul Rubinson shows, the “test ban treaty, long fought for by scientists, eventually came to be seen as a missed opportunity.”158 Despite optimistic hopes that it would, the LTBT did not pave the path to disarmament. The treaty removed the immediate threat of fallout in the global environment but did almost nothing to curb the continued expansion of nuclear arsenals. Although nuclear tests ­were relegated under­g round, the United States increased the average number of annual tests in the years following the treaty, and both superpowers continued to expand the strength and sophistication of their arsenals.159 Over the de­cade and a half following the LTBT, the Soviet Union and the United States went on to reach several other agreements that attempted to  curb proliferation, regulate weapons, and restrict the development of new offensive and defensive technologies. Yet the treaties that followed ­were incremental, designed to stabilize and maintain parity as the superpowers’ arsenals grew, not to work t­ oward dismantling the arsenals entirely. A comprehensive test ban, which most closely resembles the “next step” to advocates of the LTBT, has proven elusive long a­ fter the Cold War came to an end.160

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Nuclearization raised uncomfortable questions about American democracy and national community. In its capacity as an individualist enterprise, based on self-­help and privatization, civil defense seemed to repudiate traditions of community and the common good. As Americans negotiated “morality at the shelter door,” they discovered an uncomfortable choice: survival for oneself and one’s ­family or for one’s neighbors and countrymen. As Americans came to understand radioactive fallout as a ubiquitous intergenerational prob­lem even during times of peace, they questioned the rationality of nuclear weapons writ large. The public debates that raged over civil defense, nuclear testing, and weapons policies highlighted a major fracture in American culture in the early Cold War: Was the United States a nation of individuals, united by their individualism, or was the United States a community of actors who promote the collective good? This dichotomy had long existed in American culture, but the exigencies of surviving the Atomic Age disrupted both visions. As such questions r­ ose to the surface of public debate during the intense years of the early 1960s, they ­were intensified by the notion that perhaps the Atomic Age was not worth the many apparent costs of survival.

Conclusion Renouncing the Nuclear in Nuclear Citizenship

Between 1945 and 1963, American citizens had no choice but to learn to live with the existence of nuclear weapons. They witnessed the staggering expansion of nuclear arsenals at home and abroad, elected officials’ vacillating commitment to civil defense, a growing public concern with the dangers of fallout, and the repeated waxing and waning of international hostilities. As t­ hese dramas unfolded, Americans worried about the survival of their families, their homes, their communities, their nation, and their world. Yet public concern for nuclear survival was no monolith; it surfaced in a variety of ways over the course of the early de­cades of the Cold War. Across a diverse array of responses, however, concerned Americans staked their claims as t­ hose of engaged citizens who believed that their elected leaders could improve the situation. This impulse of concerned Americans was not surprising: b­ ecause nuclear weapons w ­ ere so clearly the purview of the federal state, Americans came to understand both nuclear threats and nuclear responses as functions of government. Bound by a host of competing po­liti­ cal, fiscal, and logistical priorities, however, policymakers and government agencies settled on a dif­fer­ent articulation of responsibility, one that placed the onus of survival on individual Americans themselves. In debating who or what was responsible for nuclear survival, Americans uncovered a distressing rift in the relationship between citizens and their state. This contest over the burden of survival not only created an impor­tant site of Cold War po­liti­cal engagement 171

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but also formed the very contours of what it meant to be a citizen in the Atomic Age. The dilemmas of nuclear citizenship galvanized a wide variety of Americans to push back against the state’s nuclear policies. Despite divergent politics, backgrounds, geographies, and motivations, an informal co­ali­tion of Americans created a significant antinuclear movement beginning in the mid1950s. In the years a­ fter the Cuban Missile Crisis and the ratification of the ­Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), however, antinuclear activism—in both formal organ­ization and informal public discussion—­lost much of its steam. Pundits at the time noted with interest that despite the fervor of public engagement with nuclear weapons policies in the 1950s and early 1960s, the public was no longer animated by such issues. As Norman Cousins wrote in 1976, “hardly anyone talks anymore about nuclear stockpiles as the world’s No. 1 prob­lem. An entire generation has come of age with only a theoretical idea of the nature of atomic destructive force. The anti-­testing clamor of the Sixties now seems far-­off and almost unreal.”1 By then, diplomatic solutions such as the Non-­ Proliferation Treaty (1968) and the Anti-­Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972) seemed to be making pro­gress t­ oward curbing global arsenals. But Cousins and ­others observed with trepidation that although deterrence had normalized into apparent stability, very ­little had changed in terms of the machinery of war. Enormous nuclear stockpiles remained at the ready, and both the Soviet Union and the United States continued to develop arms technologies in the form of missiles and more sophisticated weapons. Yet what of the civilians, scientists, pacifists, and antinuclear organizers who had spent years raising concern about the varied dangers of the Atomic Age? So many of them had considered the LTBT in 1963 to be a stepping-­stone to the eventual goal of disarmament and peace. The “climate of apparent obliviousness and unconcern” for nuclear weapons issues that characterized American culture during the period that followed has puzzled historians for de­cades.2 In a much-­cited 1984 article, historian of nuclear culture Paul Boyer surveyed a variety of explanations. Among the c­ auses he cites ­were the eclipsing effect of civil rights campaigns and Vietnam War protests as well as public confidence that grew out of international arms agreements and détente. Other observers, such as historian Dee Garrison, point to fizzled activist energy. Garrison notes that ­after the LTBT, “many weary activists momentarily retreated, burned-­out and exhausted a­ fter their long years of strug­gle.”3 Boyer also relies heavi­ly on an amorphous explanation that Americans had simply become inured to the dangers of nuclear war, hearkening to psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s 1982 theory of nuclear “psychic numbing,” a commonly invoked trope in nuclear history and culture.4 Undoubtedly, the decline of antinuclear activ-

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ism was due to all of t­hese conditions, the cumulative result of a variety of changes in American culture and Cold War politics.5 Yet to question the transition into “nuclear apathy” ­after the LTBT runs the risk of diminishing a central reason why many everyday Americans found themselves pushing back against the nuclear state: the h ­ azard of fallout. For the many thousands of Americans who feared for their personal safety, the health of their c­ hildren, or the ­f uture of the ­human species, the LTBT was a success ­because it resolved the most immediate threat to personal safety. As long as leaders ­were able to prevent a hot war, as they had proven capable of ­doing during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the test ban guaranteed that global levels of radiation would dissipate. Without that pressing threat to individual health perhaps, it was easy to turn away from nuclear protest. In the years following 1963, civil defense strug­gled to maintain a foothold in US politics as well. By the time the LTBT was ratified, civil defense had well passed its zenith in American domestic politics. Americans had been warned for nearly fifteen years that a nuclear attack was imminent, and yet none came. For t­hose who saw the LTBT as a forerunner to disarmament, civil defense seemed like an outmoded and unnecessary program. Moreover, some believed that in its capacity—­however dubious—to bolster a deterrent threat, civil defense might actually create an impediment to stable international relations ­because it eroded the credibility of American calls for peace. Several days before the US Senate ratified the LTBT, Representative Edward R. Roybal of California told Congress that by intensifying the nation’s civil defense program, “we are unmistakably demonstrating our lack of faith . . . ​and putting a real damper on the spirit of relaxed tension that has recently given us some mea­sure of hope that a way can be found out of the spiraling and costly nuclear arms race.”6 Congress ultimately neglected to fund many of the civil defense initiatives of John F. Kennedy’s administration a­ fter his death in 1963, and as we have seen, some city-­and state-­level civil defense programs w ­ ere terminated entirely. The Office of Civil Defense would continue to operate but on a much smaller scale. Without the support of civilians, civic groups, and advocates in Congress, nuclear civil defense fell “slowly off the public radar.”7 Throughout the second half of the 1960s and into the following de­cade, other national and international concerns certainly eclipsed discussions about civil defense. The growing expenses of the Vietnam War made it easy to reallocate civil defense appropriations to the war effort. In the shadow of shifting nuclear strategy during détente, it was even easier to let civil defense go by the wayside. Beginning in the mid-1960s, planners at all levels of government had started to see emergency planning as a task that extended beyond considerations of nuclear attacks. In terms of both funding and bureaucratic structures,

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civil defense planners increasingly turned their attention to natu­ral disaster planning and relief. Ultimately, the shift to all-­hazards response would be formalized in the 1979 creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which subsumed a variety of previously separate responsibilities, including nuclear preparedness.8 As antinuclear protest and civil defense programs alike abated, the nature of American cultural citizenship shifted as well. The l­ ater 1960s and the 1970s gave Americans a host of reasons for questioning demo­cratic structures, elected officials, and the vitality (and righ­teousness) of American institutions. Between ongoing conflict over racial disparities as well as fierce strug­gles over the meaning of feminism, sexuality, and the ­family in addition to frustration over the conflict in Vietnam, reactionary partisan politics, and economic disenfranchisement, Americans found other ways of negotiating—­and protesting—­ the complex relationship between citizens and their government. Much has been written recently about the po­liti­cal and cultural turbulence of the 1970s, a de­cade that often serves as a turning-­point period, one of rupture and realignment.9 Yet while ­these accounts often point to the causal relationship between the social upheaval of the 1960s and the turmoil of the following de­cade, less attention is granted to the experience of living through the early Cold War.10 To have learned to understand citizenship as something literally tied to survival—­however strained that tie was—­amounted to a kind of civic trauma. Nuclear citizenship, as articulated by both concerned Americans and their elected officials, revolved around who or what was responsible for ensuring survival. Yet by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear war seemed unsurvivable for many millions of Americans. It was with this backdrop that nuclear citizenship broke down, as voiced by thousands of discouraged citizens. As concerned Americans gradually renounced nuclearization over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, they w ­ ere expressing a civic disenchantment that foreshadowed what would play a much larger role American culture a de­cade ­later. Nuclear citizenship, however, did not dis­appear altogether. In the heat of the reinvigorated Cold War tensions of the 1980s, millions of critical citizens across the globe revived demands that states must bear the responsibility for the survival of their subjects. When President Ronald Reagan entered office, his repudiation of mutually assured destruction doctrine and détente ended an era of apparent stability between the superpowers. Many Americans balked at the Reagan administration’s insistence that nuclear war was winnable even if it did gesture ­toward renewed civil defense mea­sures.11 As had been the case in the early years of the Cold War, a nuclear confrontation would leave millions of ­people dead or gravely ill, a condition that many found intolerable.

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This familiar logic energized the antinuclear movement of the early 1980s. Familiar organ­izations marshaled the message as well. The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy once again took a central organ­izing position, while activist scientists reassumed the vanguard of new arguments against nuclearization.12 The antinuclear movement of the 1980s well exceeded the scale and scope of that of the late 1950s and early 1960s, as is evident by the hundreds of thousands of participants who joined the Nuclear Weapons Freeze march in New York City in June 1982. The movement was also more or­ga­nized, more international, and arguably more po­liti­cally influential. Still, antinuclear protest in the early Cold War period laid the groundwork for mass-­scale citizen involvement in antinuclear campaigns of the 1980s. ­These w ­ ere nuclear citizens like the generation before them: individuals galvanized by a commitment to h ­ uman survival in the face of the perils of the Atomic Age. Americans’ engagement with and pushback against nuclear weapons in the Cold War cast a long shadow over public attitudes ­toward nuclear weapons in society. In 1954 during a broadcast address to the American p­ eople on the state of the nation, President Dwight Eisenhower said of thermonuclear weapons that “this increase of power from a mere musket and a ­little cannon, all the way to the hydrogen bomb in a single lifetime, . . . ​indicate[s] how far the advances of science have outraced our social consciousness, how much more we have developed scientifically than we are capable of ­handling emotionally and intellectually.”13 The dualisms between head and heart, between science and morality, and between machine and ­human came to define American ambivalence about nuclear weapons. One needs to look no further than the rich Cold War–­ era array of science fiction, nuclear apocalyptic tales, and the closely related genre of nuclear satire to observe the degree to which entertainment culture grappled with the gravity of the Atomic Age. By extension, such dichotomies have also colored public debates—in the United States and elsewhere—­about the peaceful applications of nuclear science, including energy production and medical treatments. Despite Eisenhower’s rhetorical urging, American culture has never truly partitioned the difference between “atoms for peace” and “atoms for war.” Nuclear threats did not end with the end of the Cold War, of course. The end of the conflict removed some of the perceived urgency and constancy of missiles trained on American targets. Yet the Atomic Age is still very much with us. The Comprehensive Nuclear-­Test-­Ban Treaty (CTBT), a­ dopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996, has fallen short of the number of nations needed to enter the treaty into force. Since the CTBT’s adoption at the United Nations, the pos­si­ble US ratification of the treaty has become

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freighted with partisan baggage and mired in a new set of geopo­liti­cal rivalries and national security concerns.14 Although the CTBT, even in its unenforced state, has undoubtedly worked to curb proliferation and testing, the world is still heavi­ly armed. Between the eight “nuclear club” nations, the estimated global inventory of nuclear weapons is still over thirteen thousand.15 Yet public attention to nuclear dangers—­and therefore the position of nuclear weapons in American civic life—is undoubtedly less t­oday than it was during the Cold War. It is notable that events such as the Donald Trump administration’s 2019 withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-­Range Nuclear Forces Treaty registered only briefly in the news cycle, largely unremarkable to ­those outside communities of arms-­control watchdogs, po­liti­cal strategists, and nuclear history wonks (among whom I have to include myself ). More emotionally fraught but no less short-­lived in the media was the January 13, 2018, alarm of a North Korean warhead en route to Hawaii. For thirty-­eight minutes that Saturday morning, residents of Hawaii faced the prospect of imminent death. Yet perhaps aside from t­hose who lived through it and their loved ones who received heartbreaking phoned and text-­messaged goodbyes, the memory of this incident has all but dis­appeared. ­Today, my traditionally aged college students are less likely to be aware of global stockpiles than the long-­term threats of nuclear waste. Interestingly, many of them attribute nuclear waste stores exclusively to the nuclear power industry, not arsenal development and maintenance. It ­will surely be the task of historians in the ­f uture to examine why nuclear fear has taken on such a dif­fer­ent quality t­ oday than it did several de­cades ago. I suspect that psychic numbing is but one small part of the equation. One issue that cannot be overlooked in examining change over time since 1991 is the parallel between the Cold War and current threats to global, national, and personal security. Scholars have noted impor­tant social, cultural, and po­liti­cal continuities that have traced well into the twenty-­first ­century. Historian Elaine Tyler May has argued that Cold War insecurities translated into an overblown fear of crime that has grown since the 1960s and found legibility in the security-­minded atmosphere of post-9/11 American culture.16 Anthropologist Joseph Masco goes further to suggest that the “declaration of a ‘new’ counterterrorism state in 2001 was actually a repetition, modeled in language and tone on the launch of the national security state in 1947.”17 I would add that ­today’s prepper and survivalist movements also have antecedents in Cold War culture. Beyond the material centrality of bunkers, supply stockpiles, and, in some versions, firearms, ­today’s survivalism often carries a mandate of extreme individualism that would have made the most hardline Cold War civil defense planners blush. Nuclear survival occupies some of the

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landscape of prepper culture t­ oday but blends in easily with other visions of doomsday at the hands of societal or po­liti­cal breakdown, biological warfare, cyberterrorism, or religious apocalypse.18 ­Whether explic­itly called upon or not, the legacy of Cold War civil defense is baked into t­ hese practices and ways of thinking. This all raises the question, of ­whether we are nuclear citizens ­today, more than seventy-­five years since the dawn of the Atomic Age. The answer is, of course, complicated. On one hand, nuclear threats no longer serve as a central point of mediation between citizens and their government. On the other hand, however, survival still plays an integral role in what citizens expect from their state. This is readily apparent in recent protest movements in the United States and elsewhere. Climate change activism continues to stress not only the ­matter of h ­ uman survival but also the responsibility of governments to foster it. Importantly, the intergenerational consequences of climate change are a primary source of objection, just as they w ­ ere in e­ arlier nuclear protest. Activists still argue on behalf of c­ hildren and f­ uture generations, and young p­ eople figure centrally in the movement’s leadership. Likewise, the bodily survival of Americans of color is at the heart of the recent movement against police brutality and systemic racial injustice. As the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic have uncovered, it is evident that infection and mortality rates are significantly higher among Black, indigenous, and p­ eople of color in the United States due to the intersection of inequity in access to health care, safe working conditions, childcare, and a host of other contributing ­factors.19 In all of ­these movements, life and death is at the fore. And in all of ­these movements, activists have centered the idea that governments have the responsibility to respond to threats to survival. The po­liti­cal stakes of bodily and existential survival thus form a through line rooted in the earliest years of the Atomic Age.

N ote s

Archival Abbreviations

DDEL Dwight D. Eisenhower Library VLC   Virgil L. Couch Papers WHCF   White House Central Files GPO US Government Printing Office HSTL Harry S. Truman Library OF   Official File WHCF   White House Central Files NACP National Archives College Park, Mary­land OCDM   Rec­ords of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, RG 304 OEP   Rec­ords of the Office of Emergency Preparedness, RG 396 NYMA New York City Municipal Archives NYU New York University Special Collections TLRWLA   Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner L ­ abor Archive PUL Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Prince­ton University Library AES   Adlai E. Stevenson Papers HAS   H. Alexander Smith Papers RAC Rocke­fel­ler Archive Center NARGR   Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler Gubernatorial Rec­ords NARPP   Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler Personal Papers OMRR   Office of the Messrs. Rocke­fel­ler Rec­ords SPC Swarthmore College Peace Collection CNVA   Committee for Non-­Violent Action (DG 017) FOR   Fellowship of Reconciliation Files (DG 013) SANE   SANE, Inc. Rec­ords (DG 058) SF-­CD   Subject File Collection—­Civil Defense Introduction

1. Anthony Zecca, “ ‘Optimist’ at Valley Forge Has Backyard Bomb Shelter,” Petersburg Progress-­Index (­Virginia), October 23, 1958. The article was printed in syndicated outlets over the course of several months. 2. Although the term “nuclear winter” did not come into popu­lar usage ­until the 1980s, the ethos of deprivation and scarcity was foundational to early imaginings of nuclear war. 179

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3. Given the importance of the technological evolution of weapons in the Cold War, a brief note about terminology, technicality, and anachronism is merited ­here. The earliest nuclear weapons—­those developed during World War II and for the remainder of the 1940s—­were atomic weapons that derived their explosive power from nuclear fission. By the early 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union ­were engaged in developing thermonuclear—or hydrogen—­superbombs, which used a fission pro­cess to catalyze nuclear fusion. The explosive power that could be achieved through fusion was many ­orders of magnitude larger than e­ arlier fission bombs. While both countries continued to develop and refine atomic and thermonuclear weapons throughout the Cold War, the staggering scale of thermonuclear weapons meant that they replaced atomic weapons in both strategic assumptions and popu­lar imagination. In the pages that follow, I use the term “nuclear weapons” as a general category that encompasses both types of devices. Where further specificity is required, I ­will indicate the terms “atomic” or “thermonuclear.” Fi­nally, I use the term “Atomic Age” to denote the epoch beginning with the first atomic test in the summer of 1945 and continuing through the remainder of the Cold War. This term appeared in the cultural nomenclature with remarkable speed a­ fter the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Americans continued to use it well ­after the thermonuclear revolution, even when they understood the difference between atomic and thermonuclear. ­Here, I wish to honor the language that my actors used at the expense of a slight loss of technical specificity. 4. A number of excellent works have examined the politics of nuclear weapons in the early Cold War through the lens of statecraft, diplomacy, and po­liti­cal development. See, for example, Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft; Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State; Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace; Jervis, Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution. This book focuses more closely on the role of nuclearization in domestic politics, culture, and civic life, echoing the frameworks of Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, and, more recently, the studies found in Mari­ner and Piehler, Atomic Bomb and American Society; Grant and Ziemann, Understanding the Imaginary War. For more on the culture of Atomic Age Amer­i­ca, see Jacobs, Dragon’s Tail; Zeman and Amundson, Atomic Culture; Scheibach, Atomic Narratives and American Youth; Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s Amer­i­ca; Winkler, Life ­under a Cloud; Weart, Nuclear Fear; Hilgartner, Bell, and O’Connor, Nukespeak. 5. I am indebted to a wide-­ranging lit­er­a­ture on American cultural citizenship that has emerged in the last two de­cades. For citizenship in Cold War and Atomic Age Amer­i­ca, see Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War Amer­i­ca; Masco, Nuclear Borderlands, 1–39. For nuclear-­biological frameworks for citizenship, see Petryna, Life Exposed; Zaretsky, Radiation Nation. For helpful frameworks for citizenship in postwar Amer­i­ca more generally, see Rutenberg, Rough Draft; Loss, Between Citizens and the State; Cohen, Consumer’s Republic; Gerstle, American Crucible; Putnam, Bowling Alone; Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. 6. Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War Amer­i­ca; Cuordileone, Manhood and American Po­liti­cal Culture; Johnson, Lavender Scare; Storrs, Second Red Scare; May, Homeward Bound; Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes. 7. This book takes cues from Friedman’s examination of spaces for expressions of citizenship that ­were able to work against the restrictive Cold War state. As she puts it, the early Cold War fostered a “realization that the caretakers of the burgeoning national security state had to be pushed into living up to American ideals.” Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War Amer­ic­ a, 193.

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8. Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 14. Renewed nuclear hostilities in the 1980s and the subsequent end of the Cold War prompted a series of critical histories that not only criticized the federal state’s civil defense initiatives e­ arlier in the Cold War but also framed such programs as a symptom of the state’s duplicitous Cold War governance. See Kerr, Civil Defense in the U.S.; Oakes, Imaginary War. Several government-­sponsored institutional histories of civil defense map the evolution of programs over the de­cades. See Gessert, Jordan, and Tashjean, Federal Civil Defense Organ­ization; Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield; Blanchard, American Civil Defense, 1945–1984; Homeland Security National Preparedness Task Force, Civil Defense and Homeland Security. 9. For a detailed exploration of “the shelters that w ­ ere not built,” see Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 186–213. See also George, Awaiting Armageddon, 1–11. 10. See Rose, One Nation Under­ground; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home; Bishop, ­Every Home a Fortress; Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red; Knowles, “Ten to Twenty Million Killed, Tops,” in Disaster Experts, 162–208; Jacobs, Dragon’s Tail, chap. 4; Monteyne, Fallout Shelter; Davis, Stages of Emergency. The best institutional history of civil defense, in both the United States and the Soviet Union, is Geist, Armageddon Insurance. A number of recent assessments of nuclear civil defense outside the United States have also enriched the field. See Ziauddin, “Superpower Under­ground”; Cronqvist, “Survival in the Welfare Cocoon”; Bennesved and Norén, “Urban Catastrophe and Sheltered Salvation.” Several other non-­US studies of civil defense provide excellent considerations of citizenship, civic participation, and inclusion. See Hogg and Brown, “Social and Cultural Histories of British Nuclear Mobilisation”; Grant, “ ‘Civil Defence Gives Meaning to Our Leisure’ ”; Grant, “Making Sense of Nuclear War”; Burtch, Give Me Shelter. 11. McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 152. 12. Rose, One Nation Under­ground; Bishop, ­Every Home a Fortress. See also Lichtman, “Do-­It-­Yourself Security.” 13. The long influence of Elaine Tyler May’s ideal of “domestic containment” is evident throughout the recent cultural historiography of civil defense. May, Homeward Bound. 14. For more on the contours of self-­help civil defense, see McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 11–39. 15. Senator Brien McMahon, JCAE, Executive Session, Civil Defense, unpublished hearing, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., March 23, 1950, 19. 16. For a reassessment of New Deal liberalism and postwar historiography, see Jacobs, “Uncertain F ­ uture of American Politics.” For the role of statism and antistatism, see Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State; Hogan, Cross of Iron; Balogh, Chain Reaction. 17. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 113. For further discussion of this startling number, see chapter 5 in the current volume. The lengthy historiography of nuclear weapons development necessitates a representative overview. For a recent primary source collection that offers context and concise synthesis, see Feldman, Nuclear Reactions. For a narrative synthesis, see DeGroot, The Bomb. For an encyclopedic resource on weapons, policy, and costs, see Schwartz, Atomic Audit. 18. The complex role of nuclear science, nuclear scientists, and policy in the early Cold War is a historiographical genre in itself. To start, see Bridger, Scientists at War; Rubinson, Redefining Science; Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory; Slaney, “Eugene Rabinowitch,

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TO PAGES 8– 16

the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and the Nature of Scientific Internationalism”; Hecht, “Atomic Hero”; Wang, In Sputnik’s Shadow; Balogh, Chain Reaction; Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb; Wang, “Scientists and the Prob­lem of the Public.” 19. For analyses of early fallout studies, see Creager, “Radiation, Cancer, and Mutation”; Hamblin, “ ‘A Dispassionate and Objective Effort.’ ” For a wide-­ranging consideration of the environmental, po­liti­cal, and diplomatic consequences of fallout, see Higuchi, Po­liti­cal Fallout. 20. For nuclear science and dissent, see Moore, Disrupting Science; Rubinson, Redefining Science; Higuchi, Po­liti­cal Fallout. For nuclear dissent and activism more broadly, see Wittner’s extensive three-­volume series “The Strug­gle against the Bomb,” which includes One World or None, Resisting the Bomb, and ­Toward Nuclear Abolition; Intondi, African Americans against the Bomb; Foertsch, Reckoning Day; Fox, Downwind; Swerdlow, ­Women Strike for Peace; Divine, Blowing on the Wind; Katz, Ban the Bomb. 21. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb; Divine, Blowing on the Wind; Katz, Ban the Bomb. 22. ­Sullivan, Nuclear Democracy. 23. See Kiernan, Girls of Atomic City; Brown, Plutopia; Masco, Nuclear Borderlands. 1. Stop “Play[ing] Pattycake with the Whole Issue”

1. Rabinowitch, “If the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission Fails,” 169. The Doomsday Clock was first used on the cover of the sixth issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in June 1947. 2. Boyer posits that this quote, from radio news broadcaster Don Goddard, was the very first report that most Americans heard about the atomic bomb. Quoted in Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 4. 3. In the National Opinion Research Center poll, 59 ­percent of respondents answered “very real danger,” 24 ­percent answered “slight danger,” 10 ­percent answered “no danger,” and 7 ­percent ­were undecided. “Quarter’s Polls,” 530. 4. For more on change and continuity a­ fter World War II, see Dudziak, War Time; Engelhardt, End of Victory Culture; Sherry, In the Shadow of War. 5. “The 36-­Hour War,” Life, November 19, 1945, 27–35. 6. Morrison, “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand,” 15. 7. For more on the scientists’ movement, see Smith, Peril and a Hope, 47–106; Barnhart, “Selling the International Control of Atomic Energy”; Wang, “Scientists and the Prob­lem of the Public.” 8. For an extensive discussion of the difficulties inherent in predictions in nuclear statecraft, see Connelly et al., “ ‘General, I Have Fought Just as Many Nuclear Wars as You Have.’ ” 9. See, for example, United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 10. Eva Hill to President Harry S. Truman, November 12, 1945, folder “Atomic Bomb,” box 1686, WHCF, OF 692-­A, Truman Papers, HSTL. 11. Cairoli Hegani to President Harry S. Truman, February 8, 1950, E4-3, box 5, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 12. G. L. Simpson to Public Relations Section, Atomic Energy Commission, January 18, 1951, E4, box 92, Security-­Classified General Correspondence of the Board, July 1949–­April 1953 (Entry #31), OCDM-­NACP.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 7 – 2 2

183

13. Daniel Lang, “A Reporter at Large: The Man in the Thick Lead Suit,” New Yorker, July 16, 1949, 50. 14. Boyer’s treatment of civil defense, for example, is ­limited to responses from planners, experts and professionals, and other officials. See Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 319–33. 15. University of Michigan Survey Research Center, Public Reaction to the Atomic Bomb, 120. 16. See Dudziak, War Time, chap. 3. 17. John G. Norris, “U.S. Has No Plans for Civil Defense,” Washington Post, May 22, 1947. 18. Eric H. Biddle, chairman of the NSRB Interagency Working Group of Interim Civil Defense Plans, “Critique of Seattle Interim Defense Plan,” July 17, 1950, 13, E4-26, box 12, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 19. Mrs. C. H. L. Pennock, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Citizen Participation, to W. Stuart Symington, chairman, National Security Resources Board, July 27, 1950, E4-2, box 1, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 20. Ibid. 21. Robert J. Ewig to President Harry S. Truman, June 1951, folder “(Feb 1951–53),” box 1843, WHCF, OF 1591 Truman Papers, HSTL. 22. “Civil Defense ‘Apathy,’ ” Philadelphia Inquirer, included as clipping in folder “(Feb 1951–53),” box 1843, WHCF, OF 1591, Truman Papers, HSTL. 23. Ewig to Truman, June 1951. 24. For more on martial citizenship during and ­after World War II, see Westbrook, Why We Fought; Rutenberg, Rough Draft. 25. Dan H. Benson to the United States Citizens Defense Corps, 1950, E4-3, box 5, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 26. Mrs. Leonard H. Boland to Congressman Melvin Price, August 10, 1950, E4-3, box 5, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 27. John S. Bush Jr. to the Director of Public Information, Atomic Energy Commission, January 2, 1951, E4-3, box 5, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 28. John A. De Chant, Public Affairs Division, memorandum to Administrator Millard Caldwell, December  28, 1950, E4-2, box 1, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 29. Paul J. Larsen, memorandum to John A. De Chant, “Report on Second Day of Public Hearings for Civil Defense,” March 24, 1950, E4-2, box 1, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 30. Harold Russell, National Commander, AMVETS, tele­g ram to W. Stuart Symington, September 9, 1950, E4-2, box 2, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 31. Omar B. Ketchum, director, Veterans of Foreign Wars, to President Harry S. Truman, September 7, 1948, folder “(1945–­Jan 1951),” box 1842, WHCF, OF 1591, Truman Papers, HSTL. 32. Delwyn Amerine to the National Civil Defense Authority, December 29, 1950, ­E4-3, box 5, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP.

18 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 22– 28

33. Reverend John R. Blythe to Charles E. Wilson, director, Office of Defense Mobilization, December 23, 1950, E4-3, box 5, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949– 1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 34. Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca (BSA), “Civil Defense Guide for Council and District Planning,” 1950, 5, folder “(1945–­Jan 1951),” box 1842, WHCF, OF 1591, Truman Papers, HSTL. 35. BSA, “Civil Defense Guide,” 30. 36. Ibid., 5. 37. Amerine, December 29, 1950. 38. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red, 81–83. 39. BSA, “Civil Defense Guide,” 23. 40. Ibid., 6. 41. Brown, “ ‘A Is for Atom, B Is for Bomb.’ ” 42. Congressman Leroy Johnson to Paul J. Larsen, “Regarding Mrs. Kathryn W. Noonan,” March 16, 1950, E4-1, box 1, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 43. See Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage; Petigny, Permissive Society, chap. 5. 44. See, in general, Entry #31-­A, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953, OCDM-­NACP. 45. William A. Gill, memorandum to John A. De Chant, “Statement on the Role of Boy Scouts in Civil Defense,” August 28, 1950, E4-2, box 2, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 46. BSA, “Civil Defense Guide,” 4. 47. Representative Clarence Cannon to President Harry S. Truman, August 17, 1950, folder “(1945-­Jan 1951),” box 1842, WHCF, OF 1591, Truman Papers, HSTL. 48. Extension of Remarks of Hon. Clarence Cannon of Missouri in the House of Representatives, Saturday, June  19, 1948, A4348, appendix, Congressional Rec­ord Proceedings and Debates of the 80th Congress, 2nd sess., vol. 94, part 2. 49. Jacobs, “Uncertain F ­ uture,” 154–61. 50. Putnam, Bowling Alone; May, Homeward Bound. 51. John Auerbach to Eric Biddle, August 28, 1950, E4-3, box 5, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 52. For more on the contours postwar housing shortage, see Wright, Building the Dream; Baxandall and Ewin, Picture Win­dows. For shortage numbers, see Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 122. The number of Americans needing housing in the postwar period was even more acute among black Americans. See Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 170–73. 53. Martial and Scull, “Atom Bomb House,” 176. 54. For a brief discussion about how postwar suburban home design incorporated ele­ments of the Prairie School with industrialized manufacturing techniques, see Wright, Building the Dream; Baxandall and Ewin, Picture Win­dows, 132–33. 55. For more on postwar housing and prefabricated buildings, see Wolfe and Garfield, “ ‘A New Standard for Living.’ ” For AIA defense of the “modular coordination concept,” see Hauf, “Building Research and Modular Coordination,” 101. 56. Hauf, “Building Research,” 101. 57. Monteyne, Fallout Shelter, 110–23.

NOTES TO PA GES 2 8 – 3 3

185

58. “West Coast Gets Ready,” Life, March 12, 1951, 67. 59. Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 78–81. 60. G. C. Steuart to Paul J. Larsen, March 7, 1950, E2-9, box 90, Security-­Classified General Correspondence of the Board, July, 1949–­April 1953 (Entry #31), OCDM-NACP. 61. Federal Civil Defense Administration, 4 Wheels to Survival. 62. For an excellent analy­sis of the parallels between urban renewal and civil defense dispersal, see Monteyne, Fallout Shelter, 1–12. 63. Millard F. Caldwell to Senator William F. Knowland, December 26, 1950, E4-1, box 1, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 64. “West Coast Gets Ready,” 68. 65. Tracy B. Augur, memorandum to Presley Lancaster, “Report on Telephone Conversation with Mr. Robert L. Pine of Dayton, Ohio,” August 15, 1951, E2-3, box 89, Security-­Classified General Correspondence of the Board, July, 1949–­April 1953 (Entry #31), OCDM-­NACP. 66. For anx­i­eties about fitness, normalcy, and health, see Cuordileone, Manhood and American Po­liti­cal Culture; Johnson, Lavender Scare; Dean, “Masculinity as Ideology”; Creadick, Perfectly Average; May, Homeward Bound, 92–113 and 135–61; Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 119–53; Herman, Romance of American Psy­chol­ogy, 126–30; Berrett, “Feeding the Organ­ization Man”; Matthews, “One Nation over Coals”; Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White. 67. USSBS, Effects of Atomic Bombs. 68. ­Table 680-­A, “Number and Percentage of U.S. Homes with Tele­vi­sion Receivers, and Average Cost of Receivers, 1946–1977,” cited in Sterling and Haight, Mass Media, 372. 69. John N. O’Reilly to President Harry S. Truman, January 26, 1951, E4-32, box 13, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 70. Amerine, December 29, 1950. 71. Forrest Andrews to Millard Caldwell, February 13, 1951, E4-28, box 13, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 72. Representative E. H. Hedrick to Donald S. Dawson, administrative assistant to the president, February  28, 1951, folder “Miscellaneous ( Jan–­Mar 1951),” box 1915, WHCF, OF 2965, Truman Papers, HSTL. See also Core, referenced in Presidential Appointment Calendar, Monday, October  8, 1951, Harry  S. Truman Library and Museum, https://­www​.­trumanlibrary​.­gov​/­calendar​?­month​=1­ 0&day​=8­ &​ year​=7­ . 73. “The 36-­Hour War,” 35. 74. For more on physical fitness, postwar citizenship, and masculinity, see Rutenberg, Rough Draft, chap. 2. 75. For psychological studies of soldiers during and ­after World War II, see Loss, Between Citizens and the State; Herman, Romance of American Psy­chol­ogy. 76. “A ‘Grass Roots’ Program for Civil Defense,” Armed Force (August 19, 1950), 11. 77. Saint Paul—­Ramsey County Organ­ization for Civil Defense, “If We Are Bombed (Pamphlet),” ca. 1950, E4-2, box 4, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP (emphasis in the original). 78. For more about the confluence of psychological management and civil defense, see Davis, Stages of Emergency, 105–25.

18 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 34– 44

79. Niel R. Allen, chairman, American Legion National Civil Defense Committee, “Report to Erle Cocke, Jr.,” May 2, 1950, E4-2, box 4, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 80. JCAE, Hearing, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack, Part 3, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., March 17, 1950, 82–89. 81. Ibid., 87. 82. G. Mennen Williams, governor of Michigan, to Paul Larsen, June 23, 1950, E4-27, box 12, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 83. Eric H. Biddle, chairman of NSRB Interagency Working Group of Interim Civil Defense Plans, “Critique of Seattle Interim Defense Plan,” July 17, 1950, 18, E4-26, box 12, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 84. Thomas H. Nichols, mayor of Canton, Ohio, tele­g ram to President Harry S. Truman, June 27, 1950, folder “Miscellaneous,” box 1843, WHCF, OF 1591, Truman Papers, HSTL. 85. C. A. Robins, governor of Idaho, to William A. Gill, September 15, 1950, E4-34, box 14, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 86. Barney L. Allis to Matthew J. Connelly, appointments secretary to the president, January 29, 1951, folder “Bomb Shelters,” box 1843, WHCF, OF 1591-­B, Truman Papers, HSTL. 87. Hubert R. Gallagher, memorandum to Millard Caldwell, “Findings of Directors Conference,” December 13, 1950, E4-1, box 1, Rec­ords Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–1953 (Entry #31-­A), OCDM-­NACP. 88. Joseph T. Sharkey, acting president, “Resolution Requesting Action by the Government of the United States and Alternatively by the Government of the City of New York on the City Planning Commission Report to the Mayor, Entitled ‘An Immediate Program for Atomic Bomb Protection,’ ” August 15, 1950, Reel MN54003, folder 227, box 7, Rec­ords of the Council of the City of New York, NYMA. 89. Vincent R. Impellitteri, mayor of New York City, to President Harry S. Truman, December 14, 1950, folder “(1945–­Jan 1951),” box 1842, OF 1591, Truman Papers, HSTL. 90. Fletcher Knebel, “­We’re Wide Open to Disaster,” Look, February 27, 1951, 30. 2. “Between the Devil and the Deep”

1. Millard Tydings to the JCAE, Executive Session, Civil Defense, unpublished hearing, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., February 17, 1950, 29. 2. For competing arguments about ­whether the early Cold War national security state supported liberalism or illiberalism, a strong federal state or a weak one, see Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red; Storrs, Second Red Scare; Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War Amer­i­ca. 3. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State; Hogan, Cross of Iron. Geist argues that the contract state compromise over federal power and domestic intervention dictated the contours of US civil defense. See Geist, Armageddon Insurance, 8–11. The tension between practice and ideology also ­shaped peaceful nuclear energy politics. See Balogh, Chain Reaction. 4. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red; Oakes, Imaginary War. 5. For example, Oakes argues that this characterization of policymakers was the public “unofficial, clandestine, and cynical” view of the majority of postwar Ameri-

NOTES TO PA GES 44– 49

187

cans. While certain civilian dissenters likely held this opinion in the late 1940s, policymakers generally did not. Oakes, Imaginary War, 6–7. 6. McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home; Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red. 7. USSBS, Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The War Department published a concurrent survey in 1946 that also considered domestic civil defense, but copies of the document are exceedingly rare and not often cited publicly; see War Department General Staff, Defense against ­Enemy Actions Directed at Civilians. For further information about this rare report, see Gessert, Jordan, and Tasjean, Federal Civil Defense Organ­ization, 80–81. 8. USSBS, Effects of Atomic Bombs, 36. 9. Myths about less resilient Japa­nese building types and dense populations continued to pervade popu­lar understandings of the lessons from Japan. See ­these assumptions reinforced in Daniel Lang, “A Reporter at Large: The Man in the Thick Lead Suit,” New Yorker, July 15, 1949, 48–59. 10. USSBS, Effects of Atomic Bombs, 36–38. 11. “U.S. Defense Moves on Atom Proposed,” New York Times, June 30, 1946. 12. USSBS, Effects of Atomic Bombs, 38. 13. Ibid., 43. 14. “The Bombs That Hit Japan,” New York Times, July 1, 1946. 15. See Chance, “Sharing the Atom Bomb”; Wang, “Scientists and the Prob­lem of the Public”; Miller, “ ‘An Effective Instrument of Peace.’ ” For a detailed account of the Baruch Plan and its failure, see Powaski, March to Armageddon, 29–47. 16. See initial posttest statements reprinted in Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini, 192–204. See also DeGroot, The Bomb, 117–22. 17. Hanson W. Baldwin, “Atom Bomb Is Proved Most Terrible Weapon,” New York Times, July 7, 1946. 18. Ibid. 19. Don Whitehead, “Bikini Lagoon Turned into Flaming Caldron,” Pittsburgh Post-­Gazette, July 25, 1946. 20. War Department Civil Defense Board, Study of Civil Defense. The WDCDB was first established in November 1946. Its final report was declassified and released to the public in February 1948. 21. For more on the WDCDB’s Report of the War Department Civil Defense Board (Bull Report) and OCDM’s Civil Defense for National Security (Hopley Report), see Jordan, U.S. Civil Defense before 1950, 65–78. 22. War Department Civil Defense Board, Study of Civil Defense, 4. 23. Ibid., 5. 24. John G. Norris, “U.S. Has No Plans for Civil Defense,” Washington Post, May 22, 1947. 25. Ibid. 26. Wayne Thomis, “Legion Leaders Urge Plan for Civil Defense,” Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1947. 27. James Forrestal, secretary of defense, War Department memorandum establishing the OCDP, March 27, 1948, printed in JCAE, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack: Preliminary Data, report prepared by staff of the Joint Committee, 81st  Cong., 2nd sess., 1950. 28. OCDP, Civil Defense for National Security.

18 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 49– 53

29. H. Waggoner, “Civil Defense Plan Mapped against Any ­Enemy Attack,” New York Times, November 14, 1948. 30. As B. Wayne Blanchard argues, defense bud­gets ­were so constrained in the years immediately following World War II that the military was “unresponsive to suggestions that civil defense become a responsibility of the military establishment.” Nevertheless, both the Bull and Hopley boards came to the conclusion that military coordination was needed. This could have contributed to the fiscal restraint advocated by both reports. W ­ hether it was directly tied to the military’s bud­get austerity or a more general concern for federal spending, federal fiscal restraint characterized all major civil defense initiatives ­until the Kennedy administration. See Blanchard, American Civil Defense, 1945–1984, 2. 31. As the Hopley Report stated, “it seems reasonable that the [military] would be preferable.” OCDP, Civil Defense for National Security, 18. 32. Walter Winchell, “Excerpt of Scripts,” November 21, 1948, printed in JCAE, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack, 62. 33. Bond, “Military and Civil Confusion about Civil Defense,” 297. 34. Hanson W. Baldwin, “New Steps for Defense,” New York Times, November 25, 1948. 35. “A Civil Defense Plan,” New York Times, November 14, 1948. 36. Sam Zagoria, “President Moves to Separate Civil Defense from Military,” Washington Post, December 16, 1948. 37. Ibid. 38. The National Security Act of 1947, Public Law 253, U.S. Statutes at Large 343 (1947) § 103 (c). 39. Joseph H. Short, “Truman Junks Proposed Office of Civil Defense,” Baltimore Sun, March 5, 1949. 40. “President Rejects Civil Defense Unit,” New York Times, March 5, 1949. 41. “Reckord O.K.’s President on Civil Defense,” Baltimore Sun, March 6, 1949. 42. Louis Johnson, secretary of defense, “Directive Abolishing the Office of Civil Defense Planning and Establishing the Office of Assistant for Civil Defense Liaison,” August 1, 1949, printed in JCAE, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack, 53–54. 43. See specifically the following hearings: SCAS, Subcommittee on Civilian Defense, Executive Session, Civilian Defense, unpublished hearing, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., April 6, 1950; SCAS, Executive Session, Preliminary Report on Civil Defense Nomination of Thomas K. Finletter to Be Secretary of the Air Force, and Nominations as Per Reference Numbers 194 and 195,” unpublished hearings on S. 2496 and S. 2911, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., April 13, 1950; JCAE, Executive Session, Plans for Civilian Defense, unpublished hearing, 81st  Cong., 2nd sess., December 4, 1950; SCAS, Executive Session, Civilian Defense, unpublished hearing, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., December 5, 1950. For the response in the press, see, for example, “Whose Civil Defense,” Washington Post, April 15, 1950. 44. McEnaney posits that a “healthy suspicion of the military’s power” drove civil defense into the realm of civilian control yet normalized militarization as a part of everyday life. See McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 7. For more on civilian-­ military tension in postwar Amer­i­ca, see Hogan, Cross of Iron. 45. Senator Estes Kefauver of the Subcommittee on Civilian Defense, SCAS Executive Session, Civilian Defense, April 6, 1950, 1.

NOTES TO PA GES 5 4– 6 1

189

46. Senator Brien McMahon speaking for the JCAE, Executive Session, Civil ­Defense, unpublished hearing, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., February 23, 1950, 17–18. 47. Senator Brien McMahon, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 17, 1950, 59. 48. McMahon, Civil Defense, February 23, 1950, 1–9. 49. Senator John W. Bricker, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 17, 1950, 58. 50. Gordon Dean, commissioner, AEC, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 17, 1950, 21. 51. Shields Warren, Division of Biology and Medicine, AEC, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 17, 1950, 54. 52. John W. Bricker, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 17, 1950, 58. 53. McMahon, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 23, 1950, 21. 54. McMahon, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 17, 1950, 61. 55. For a detailed narrative of official projections for the Soviet nuclear program, see Hewlett and Anderson, Atomic Shield, 1947/1952. 56. JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 23, 1950, 24. 57. Herman, Romance of American Psy­chol­ogy; Igo, Averaged American; Petigny, Permissive Society; Hudnut-­Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs, 9–15. 58. JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 23, 1950. 59. Brien McMahon, JCAE, Executive Session, Civil Defense, unpublished hearing, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., March 1, 1950, 42. 60. McMahon, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 17, 1950, 61. 61. For NSC-68 used in civil defense discussions, see Leslie Kullenberg, NSRB testimony before the JCAE Executive Session, Plans for Civilian Defense, December 4, 1950, 24–32. For NSC-68, see “National Security Council Report, NSC 68, ‘United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,’ ” April 14, 1950, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, US National Archives, http://­digitalarchive​.­wilsoncenter​.­org​ /­document​/­116191. 62. McMahon, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, March 1, 1950, 28. 63. Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War Amer­i­ca, 1–9. 64. McMahon, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 17, 1950, 62–63. 65. William L. Borden, JCAE staff member, JCAE, Executive Session, Civil Defense, unpublished hearing, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., March 16, 1950, 10. 66. See McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, chap. 1. For a broader discussion of how anticommunism ­shaped policy, see Storrs, Second Red Scare. 67. McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 25. 68. Representative W. Sterling Cole speaking for the JCAE, Executive Session, Civil Defense, unpublished hearing, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., March 23, 1950, 21. 69. Paul Larsen, director, OCM, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, March 23, 1950, 21. 70. Paul Larsen, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, March 23, 1950, 20. 71. Hearing before the JCAE, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack, Part 6, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., December 4, 1950, 192–193. 72. OCDP, Civil Defense for National Security, 9. 73. Ibid., 3.

19 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 61– 66

74. Shields Warren, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, February 17, 1950, 31. 75. NSRB, Case Study in Peacetime Mobilization Planning, 14–31. 76. “Industrial War Mobilization, Civil Defense Demilitarized,” Washington Post, June 26, 1949. 77. See, for example, Lincoln Gould, “Rep. Kennedy ‘Shocked’ by Civil Defense Setup,” Daily Boston Globe, October 10, 1949; “Only 12 Men Plan U.S. Civil Defense,” New York Times, October 2, 1949; “Baruch Lashes Lack of Action in Civil Defense,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October  31, 1949; “Neglected Civil Defense,” Washington Post, December 1, 1949. 78. See “Legion Asks Drill for Civil Defense,” New York Times, March 21, 1950; “Big City Officials Ask Civil Defense on National Scale,” Daily Boston Globe, April 4, 1950. 79. NSRB, United States Civil Defense. The report was also known as NSRB Document 128. 80. Lieutenant Col­o­nel Barnet  W. Beers speaking before House Committee on Armed Ser­vices, Subcommittee on Civilian Defense, Subcommittee Hearings on H.R. 9798, to Authorize a Federal Civil Defense Program, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., December 5, 1950. 81. On December 16, 1950, Truman issued Executive Order 10,193 establishing the Office of Defense Mobilization u ­ nder the jurisdiction of the executive branch. ­Until the NSRB was formally disbanded on June 12, 1953, the Office of Defense Mobilization gradually took up its responsibilities. Executive Order 10,193, “Providing for the Conduct of the Mobilization Effort of the Government,” December 16, 1950. 82. JCAE Executive Session, “Plans for Civilian Defense,” December 4, 1950, 9. 83. President Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President on Announcing the First Atomic Explosion in the U.S.S.R.,” September 23, 1949, The American Presidency Proj­ect, https://­www​.­presidency​.­ucsb​.­edu​/­documents​/­statement​-­the​-­president​-­annou​ ncing​-­the​-­first​-­atomic​-­explosion​-­the​-­ussr. 84. The diplomatic historiography is somewhat divided on the significance of the Soviet atomic explosion in 1949. Some argue that the Soviet thermonuclear explosion in 1953 was a more critical moment in Cold War strategy. See, for example, Leffler, Preponderance of Power. However, Truman and his advisers downplayed the news in 1949 in order to control the press reaction. While the magnitude of destruction caused by thermonuclear devices greatly obscures that of atomic weapons, 1949 is not to be overlooked. For the public, 1949 changed assumptions about safety, peace, and aggression as much as if not more than the 1953 revelation. For a detailed account of the weeks surrounding the explosion, see Hewlett and Anderson, Atomic Shield. 85. Paul P. Kennedy, “How Much Civil Defense? Most of It Is on Paper,” New York Times, July 16, 1950. See also “Civil Defense Not Yet Ready for All-­Out War,” Daily Boston Globe, July 23, 1950. 86. Oakes, Imaginary War; Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red; Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon. 87. Brien McMahon, JCAE Executive Session, Civil Defense, March 23, 1950, 3. 88. For frontier imagery, see James J. Wadsworth, acting deputy administrator, Civil Defense Administration, NSRB, speaking to the JCAE, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack, Part 6, 191.

NOTES TO PA GES 6 7 – 74

191

3. The Man in the White Lab Coat

1. Press release, “Atoms for Peace” speech, December 8, 1953, United Nations Speech 12/8/53, box 5, Speech Series, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Papers as President of the United States, Eisenhower Presidential Library. For extensive background about Eisenhower’s speech, see Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 222–42. 2. For more on PER, see Geist, Armageddon Insurance, 76–77; Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red, 58–62; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 31–34; Oakes, Imaginary War, 47–69; Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 2006, 48–50; Tobin, “Reduction of Urban Vulnerability.” 3. AUI institutions ­were all located in the Northeast, many of them Ivy League: Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Prince­ ton University, the University of Rochester, and Yale University. For more on Lloyd V. Berkner, AUI’s president, see Needell, Science, Cold War and the American State. 4. AUI, General Report: Part I, Report of the Proj­ect East River (New York: AUI, 1952), i. 5. Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 191. 6. See Solovey, Shaky Foundations; Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University; Balogh, Chain Reaction. 7. AUI, Information and Training for Civil Defense: Part IX of the Report of Proj­ect East River (New York: AUI 1952), ii, i, and Appendix IXB, “Panic Prevention and Control.” 8. See, for example, Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red, 58–62. 9. See broadly Herman, Romance of American Psy­chol­ogy, chaps. 2 and 3; Engerman, “Social Science in the Cold War”; Loss, Between Citizens and the State, chap. 4; Igo, Averaged American; Jacobs, Dragon’s Tail, 42–60. 10. Herman, Romance of American Psy­chol­ogy, 13. 11. AUI, Information and Training for Civil Defense, v (emphasis in the original). 12. Ibid., vi. 13. AUI, General Report, 2. 14. Compartmentalization provided a managerial logic to many parts of the nuclear bureaucracy. See, for example, Malloy, “ ‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’ ”; Masco, Nuclear Borderlands, chap. 6. 15. See, for example, FCDA, Operation Cue, 14 minutes, 36 seconds (FCDA, 1955), film; National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association, The House in the M ­ iddle (Robert J. Enders Inc. 1954), film. 16. Committee on Civil Defense, APA, “Psychological First Aid in Community Disasters,” 1954, folder 4, box 19, Subseries H: Civil Defense Publications By Vari­ous Organ­izations and Associations, 1951–1958, Series I: FCDA, 1951–1958, VLC-­DDEL. 17. Committee on Civil Defense, APA, “Psychological First Aid,” 9. 18. Division of Biology and Agriculture Civil Defense Foods Advisory Committee, National Acad­emy of Sciences–­National Research Council, “The Vulnerability of the Food Industries to Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Warfare Agents” (November 1955), box 15, Subseries E: FCDA Publications, 1951–1958, Series I: FCDA 1951–1958, VLC-­DDEL. 19. ­These files w ­ ere correspondence files, with nearly e­ very pamphlet dated with a “received” stamp. The information was likely sent to Virgil Couch’s office as a courtesy rather than a requirement. See Subseries F-­J in Series I: FCDA 1951–1958, VLC-­DDEL.

19 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 75– 80

20. Arnold Ringstadt, however, argues that ­there ­were impor­tant changes in tone, delivery, and style between early civil defense films (early 1950s) and ­later (early 1960s). See Ringstadt, “Evolution of American Civil Defense Film Rhe­toric.” 21. “U.S. Cities Wide Open to Atom Raid,” Daily Boston Globe, January  4, 1953; “You Must Meet Atomic Attack, Nation Warned,” Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1953. 22. A good early example of this is 1951’s Target USA, sponsored by the American Red Cross. American Red Cross, Target USA, produced by Milton J. Salzburg, directed by Herman Boxer (Cornell Films, Co., 1951), film, 20 minutes. 23. Balderston and Hewes, Atomic Attack, 43. 24. A Voice ­Shall Be Heard, sponsored by the Electronics Division of GE, promoted two-­way radio equipment as essential technology for survival in an atomic attack scenario. See Electronics Div., GE, A Voice S­ hall Be Heard, directed by Jack Glenn (March of Time, 1951), film, 22 minutes. 25. The Geiger ­counter is the most vis­i­ble of a wide inventory of nuclear-­related devices found in civil defense films. O ­ thers include the dosimeter, radar, radio, and other notification and communication devices. For another example of how Geiger ­counters became normalized in American culture, see Zeman and Amundson, Atomic Culture, chap. 3. 26. Balderston and Hewes, Atomic Attack, 15. 27. Encyclopedia Britannica Films, Atomic Alert (Elementary Version) (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1951), film, 11 minutes. 28. Lapp, “Civil Defense ­Faces New Peril,” 350. 29. Luminous watch ­faces appear frequently in civil defense materials. For a grim history on the manufacture of luminescent watches, see Clark, Radium Girls. 30. You Can Beat the A-­Bomb, directed by Walter Colmes (Emerson Film Corporation and Crystal Productions Inc., 1950), 1:08. 31. Ibid., 0:59. 32. Malloy, “ ‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die.’ ” 33. For more on fallout secrecy and public health, see Hacker, Ele­ments of Controversy; Ball, Justice Downwind; Miller, ­Under the Cloud; Titus, Bombs in the Backyard. 34. The House in the ­Middle, 3:45 and 4:01. 35. Ibid., 1:20. 36. National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Field Office, “Secret Film Studio.” 37. See Mielke, “Rhe­toric and Ideology in the Nuclear Test Documentary,” 31. 38. For more on government-­produced images of civil defense and nuclear tests, see Nowak, “Images of Nuclear War in US Government Films.” 39. See, for example, The Armed Forces Special Weapons Proj­ect, Medical Aspects of Nuclear Radiation (Cascade Pictures, 1950), film, 20 mins.; GE, A Is for Atom, directed by Carl Urbano (John Sutherland Productions, 1953), film, 15 mins.; Walt Disney’s Disneyland, “Our Friend the Atom,” season 3, episode 14, directed by Hamilton Luske, aired January 23, 1957, on ABC. 40. GE, A Is for Atom, 0:37. 41. Chamber of Commerce of the United States, The Atom Comes to Town (Muller, Jordan & Herrick, 1957), film, 29 mins. 42. See also The Christophers, Atomic Energy as a Force for Good, directed by Robert Stevenson ( Jack Denove, 1955), film, 27 mins.

NOTES TO PA GES 8 0– 8 8

193

43. GE, A Is for Atom. 44. Prelinger, Field Guide to Sponsored Films, 1. 45. “Atom Educational Film Made Available by GE,” Washington Post, August 9, 1953. 46. White, “Newsman Looks at Physicists,” 16 (emphasis in the original). 47. GE, A Is for Atom, 0:55. 48. You Can Beat the A Bomb, 2:40. 49. Ibid., 6:44. For more on civil defense, masculinity, and fatherhood, see Bishop, ­Every Home a Fortress. 50. FCDA, Operation Cue (1955), film, 15 mins. 51. Ibid., 2:37. 52. Ibid., 5:18. 53. For language about “Modern Grandmas,” see C. Bruce Wright, “Grandma’s Pantry Civil Defense display, ca. 1957,” photo­graph, Maine Historical Society, Maine Memory Network, https://­www​.­mainememory​.­net​/­artifact​/­28915. For more on Grandma’s Pantry, w ­ omen in civil defense, and civil defense food, see May, Homeward Bound, 103–7; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 110–12; Tunc, “Eating in Survival Town.” 54. The voice used during the primer is dif­fer­ent from the voice used during the documentary. However, they are similar enough that the switch would likely escape first-­time viewers. 55. Bishop, ­ Every Home a Fortress; Rose, One Nation Under­ g round, 141–49; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 88–122; May, Homeward Bound, 103–9. 56. For additional scholarship on the Super controversy, see York, The Advisors; Bern­stein, “Crossing the Rubicon”; Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb; Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus. 57. “Statement by the President on the Hydrogen Bomb, January 31, 1950,” in Truman, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. 58. See York, The Advisors, chap. 4. 59. Ibid., 42–43. 60. Marguerite Ologhlin Crowe, telegraph to President Harry S. Truman, January 31, 1950, folder “Miscellaneous,” box 1693, WHCF: OF 692-­J; Truman Papers, HSTL. 61. See, for example, Palmer Smith Jr. to Charles Ross, presidential press secretary, January 18, 1950, folder “Miscellaneous,” box 1693, WHCF: OF 692-­J; Truman Papers, HSTL. 62. “It Does Not Shock Us as It Should,” Detroit News, January 23, 1950. 63. York, The Advisors, 73; Wang, “Scientists and the Prob­lem of the Public,” 342–47. 64. Although the Fuchs m ­ atter was not addressed directly at the NSC meeting or in Truman’s announcement, the m ­ atter did not go unnoticed by t­ hose involved. See York, The Advisors, 68–69; Bundy, “Missed Chance to Stop the H-­Bomb”; Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 337–38; Bern­stein, “Crossing the Rubicon.” 65. The first thermonuclear reaction occurred ­earlier in the year. On May 8, 1951, the George-­shot used a large fission reaction to catalyze a small thermonuclear reaction. This demonstrated that a larger thermonuclear reaction was pos­si­ble. The test is an impor­tant development in the timeline of the Super, which u ­ ntil George was still only a theoretical possibility. See York, The Advisors, 77. 66. Ibid., 82. 67. Salaff, “Lucky Dragon,” 21.

19 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 88– 92

68. For more on Bravo, the Fukuryu Maru, and fallout, see Hacker, Ele­ments of Controversy, chap. 6; Jacobs, Dragon’s Tail, 29–33; Rothschild, “Environmental Awareness in the Atomic Age.” 69. Lindesay Parrott, “Japan Buries Fish Exposed to Atom: Sampan Showered with Ashes from Explosion Provides Anti-­American Issue,” New York Times, March 18, 1954; “Japa­nese Bid U.S. Curb Atom Tests,” New York Times, April 1, 1954. For secondary discussion, see Higuchi, Po­liti­cal Fallout, 41–60; Dingman, “Alliance in Crisis”; Smith-­Norris, “ ‘Only as Dust in the Face of the Wind.’ ” 70. For an overview of how the AEC handled early press, see Titus, Bombs in the Backyard, 46–54; Hacker, Ele­ments of Controversy, 131–58. In its Sixteenth Semiannual Report, the AEC continued to downplay fallout’s h ­ azards. See “Radiation Exposures in Recent Weapons Tests (Condensed from the AEC 16th Semiannual Report),” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 10, no. 9 (November 1954): 352. 71. See, for example “U.S. Widens H-­Bomb Test Safety Zone: Enormous Power Surprised Experts at Pacific Blast,” Daily Boston Globe, March 21, 1954. 72. John Davy, “Experiments with the H-­Bomb,” The Observer, March 28, 1954, 4. 73. Lapp, “Civil Defense ­Faces New Peril,” 349–51. 74. Krugler, This Is Only a Test, 75. 75. Joseph T. Sharkey, acting president, “Resolution Requesting Action by the Government of the United States and Alternatively by the Government of the City of New York on the City Planning Commission Report to the Mayor, Entitled ‘An Immediate Program for Atomic Bomb Protection,’ ” August 15, 1950, Reel MN54003, folder 227, box 7, Rec­ords of the Council of the City of New York, NYMA. 76. Ray Bradbury, “Letter to the Editor,” Life, June 20, 1955, 17. 77. “16 Days to Go,” New York Times, October 21, 1956. 78. Ibid. 79. In 1958, Ralph Lapp published a two hundred–­page exposé titled The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reflected on the incident again in 1978: Salaff, “Lucky Dragon,” 21–23. 80. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 352. 81. See, for example, White, “Newsman Looks at Physicists,” 16. Historians of science and technology have documented cultural images of the science-­expert in this era in some detail. For projections of nuclear physicists, see Hecht, “Atomic Hero”; Hecht, “Constructing a Scientist”; Kaiser, “Atomic Secret in Red Hands?”; Thorpe, “Disciplining Experts”; Wang, “State of Rumor.” 82. Slaney, “Eugene Rabinowitch, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists”; Wang, “Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self ”; Wang, “State of Rumor”; Balogh, Chain Reaction. 83. For more on the extent to which secrets ­were shared across the Iron Curtain, see Goodman, “Grand­father of the Hydrogen Bomb”; Hilgartner, Science on Stage. 84. For an excellent exploration of the role of scientists in American public life a­ fter World War II, see Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety. For a detailed examination of the role of scientists in policymaking, see Balogh, Chain Reaction. For the atomic scientists’ movement specifically, see Smith, A Peril and a Hope. 85. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 378. 86. Ibid., 169. 87. Kaiser, “Atomic Secret in Red Hands?,” 43; Wang, “Scientists and the Prob­lem of the Public,” 334.

NOTES TO PA GES 9 3 – 1 01

195

88. Kaiser, “Atomic Secret in Red Hands?,” 46. 89. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 177. 90. Goodman, “Grand­father of the Hydrogen Bomb,” 2 91. Kaiser, “Atomic Secret in Red Hands?,” 38–41. 92. York, The Advisors, 51–3. 93. Kaiser, “Atomic Secret in Red Hands?,” 28. David Hecht has a more nuanced view: “the newfound importance of science and the complex interaction between the competing professional cultures of science, military, and government.” Hecht, “Atomic Hero,” 955. 94. Hecht, “Atomic Hero,” 951. See also Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus; Thorpe, “Disciplining Experts.” 95. Hecht, “Atomic Hero,” 945–55; Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb. 96. See Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 292–93; Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb; Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus. 97. Thorpe, “Disciplining Experts,” 531. 98. “Texts of Letter from A.E.C. General Man­ag­er to Dr. Oppenheimer and Scientist’s Reply,” New York Times, April 13, 1954. 99. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 180. 100. See ibid., 180–81; Hecht, “Atomic Hero”; Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 292–93. 101. Thorpe, “Disciplining Experts,” 550–52. 102. Hecht, “Atomic Hero,” 965. 103. Panel of Con­sul­tants on Disarmament, “Report by the Panel of Con­sul­tants of the Department of State to the Secretary of State: Armaments and American Policy” ( January 1953), in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Volume 2, Part 2, National Security Affairs, ed. Lisle A. Rose and Neal H. Petersen (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1984), Document 27. 104. NSC Planning Board on Armaments and American Policy, “Interim Report by the Ad Hoc Committee of the NSC Planning Board on Armaments and American Policy/NSC 151” (May 8, 1953), in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Volume 2, Part 2, National Security Affairs, ed. Lisle A. Rose and Neal H. Petersen (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1984), Document 88. 105. For more information about the Oppenheimer Report, Operation Candor, and the “Atoms for Peace” speech, see Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 222–27. As Richard Hewlett and Jack M. Holl have illustrated in ­g reat detail, Oppenheimer’s involvement in the Candor Proposal—­and Eisenhower’s subsequent enthusiasm for it—­ contributed to mounting aggression from Oppenheimer’s po­ liti­ cal opponents, ultimately leading to his security hearing. See Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 47–55. 4. The Fallout from Fallout

1. Korra Dane, “Atomic Query,” letter to the newspaper, Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1956 (my emphasis). 2. Recently, historian Toshihiro Higuchi described fallout h ­ azards as something that “fused science and politics into an entangled pro­cess of knowledge production” in the early Cold War. In what follows, I extend this idea to consider how such constructions

19 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 102– 105

of nuclear knowledge filtered into the American public’s consciousness. Higuchi’s excellent monograph is an invaluable addition to the historiography of fallout and nuclear testing and helped me clarify this chapter’s ideas in the final stages of revision. Higuchi, Po­liti­cal Fallout, 7. 3. Daniel Lang, “Fallout,” New Yorker, July 16, 1955, 34. 4. See, for example, “A.E.C. Manual Cited,” New York Times, March 26, 1954; “U.S. Widens H-­Bomb Test Safety Zone: Enormous Power Surprised Experts at Pacific Blast,” Daily Boston Globe, March 21, 1954. 5. Gerald Griffin, “Fisherman’s Death Eyed: U.S. Doctors Feel Radiation W ­ asn’t Chief Cause,” The Sun, September 24, 1954. 6. For a thorough timeline of the Bravo aftermath, see Divine, Blowing on the Wind, chap. 1. 7. Joseph Alsop and Stewart Alsop, “­Matter of Fact . . . ​The Radiological H ­ azard: II,” Washington Post and Times Herald, November  24, 1954. Some complained that “­there is no area of public policy in which so l­ittle firm information is available.” See “How Bad Is Radiation?,” Washington Post and Times Herald, April 12, 1955. 8. Joseph Alsop and Stewart Alsop, “Facts on the Fall-­Out,” Washington Post and Times Herald, December 16, 1954. 9. Lapp, “Atomic Candor,” 336. 10. AEC, Effect of High-­Yield Nuclear Explosions. For more on the AEC report and its aftermath, see Moore, Disrupting Science, 100–101. 11. AEC, Effect of High-­Yield Nuclear Explosions, 4 (emphasis in the original). 12. Robert T. Hartman, “Fallout Could Kill Every­one inside Area of 7000 Square Miles: AEC Reveals Vast Extent of Bomb Fallout,” Los Angeles Times, February  16, 1955. 13. See, for example, “H-­Bomb Able to Kill 190 Miles Away: Lethal Fall-­Out in Test Covered 7000 Sq. Mi. Area Nearly Size of N.J. Poisoned by Bikini Blast,” Daily Boston Globe, February 15, 1955. 14. AEC, Effect of High-­Yield Nuclear Explosions, 6. 15. Among many ­others, see Roy Weinstein, “Letter to the Editor: It May Be Poison, But . . . ,” Daily Boston Globe, March 31, 1955; John Hillaby, “British Unit Sees Fall-­out Threat,” New York Times, June 13, 1956; “12 Scientists Ask Bomb Tests Go On,” New York Times, October 21, 1956; John W. Finney, “Study Minimizes Fall-­out Danger,” New York Times, May 8, 1959. For historical assessments, see Duffin and Hayter, “Baring the Sole”; Herzig, “Removing Roots.” 16. Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 50–54. For more on cultural repre­sen­ta­tions of fallout and radiation, see Jacobs, Dragon’s Tail. 17. Robert Trumbull, “Hiroshima—­Ten Years A ­ fter,” New York Times, July  31, 1955. 18. Miller, “Historical Vignette.” 19. For brief discussions on the Hiroshima Maidens, see Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s Amer­i­ca, 45–46; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 157–59. For the experience of hibakusha (nuclear blast survivors), see Diehl, Resurrecting Nagasaki. 20. “The Acad­emy and the Bomb,” New York Times, April 9, 1955. See also Story, Rosenfeld, and Warshaw, “Fall-­Out.” 21. For complaints in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, see Rabinowitch, “­People Must Know,” 370. See also Lapp, “Atomic Candor,” 313–14.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 05 – 1 08

197

22. Mark S. Watson, “H-­Bomb ‘Fall-­Out’ Fatal for 190 Miles, AEC Says,” The Sun, February 15, 1955. 23. “Evaluating Fall-­Out,” Washington Post and Times Herald, June 24, 1955. 24. NAS, Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation; NAS, Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation: A Report to the Public. Both the report in full and a digest appeared in “Text of Ge­ ne­tics Committee Report Concerning Effects of Radioactivity on Heredity,” New York Times, June 13, 1956. Almost si­mul­ta­neously, the British Medical Research Council released a report with similar findings. For extended discussion, see Higuchi, Po­liti­cal Fallout, 88–108; Hamblin, “ ‘Dispassionate and Objective Effort.’ ” 25. As Audra Wolfe has shown, although the NAS bore the hallmarks of in­de­pen­ dence, its relationship to the federal government and nongovernment (but very connected) groups such as the Rocke­fel­ler Foundation was much closer than the public image would suggest. See Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory. 26. Creager, “Radiation, Cancer, and Mutation”; Hamblin, “ ‘Dispassionate and Objective Effort.’ ” 27. ­Uncle Dudley, “Radiation and Progeny,” Daily Boston Globe, June 14, 1956. 28. NAS, Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation: A Report to the Public, 2. 29. Ibid., 14. 30. Ibid., 16–17. 31. “Text of Ge­ne­tics Committee Report,” 18–19. The Hiroshima Maidens appear in a photographic inset on page 19. 32. See, for example, Lloyd Norman, “Guards Urged against Rise in A-­Deformities,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 13, 1956; “Scientists Call for Safeguards against Exposure to Radiation,” Daily Boston Globe, June 13, 1956; “Program to Curb Fallout Offered,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1956. 33. NAS, Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation: A Report to the Public, 20. 34. Ibid., 22, 26. 35. See Moore, Disrupting Science, 101–2. 36. John Hersey, “Hiroshima,” New Yorker, August 31, 1946. 37. The public discussions of pathological versus ge­ne­tic effects paralleled a debate within the scientific community over the “somatic mutation theory,” which linked ge­ ne­tic mutation to both cancer and hereditary traits. See Creager, “Radiation, Cancer, and Mutation.” 38. Harrison E. Salisbury, “Stevenson Calls for World Pact to Curb H-­Bomb,” New York Times, October 16, 1956. 39. “Mr. Stevenson and the Bomb,” editorial, New York Times, October 17, 1956; “12 Scientists Ask Bomb Tests Go On.” 40. “Strauss Denies Charge on Milk,” New York Times, November 4, 1956. 41. Adlai  E. Stevenson, Nuclear Test Ban, 25 minutes, film, folder 12, box 350, AES-­PUL. 42. In his work on the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ CNI, William Cuyler S­ ullivan Jr. argues that Stevenson’s test ban bid created public interest. I argue that public interest existed prior and that Stevenson’s campaign was one of many galvanizing events. ­Sullivan, Nuclear Democracy, 1. 43. US Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations, Hearings on Control and Reduction of Armaments (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, January 1957), 143, 1151.

19 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 108– 111

44. Eleanor Clymer to the editor of the Saturday Review, June 1957, folder “C,” box 1, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. Cousins responded to such claims in a letter to Phillip Hildreth, a reader from Tucson: “Increasingly, we can expect that all ­those who are concerned with the question of fallout ­will be accused of being dupes of the Communist party. But this should not deter us.” Norman Cousins to Phillip Hildreth, June 21, 1957, folder “Correspondence of Norman Cousins A-­K,” box 2, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. 45. Schweitzer’s lecture was originally broadcast on April 24, 1957. “A Declaration of Conscience,” Saturday Review, May 18, 1957, https://­www​.­wagingpeace​.­org​/­a​-­de​ claration​-­of​-­conscience​/­. 46. “Schweitzer Urges World Opinion to Demand End of Nuclear Tests,” New York Times, April 24, 1957; “Dulles Gives U.S. Policy,” New York Times, April 24, 1957. 47. For more on Schweitzer’s influence and the Schweitzer-­Libby conflict, see Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 29–33; Katz, Ban the Bomb, 16–18; Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 121–23. 48. Elmer A. Hilker to J. R. Cominsky, publisher of the Saturday Review, May 15, 1957, folder “H,” box 1, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. 49. Nelson R Haas to Norman Cousins, June 10, 1957, folder “Correspondence of Norman Cousins A–­K,” box 2, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. 50. William L. Laurence, “Science in Review: Schweitzer versus Atomic Authorities on the Dangers of Weapons Testing,” New York Times, April 28, 1957. 51. Ibid. 52. John W. Finney, “Libby Gives Case for Bomb Tests,” New York Times, June 8, 1957. 53. Lorraine Klatzkin to Senator H. Alexander Smith, June 6, 1957, Nuclear Tests, 1957, box 422, folder 14, HAS-­PUL. 54. The year 1957 marked Japan’s “second formal request for the suspension of current nuclear tests in Nevada.” “Japa­nese Students Protest Atom Tests,” New York Times, May 30, 1957. In 1956, Indian officials led a UN petition for a test ban, which was promptly rejected by the nuclearized states. 55. For media reporting on Pauling’s petitions, see Gladwin Hill, “2,000 Join Pauling in Bomb Test Plea,” New York Times, June 4, 1957; “Pauling Lists 10,000 as Fall-­out Victims,” New York Times, May 1, 1957; Thomas J. Hamilton, “9,000 Scientists of 43 Lands Ask Nuclear Bomb Tests Be ­Stopped,” New York Times, January 14, 1958. For more on Pauling’s long antinuclear activism, see Rubinson, Redefining Science, chap. 2. 56. “Pauling to Press Atom Ban Abroad,” New York Times, June 12, 1957. 57. For an elaboration on moral-­scientific arguments and nuclear weapons protest, see Rubinson, Redefining Science, chap. 2. For an in­ter­est­ing parallel in the uses of scientific authority in public protest against nuclear energy production, see Balogh, Chain Reaction. And on how activist physicians “transplanted the notion of preventative medicine to . . . ​peace advocacy,” see Kemper, “ ‘Nuclear Arms Race Is Psychological at Its Roots,’ ” 214. 58. Moore also shows how the debates eroded public faith in science more generally. See Moore, Disrupting Science, 112–13. 59. US Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations, Hearings on Control and Reduction of Armaments, 1151–54. 60. ­Sullivan, Nuclear Democracy, 7.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 1 2 – 1 1 7

199

61. Ruth L. Morison to Senator H. Alexander Smith, June 20, 1957, Nuclear Tests, 1957, box 422, folder 14, HAS-­PUL. 62. “Ge­ne­tics: Young Science Studies Continuity of Life,” Life, March 17, 1947, 83. 63. Ibid., 91. 64. See, for example, Creager, “Radiation, Cancer, and Mutation.” 65. Louis S. Osborne, “Letter to the Editor: Estimating Fall-­out H ­ azard,” New York Times, June 30, 1957. 66. Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Summary-­Analysis of Hearings May 27–29, and June 3–7, 1957 on the Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effect on Man (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, August 1957). 67. The numbers h ­ ere are taken from Osborne, “Letter to the Editor: Estimating Fall-­out ­Hazard,” in which he acknowledges that they are only estimates. 68. In his review of The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon, Gene Marine credits this observation to his wife. Marine, “Who Makes the Decisions?,” 237. 69. William T. Evans to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 15, 1957, folder “E,” box 1, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. 70. Concerned Citizens, “The ­People Speak,” Chicago Defender, August 17, 1957. 71. Carl W. Johnson, “Letter to the Editor,” Newsweek, July 1, 1957. 72. It is also impor­tant to note that concurrent to t­ hese discussions, ge­ne­ticists w ­ ere beginning to support the somatic mutation theory, the idea that even a minute amount of radiation can induce mutations that could cause cancer at a l­ ater date. See Creager, “Radiation, Cancer, and Mutation.” 73. Higuchi argues that radiological surveys of food ­were a localized expression of frustration over the “mono­poly of fallout information by the national security states.” Higuchi, Po­liti­cal Fallout, 137. 74. This c­ounters a 1954 AEC press release that claimed, “With very few ­exceptions . . . ​most radiactive [sic] substances are readily eliminated by the liver.” See “A.E.C. Manual Cited.” 75. Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 131–32; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 151. 76. Kulp, Eckelmann, and Schulert, “Strontium-90 in Man.” Like many other early fallout studies, the data was highly controversial. Ralph Lapp, for example, criticized the study for omitting bones of very young c­ hildren, born since the Bravo series in 1954. For more on Lapp’s dissent, see Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 117–18. 77. Moore, Disrupting Science, 96–129; ­Sullivan, Nuclear Democracy; Rosalind Early, “How to Stop a Nuclear Bomb: The St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey, 50 Years ­Later,” St. Louis Magazine, September 20, 2013, https://­www​.­stlmag​.­com​/­How​-­to​-­Stop​-­a​ -­Nuclear​-­Bomb​-­The​-­St​-­Louis​-­Baby​-­Tooth​-­Survey​-­50​-­Years​-­Later​/­; Jack and Steinhardt, “Atomic Anxiety and the Tooth Fairy.” 78. Moore, Disrupting Science, 120. 79. Bob Poos, “Collection of Baby Teeth Aids Strontium 90 Study,” Reading Ea­gle, February 4, 1962. 80. Smith-­Howard, Pure and Modern Milk, 130. 81. For more on c­ hildren and radiological concern, see Zaretsky, Radiation Nation, 15–56. 82. Mrs. Walter S. Davidson, “Letter to the Editor,” East Hampton Star, February 27, 1958.

20 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 117– 124

83. Stephen D. Pfeiffer to Senator H. Alexander Smith, July 23, 1958, Nuclear Tests, 1958, box 468, folder 18, HAS-­PUL. 84. Lois Grebbs, “Another Plea to Halt Nuclear Bomb Tests—­Letter to the Editor,” Deseret News, July 22, 1957. 85. Irene Burke, “Letter to the Editor: ‘Fallout’ Fears,” Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1955. 86. Helen Hosler, “Letter to the Editor: Fall-­out Fear,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1957. 87. Alton Blakeslee, “Parents Often Too Fearful about Radiation’s Dangers,” Gadsden Times (Alabama), May 2, 1962. 88. Smith-­Howard, Pure and Modern Milk, 129; Moore, Disrupting Science, 105–8. 89. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 8. 90. National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Field Office, United States Nuclear Tests, xi. 91. See, for example, Laurence, “Science in Review”; “Is Fallout Good?,” Washington Post and Times Herald, April 27, 1957; US Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations, Hearings on Control and Reduction of Armaments, 1149. 92. Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 262; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 182–83. 93. Schweitzer, “Declaration of Conscience.” 94. “Fallout and Disarmament,” 147. 95. Marine, “Who Makes the Decisions?,” 236. 96. Ibid., 237. 97. Ibid. 98. Lynn Hough Corson, “Caught in the Fallout,” The Bulletin of the Haddonfield Methodist Church, May 26, 1957, folder “C,” box 1, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC; Meredith Bloss to the Saturday Review, June 9, 1957, folder “B,” box 1, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC; Vera D. Bruestle to Norman Cousins, June 1957, folder “B,” box 1, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. 99. B. J. Arsnato to the Saturday Review, July 7, 1957, folder “A,” box 1, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. 100. Beth Campbell to the Saturday Review, May 20, 1957, folder “C,” box 1, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. 101. Phillip Hildreth to Norman Cousins, May 4, 1957, folder “Correspondence of Norman Cousins A–­K,” box 2, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. 102. Ibid. 103. Albert V. Baez, “Acting on the Schweitzer Declaration of Conscience,” ca. July 1957, folder “B,” box 1, Subseries B-1, Series B, SANE-­SPC. 104. “Joan Baez Appears at Stamford Palace,” The Hour, November 14, 1989. 105. Mrs. Lee B. Lusted, “Fearful ­Mothers,” Washington Post and Times Herald, June 18, 1957. 106. Stevenson, Nuclear Test Ban, 11:57–12:13. 107. Elsie Carper, “House­wives Petition Ike to Halt Nuclear Testing,” Washington Post and Times Herald, June 26, 1957. 108. “5 PTA Units to Hear of Atom Fallout,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 26, 1957. 109. Swerdlow, ­Women Strike for Peace; Higuchi, Po­liti­cal Fallout, 176–80. 110. The structure at 2006 Walnut Street was also home to the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors as well as other organ­izations that undoubtedly interacted

NOTES TO PA GES 1 2 4– 1 3 0

201

with one another. The CNVA in par­tic­u­lar was acutely aware of its position among many organ­izations and went out of its way to cooperate but not overlap. CNVA, Meeting Notes, September  17, 1959, folder “Executive Committee Minutes 1957–1959,” box 1, Series I, CNVA-­SPC. 111. See, among o ­ thers, Katz, Ban the Bomb, 1–20. 112. Ibid., 21–22. 113. SANE, “Advertisement: We Are Facing a Danger Unlike Any Danger That Has Ever Existed . . . ,” New York Times, November 15, 1957. 114. By December  26, “the advertisement had been reprinted in 20 other ­newspapers . . . ​[and] publication is planned in an additional 37 cities within the coming weeks.” “Sane Nuclear Policy Group Reports Strong Response,” Milwaukee Journal, December 30, 1957. 115. As quoted in Katz, Ban the Bomb, 29. Tracking membership numbers is difficult, however. See “Sane Nuclear Unit Backs Eisenhower,” New York Times, August 23, 1958, which claims “5,000 members in seventy cities in the eastern United States.” 116. Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 167–68. 117. “How Sane the Sane?,” Time, April 21, 1958. 118. Bobbie  B. Coppage, “Necessary Risk,” Washington Post and Times Herald, May 14, 1958. 119. SANE, “Advertisement: Nuclear Bombs Can Destroy All Life in War,” New York Times, April 11, 1958. 120. Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 375–402. 121. Rosi, “Mass and Attentive Opinion on Nuclear Weapons Test and Fallout, 1954–1963,” 281. 122. “The Known and the Unknown,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 1957. 123. SANE, “What Is Sane?” (ca. 1961), box 1, “Civil Defense,” SF-­CD-­SPC. 124. “Atomic Test Foes to Ask Soviet Ban,” New York Times, April 15, 1958; “Pacifists Picket Again,” New York Times, April 16, 1958; “600 Rally in City for Atomic Peace,” New York Times, March 29, 1959. 125. “Advertisement: No Contamination without Repre­sen­ta­tion,” New York Herald Tribune, March 24, 1958. 126. Edith McGrin to Senator H. Alexander Smith, July 21, 1957, Nuclear Accident Claims, 1957, box 422, folder 6, HAS-­PUL. 127. CNVA against Nuclear Weapons, Summary of Committee Meeting, ­November 12, 1957, folder “Executive Committee Minutes 1957–1959,” box 1, Series I, CNVA-­SPC. 128. “Letter to President Dwight  D. Eisenhower,” Northport Journal, January  9, 1958. 129. For more on the relationship between Marshall Islanders and the US government, see Mitchell, “Offshoring American Environmental Law.” 130. United Nations General Assembly, “Chapter X: The Economic and Social Council,” Article 68, Charter of the United Nations, June 26, 1945, https://­legal​.­un​ .­org​/­repertory​/­art61​.­shtml. 131. United Nations General Assembly, Preamble, Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights, December 10, 1948, https://­www​.­un​.­org​/­en​/­universal​-­declaration​-­human​ -­rights​/­. 132. Moyn, ­Human Rights and the Uses of History, 89.

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TO PAGES 130– 136

133. For more on the history of h ­ uman rights, see Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue; Moyn, Last Utopia; Iriye, Goedde, and Hitchcock, ­Human Rights Revolution. 134. Lindesay Parrott, “Atom Arms Tests by U.S. to Go On,” New York Times, July 14, 1956. 135. George Willoughby to Senator H. Alexander Smith, May 28, 1957, Nuclear Tests, 1957, HAS-­PUL. 136. Emanuel Margolis, Yale Law Journal, April 1955, as cited in the editorial “Fallout in Reverse,” Washington Post and Times Herald, September 9, 1956. 137. “The Case of Four against the Many,” Denver Post, ca. 1958, box 23, Series VII, CNVA-­SPC. 138. “Never Had It So Good: H-­Bomb’s ‘Poisoned ­People’ Happy and Lazy on U.S. Aid,” The Sun, July 3, 1955; “Fortuitous Fallout,” Time, July 8, 1957. See also Wasserman and Solomon, Killing Our Own. 139. CNVA, Summary Information on the Sahara Nuclear Bomb Test Protest Team, December  22, 1959, folder “Proj­ects—­Sahara Proj­ect Printed Releases,” box 13, Series VI, CNVA-­SPC. 140. See A. J. Siggins, “Africa Watches Helplessly as Western World Moves Slowly to Destruction,” Philadelphia Tribune, July 2, 1957; Intondi, African Americans against the Bomb, 51–59; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 80; Hill, “Britain, West Africa, and ‘the New Nuclear Imperialism.’ ” 141. On the Beach, directed by Stanley Kramer (Los Angeles: Lomitas Productions, 1959), film. Based on the novel by Nevil Shute, On the Beach (London: Heinemann, 1957). 142. Helen F. Dice, “Act While ­There’s Time to Stop War,” Pittsburgh Post-­Gazette, February 15, 1960. 143. Rabinowitch, “First Year of Deterrence,” 7. 144. Walter Lipp­mann, “­Today and Tomorrow,” Washington Post and Times Herald, June 13, 1957. 145. SANE, “Advertisement: We Are Facing a Danger Unlike Any Danger That Has Ever Existed . . .” 146. Mrs. H. B. Hoffman, “Atomic Ge­ne­tic Dangers,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1955. 147. CNVA against Nuclear Weapons, “A Call to Non-­Violent Action against Nuclear Weapons,” ca. 1957, folder “Proj­ects—­Nevada Vigil 1957,” box 11, Series VI, CNVA-­SPC. 148. SANE, “Advertisement: We Are Facing a Danger Unlike Any Danger That Has Ever Existed . . .” (my emphasis). 149. Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 375–402; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 175–83. 5. Atomic Amer­i­ca

1. Eileen Peck to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, March 24, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC, and Hassler to the New York Times, February 18, 1960. 2. The New York state 1958 civil defense annual report lamented this cycle, saying “Civil Defense preparations should not be turned on and off depending on the tem-

NOTES TO PA GES 1 3 6 – 1 40

203

porary state of international relations.” New York State Civil Defense Commission “Annual Report” (1958), forward page 4, folder 292, box 25, Subseries 2: Reference Files, Series 29: William J. Ronan (FA371), NARGR-­RAC. 3. Smith, “Trends,” 267. 4. John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Tele­vi­sion Report to the American P ­ eople on the Berlin Crisis,” July 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, https://­ www​.­jf klibrary​.­org​/­archives​/­other​-­resources​/­john​-­f​-­kennedy​-­speeches​/­berlin​-­crisis​ -­19610725. 5. Still, “Two Views on Berlin.” 6. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 113. 7. See Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 77–79. 8. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 113. 9. See, for example, Teller, “Peace through Civil Defense.” 10. John F. Kennedy, “A Message to You from the President,” Life, September 15, 1961, 95. 11. Public opinion researchers noted in 1978 that throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s ­there existed an “under­lying climate of strong support” for the idea of a civil defense program. Nehnevajsa, “Issues of Civil Defense,” 123. 12. This question is at the heart of Garrison’s book Bracing for Armageddon. This chapter takes cues from Garrison’s synthesis but attempts to remove the framework of civil defense as a “tragicomedy” that blurs the bound­aries between her two groups of actors: policymakers who promoted civil defense doctrine and individual Americans who pushed back against its absurdity. Grassroots Amer­ic­ a carved out its own ideas about civil defense, survival, and nuclear policy. In the pro­cess, they made nuclearism an issue of civic practice. Even when they rejected it, t­ hese Americans made nuclearism a component of national identity. 13. One among many: District Health Officer, Office of Civil Defense of the City of New York, Medical Emergency Division to Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, December 1951, folder 177, box 20, Series Q: World Affairs (FA326), OMRR-­RAC. 14. Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 10–11. 15. For additional overviews on the evolution of civil defense policy in the 1950s, see Geist, Armageddon Insurance, 97–137; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 40–67; Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon; Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 14–37. 16. C. O. Thrasher, director of civil defense, Kansas City, MO, to Col­on ­ el Robert L. Shulz, military aide to the president, August 16, 1954, OF 20, box 149, WHCF-­DDEL. 17. For more on reactions to Caldwell’s directorship, see Grossman, “Segregationist Liberalism”; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 141–46. 18. Edward A. Conway, “Let’s Get out of ­Here! What the ‘New Look’ in Civil Defense Can Mean for You,” Amer­i­ca: A Catholic Review of the Week, April 17, 1954, 65–67. For more on Eisenhower’s New Look strategy, see Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace. 19. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to Governor Val Peterson, White House press release, July 17, 1956, Part 1, Volume 35, Subseries 5C: President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organ­ization, Series O: Washington DC (FA350), NARPP-­RAC. 20. The committee was commissioned in 1955–1956 to explore ­whether “from an orga­nizational point of view, FCDA is handicapped in carry­ing out [its] responsibilities ­because of its status as an in­de­pen­dent agency of less than Cabinet rank. It has also been reported that t­ here is some confusion regarding the respective roles of the

20 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 142– 146

Office of Defense Mobilization and FCDA in the non-­military defense area.” Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organ­ ization, memorandum for the president, “Organ­ization for Non-­Military Defense,” March 28, 1956, Part 1, Volume 35, Subseries 5C: President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organ­ization, Series O: Washington DC (FA350), NARPP-­RAC. 21. Eisenhower to Peterson, July 17, 1956. 22. For a detailed overview of the legislative and administrative changes during Eisenhower’s second term, see Kerr, Civil Defense in the U.S.; Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield. 23. Security Resources Panel, President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age, 5 (hereafter cited as Gaither Report). 24. Ibid., 18. For more on the Gaither Committee and subsequent report, see Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, 125–54. For science policy, see Herken, “In the Ser­vice of the State”; Wang, In Sputnik’s Shadow, 71–87. 25. Gaither Report, 20. 26. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Reor­ga­ni­za­tion Plan 1 of 1958, 104 Cong. Rec., 6394. See also “Special Message to the Congress Transmitting Reor­ga­ni­za­tion Plan of 1958,” The American Presidency Proj­ect, April 24, 1958, https://­www​.­presidency​.­ucsb​.­edu​ /­documents​/­special​-­message​-­the​-­congress​-­transmitting​-­reorganization​-­plan​-­1958. Executive Order 10773 created the Office of Defense and Civilian Mobilization effective July 1, 1958. On August 26, 1958, by public law 85–763, the name was changed to Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization to maintain consistency; Executive Order 10782 of September 6, 1958, amended the previous executive order. 27. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Annual Report of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization for Fiscal Year 1959, 12. 28. DOD, Annual Report of the Secretary of Defense, July 1, 1959 to June 30, 1960, 33. 29. Gaither Report, 20. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. As quoted in Homeland Security National Preparedness Task Force, Civil Defense and Homeland Security, 10. 32. John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” The American Presidency Proj­ect, May 25, 1961, https://­www​.­presidency​.­ucsb​.­edu​ /­documents​/­special​-­message​-­the​-­congress​-­urgent​-­national​-­needs. 33. John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Tele­vi­sion Report to the American ­People on the Berlin Crisis,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, July 25, 1961, https://­ www​.­jf klibrary​.­org​/­archives​/­other​-­resources​/­john​-­f​-­kennedy​-­speeches​/­berlin​-­crisis​ -­19610725. 34. DOD, Annual Report of the Office of Civil Defense for Fiscal Year 1962, 2. 35. Ibid., 15. 36. Ibid., 21–22. 37. Kennedy, “A Message to You from the President,” 95; “A New Urgency, Big ­Things to Do—­and What You Must Learn,” Life, September 15, 1961, 96–108. 38. Pamela Abel Hill, “Report No. 2 Civil Defense, September 15—­December 1, 1961,” December 5, 1961, folder 3101, box 82, Subseries 8: Position Papers and Policy Proposals, Series 34: Diane Van Wie (FA373), NARGR-­RAC. See also Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 78–9. 39. Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 37.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 47 – 1 49

205

40. Stephen M. Young, “Civil Defense: Billion Dollar Boondoggle,” Progressive, December 1960, 18. 41. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Annual Statistical Report, Fiscal Year 1961, 48. The OCDM was the first federal civil defense agency to write detailed statistical reports, so comparable numbers do not exist for the fiscal years prior to 1959. 42. See Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 78–81; George, Awaiting Armageddon, 1–11. 43. Governors’ Committee on Civil Defense, “White House Conference on Fallout Protection,” January 25, 1960, Reel 13, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 44. Raymond H. Wilkens, civil defense warden, “Memorandum to All Staff Members, 55th and 56th Floors, RCA Building,” April 26, 1961, folder 280.33, box 30, Series L: Proj­ects (FA348), NARPP-­RAC. 45. Krugler, This Is Only a Test, 129. Krugler’s account of annual Operation Alert (Opal) drills in Washington, DC, is one of the most thorough. 46. For example, Warren Weaver Jr., “Rocke­fel­ler Drops Fight to Require Shelters in Home,” New York Times, March 24, 1960. 47. For delusion, see Norine Zimberg to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, February 25, 1962, Reel 71, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. For psychological impact, see Lucy L. Solow to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, March 7, 1962, Reel 71, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­ RAC. For ­others, see Muriel Zoref, president of the Parents’ Association, P.S. 114, Queens, NY, to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, March 5, 1962, Reel 71, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC.; Gene Currivan, “Educators Score School Shelters,” New York Times, February 22, 1962. 48. North Carolina governor Luther Hodges’s shelter cost less than $300. See Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, “Information Bulletin: Fallout Shelter Constructed at North Carolina Governor’s Mansion,” November 12, 1959, Reel 13, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­ RAC. For accusations of being out of touch, see Don Hunt to Governor Nelson  A. Rocke­fel­ler, February 19, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 49. See Governor Harold W. Handley (Indiana) and other governors, Robert M. Hanson, director of training, education, and public affairs, Region 4, Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, memorandum to Emil Reutzel, assistant to the Director, OCDM, “Summary Information on Shelters and Governor’s Mansions,” June 9, 1960, box 2, OCDM Publications, 1950–60 (Entry #1022); OEP-­NACP. 50. See also Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 188–89. 51. Catherine Novak to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, April 15, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC; Marie  K. Mulligan to Governor Nelson  A. Rocke­fel­ler, March 21, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 52. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, ­Family Fallout Shelter, 6.

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TO PAGES 149– 151

53. “Fallout Shelter Builders Say CD Estimates Are Too Low,” Buffalo Eve­ning News, April 26, 1960. The OCDM estimated $105–115 for DIY and $225 to hire a contractor, but the Buffalo Eve­ning News claimed that the costs ­were $185 for DIY shelter and approximately $750 for a contractor. 54. “A Spare Room Fallout Shelter,” Life, January 25, 1960, 46. For other examples of making shelters less bleak, see Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 191–92. For home values, see Housing and House­hold Economic Statistics Division, US Census Bureau, “Historical Census of Housing ­Tables—­Home Values,” June 6, 2012. 55. “Wine before Bombs,” Des Moines Tribune, September 26, 1958. 56. For a detailed examination of Swiss citizens’ responses to the presence of mandated shelters in f­ amily homes, see Ziauddin, “(De)Territorializing the Home.” 57. Francis E. Csendes to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, March 17 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 58. Bruce Hunt to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, February 18, 1962, Reel 71, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. ­These arguments often fell into the framework of rich/poor and white/black neighborhoods. Neither state-­level nor the federal government’s civil defense programs seriously considered issues of economic (or racial) disparity in planning. Po­liti­cal scientist Andrew Grossman has explored the contours of racial protest against civil defense planning in the very earliest years of the federal program, but much work remains to be done on t­ hese topics. See Grossman, “Segregationist Liberalism.” Similarly, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a letter to Kennedy in 1961 saying shelters ­were “a design for saving [rural/suburban] Republicans and sacrificing [urban] Demo­crats.” Cited in Weart, Nuclear Fear, 23. 59. For an excellent case study on urban disparities in civil defense and subsequent re­sis­tance, see Singer, “Civil Defence in the City.” 60. Literary scholar Jacqueline Foertsch demonstrates that Black writers, journalists, and other critics had grappled with the racial consequences of nuclear weapons since the earliest moments of the Atomic Age. See Foertsch, Reckoning Day. 61. “15 Senators Vote for Biased Defense Chief Despite Protest,” Plain Dealer, January 26, 1951. 62. “New York City NAACP Boycotts CD Meeting,” Negro Star, April 20, 1951; Grossman, “Segregationist Liberalism”; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 141–46. 63. Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 110–11; Foertsch, Reckoning Day, 101–36. For an excellent assessment of the intersection of civil rights, science fiction lit­er­a­ture, and civil defense, see Sharp, Savage Perils, 170–94. 64. McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 150. See also Grossman, “Segregationist Liberalism,” 489. 65. Grossman makes this point obliquely in “Segregationist Liberalism,” 492. However, a civil rights–­framed critique of civil defense is largely missing from the historiography and is an essential site of further research. 66. The Swarthmore College Peace Collection holds a wealth of rec­ords related to such protest action. See, specifically, rec­ords of the CNVA (DG 017), FOR (DG 013), and SANE (DG 058).

NOTES TO PA GES 1 5 1 – 1 5 3

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67. Through interviews and archival research, Wittner claims that t­ here ­were one thousand demonstrators in City Hall Park prior to the 1960 drill. He also notes that ­there ­were approximately two thousand demonstrators citywide. See Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 250. However, New York Times journalist Peter Kihss reported that only between five hundred and six hundred protesters demonstrated in City Hall Park. Peter Kihss, “Governor Thanks Workers in Alert,” New York Times, May 5, 1960. 68. Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 98. For press reports, see Kihss, “Governor Thanks Workers in Alert”; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 250–53. 69. The WSP similarly marshaled their role as ­mothers, PTA members, churchwomen, and civic-­minded citizens to combat nuclearization. First or­ga­nized in November 1961 by a small group of Washington, DC, ­women to combat the arms race and weapons testing, the WSP grew to include one hundred thousand ­people in 145 groups across the country by the following summer. See Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 251. Wittner explains that ­these numbers ­were prob­ably an exaggeration but concedes that the WSP “tapped enormous energy and talent among American ­women.” Local chapters of the WSP used maternalist rhe­toric to protest civil defense, fallout shelters, and, more broadly, weapons testing and proliferation. Sharmat and Smith ­were among early members. Garrison notes that about fifty thousand ­women in sixty US cities marched in November 1961. See Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 115. For the WSP, see Swerdlow, ­Women Strike for Peace. 70. Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 96. 71. See, for example, Katz, Ban the Bomb, 45–64. 72. Greater New York Council of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, “Memo to Local Committee Regarding Civil Defense Vigil,” January 26, 1961, SANE-­ SPC. Garrison writes that the token arrests made during the 1960 Operation Alert ­were all men and w ­ omen wearing pants. See Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 99. 73. “A Governor Says No to Atomic Shelters,” New York Post (Magazine), April 10, 1960. Meyner’s objections w ­ ere cast directly in opposition to fellow governor Nelson Rocke­fel­ler’s shelter legislation proposal, and the feud received national attention. See, for example, Darrell D. En­glish to Governor Robert B. Meyner, April 1, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 74. Civil Defense Protest Committee, “Civil Defense Protest: A Call to Sanity,” 1960, folder “Flyers and Bulletins, 1958–1962,” box 2, Series III, CNVA-­SPC; CNVA, “Polaris Action Walk to Oppose the Fish of Death,” 1960, folder “Flyers and Bulletins, 1958– 1962,” box 2, Series III, CNVA-­SPC. See also Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 264. 75. Young, “Civil Defense”; “Senator Attacks Civil Defense as ‘Billion-­Dollar Boondoggle,’ ” New York Times, November 25, 1960. The latter report was reprinted as far as the Virgin Islands: “Senator Attacks Civil Defense as ‘Billion Dollar Boondoggle,’ ” Virgin Islands Daily News, December 2, 1960. 76. Rose, One Nation Under­ground, chap. 3; Weart, Nuclear Fear, 23. 77. Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 81. 78. For more on the rehearsal of nuclear survival tactics, see Davis, Stages of Emergency. 79. Edward A. Hawks to Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, January 14, 1958, folder 280.33, box 30, Series L: Proj­ects (FA348), NARPP-­RAC.

20 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 153– 157

80. “Gun Thy Neighbor?,” Time, August 18, 1961, 58. 81. As Rose puts it, “the gun-­thy-­neighbor issue was a gold mine for editorialists, who worked themselves into a froth of moral indignation on the subject.” Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 97. Given such heightened media attention, the historiographical treatment of fallout shelters has generally reflected the fallout shelter debate in the press onto that of the public at large, sometimes uncritically. ­Here I have attempted to pair media repre­sen­ta­tions of shelters with the voices of everyday Americans in order to give nuance to the established historiography. 82. Rose, One Nation Under­ground, chap. 3. 83. Zimberg to Rocke­fel­ler, February 25, 1962. 84. The Twilight Zone, “The Shelter,” season 3, episode 3, directed by Lamont Johnson, written by Rod Serling, CBS, September 29, 1961, broadcast. For more, see Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 110–11. 85. Sidney Schwartz to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, May 11, 1961, Reel 14, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 86. McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 55. 87. New York State Civil Defense Commission, “Administrative Order No. 15,” December 29, 1961, Reel 13, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 88. See Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 118; Karp, “When Bunkers Last in Backyard Bloom–­d,” American Heritage; “Eisenhower Says He’d Quit Shelter If F ­ amily Exposed,” Lakeland Ledger (Florida), October 18, 1961. Eisenhower had other personal misgivings about ­family fallout shelters. When his Gettysburg country club asked him to endorse a shelter construction proj­ect, Eisenhower privately doubted ­whether he “would ­really want to be living if this country of ours should ever be subjected to a nuclear bath.” See Greene, Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test-­Ban Debate, 255. 89. See Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 72–73. 90. Lyndon Johnson was concerned that Sputnik meant that the Soviets could control oceans, drought, and floods and freeze the world. See Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 84. 91. Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 89. 92. DOD, Annual Report of the Office of Civil Defense for Fiscal Year 1962, 1. 93. Whitney Bolton, “Fallout Shelter: F ­ amily Room with Extras,” Newark Eve­ning News, February 12, 1960. 94. Peck to Rocke­fel­ler, March 24, 1960; Frank, Alas, Babylon; Play­house 90, “Alas, Babylon,” season 4, episode 14, directed by Robert Stevens, CBS, April  3, 1960, broadcast. 95. George W. Marshfield to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, April 7, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959– 1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 96. M. Gilbertsen to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, May 1, 1960, Reel 14, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 97. Gloria Jennings to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, May 3, 1960, Reel 14, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC (emphasis in the original).

NOTES TO PA GES 1 5 7 – 1 6 1

209

98. Blanche E. Kopper to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, March 24, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959– 1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 99. For how security experts ­were talking about ­limited war and nuclear plenty, see King, “Nuclear Plenty and ­Limited War.” 100. For evolving strategies see, for example, Kahn, On Thermonuclear War; Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “University of Michigan Commencement,” Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 16, 1962; Henry Kissinger, interview by Mike Wallace, The Mike Wallace Interview, ABC, July 13, 1958. For secondary lit­er­a­ture, see Freedman, “I Exist.” For a thorough examination of the relationship between civil defense policies and nuclear strategy, see Geist, Armageddon Insurance, 138–88. 101. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 96; see also the essay “­Will the Survivors Envy the Dead?,” 40–95. 102. Gaither Report, 18, 22. 103. Grossman argues that policymakers needed to establish their legitimacy by the public’s ac­cep­tance of deterrence theory. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red. 104. The 1958 and 1959 Operation Alert exercises concluded that during sixteen strikes in New York state 1.2 million New Yorkers would be killed immediately, 3.6 million would die from fallout, and 4 million more would be disabled by fallout. Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, Speech to W ­ omen’s Civil Defense Seminar, December 3, 1959, folder 1255, box 47, Subseries 6: Meetings, Luncheons, Dinners, Series 34: Diane Van Wie (FA373), NARGR-­RAC. In 1955’s Operation Alert, 8.5 million Americans perished and 8 million ­were wounded. In 1956 the number of casualties had risen to 20 million. See Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 77–78. By 1962, the OCD estimated that “forty to 120 million Americans would prob­ably survive the blast and heat of nuclear explosions b­ ecause of their location but would die slow deaths from radiation.” DOD, Annual Report of the Office of Civil Defense for Fiscal Year 1962, 1–2. Garrison calls all of t­ hese numbers “absurdly low.” Or as Kahn put it, “in most cases we can expect as many casualties as the ­enemy cares to inflict.” Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 112. 105. “Use and Limit of Shelters,” editorial, Life, January 12, 1962, 4. 106. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs.” 107. Kennedy, “A Message to You from the President,” 95. For civil defense logic and the protection of the home and ­family, see Bishop, ­Every Home a Fortress. 108. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance, 4. For more on the strategic weight of nuclear blackmail, see Geist, Armageddon Insurance, 138–88. 109. For a good overview of how t­ hese contradictions appeared in popu­lar press, see Louis Cassels, “Is CD Survival Insurance or Billion Dollar Failure,” Star-­News, December 19, 1961. 110. Alert Amer­i­ca poster 1B-6, Staff Member and Office File: FCDA, 040 File 2 of 2, Truman Papers, Truman Library (emphasis in original). 111. “Fallout Shelters—­the Word,” National Review, December 16, 1961, 405–6. 112. Hanson W. Baldwin, “Civil Defense Debate,” New York Times, January 8, 1962. 113. “Use and Limit of Shelters,” 4. 114. “Fallout Shelters—­the Word,” December 16, 1961; “Use and Limit of Shelters.” 115. “Fallout Shelters—­the Word.” This was echoed in Linus Pauling to Corning Knote, chairman of the National Parents Committee for Civil Defense, December 20,

21 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 161– 164

1960, Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Oregon State University, http://­ scarc​.­library​.­oregonstate​.­edu​/­coll​/­pauling​/­calendar​/­1960​/­12​/­24​-­xl​.­html. 116. Frances Egelman to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, March 12, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 117. Norman K. Gottwald, “Letter to the Editor: Compulsory Shelters?,” Christian Science Monitor, n.d., Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 118. Eisenhower’s g­ rand strategy depended on avoiding nuclear war at all costs. See Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace. 119. Robert Wayland-­Smith to Governor and Mrs. Rocke­fel­ler, April 16, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959– 1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 120. Pauling to Knote, December 20, 1960. 121. Michigan State University Poll, as quoted in DOD, Annual Report of the Office of Civil Defense for Fiscal Year 1962, Appendix 8, 109. 122. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs.” 123. Frank, Alas, Babylon. 124. On the Beach, directed by Stanley Kramer (Los Angeles: Lomitas Productions, Inc., 1959), film, based on the novel by Nevil Shute, On the Beach (London: Heinemann, 1957); Fail-­Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet (Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1964), film, based on the novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-­Safe (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1962); Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick (Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1964), film. 125. Gilbertsen to Rocke­fel­ler, May 1, 1960. 126. M. Kenneth Boss to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, March 18, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 127. Milton Heimlich to Governor Nelson A. Rocke­fel­ler, April 23, 1960, Reel 15, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 128. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail. 129. George, Awaiting Armageddon, 1. 130. Tom W. Smith notes that “fear of war prob­ably peaked during the last week of October 1962, but t­ here are no national data to confirm that idea”; however, small regional studies suggest “a large rise in thinking about nuclear ­matters” around this time. Smith, “Trends,” 267. 131. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 22; Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 78–79. 132. Kennedy, “A Message to You from the President.” 133. Statistics on shelter building are notoriously difficult to gauge. Weart claims that “only about one in eight Americans took any practical war precautions during the crisis. Only about one in fifty had built even the crudest kind of fallout shelter.” He does not provide citations. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 25. Rose uses a 1962 study to place the number at “about 0.4%.” Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 187. For discussions about civil defense during the weeks of the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Rose, One Nation Under­ground, chap. 6. 134. McEnaney, Civil Defense Starts at Home, 63.

NOTES TO PA GES 1 6 4– 1 6 9

211

135. Hine, Populuxe, 138. 136. Smith, “Trends,” 272–74. 137. Byron Cowan, Radio broadcast editorial, “National Civil Defense Corps Now—­ Peace Corps L ­ ater,” November 21, 1962, Reel 13, Subseries 1: First Administration, 1959–62, Series 37.1: Office Subject Files, 1959–1973 (FA439), NARGR-­RAC. 138. City of Portland (Oregon) Archives, Office of Civil Defense Phasing Out Party, A2012-005, June 25, 1963. 139. Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 255. 140. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 383. 141. “Brochure for Easter March for Peace,” 1961, Printed Ephemera Collection on Organ­izations, PE 036, box 73, TLRWLA-­NYU. See also Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 301–6. 142. “Peace Marchers Rally in Midtown,” New York Times, April 22, 1962. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 259. 143. Dan L. Thrapp, “20,000 Greet Dawn at Hollywood Bowl,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1962. 144. “Peace Pilgrims March in Strength on Easter,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1962. 145. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 59–60. 146. Ibid., 407. 147. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimate in 2010. See Norris and Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945–2010,” 81. 148. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, chap. 8. 149. See specifically Rosi, “Mass and Attentive Opinion on Nuclear Weapons Tests and Fallout, 1954–1963,” 283. See also Erskine, “The Polls,” 155–90. Both indicate that polls ­were inconsistent in wording (for example, it was at times unclear ­whether test cessation would be unilateral or multilateral). 150. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, 425–28. 151. “Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and ­under ­Water,” Moscow, August 5, 1963. 152. Rosi, “Mass and Attentive Opinion on Nuclear Weapons Tests and Fallout, 1954–1963,” 285. 153. “The Treaty Is Born,” New York Times, October 8, 1963, 42. 154. Howell Baum to Adlai Stevenson, US ambassador to the United Nations, September 24, 1963, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1962–1963, Adlai E. Stevenson Papers, box 350, folder 12, AES-­PUL. 155. Adlai E. Stevenson to W ­ omen Strike for Peace, September 25, 1963, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1962–1963, box 350, folder 12, AES-­PUL; James A. Wechsler, “Adlai’s Hour,” New York Post, September 24, 1963. 156. Adlai E. Stevenson, “Note to Correspondents of the US Del­e­ga­tion to the General Assembly,” September  24, 1963, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1962–1963, box 350, folder 12, AES-­PUL. 157. SANE, “Advertisement: We Are Facing a Danger Unlike Any Danger That Has Ever Existed . . . ,” New York Times, November 15, 1957. 158. Rubinson, Redefining Science, 114. 159. Based on the ten years a­ fter, excluding the moratorium years of 1959 and 1960, as compared to the de­cade before. National Nuclear Security Administration, United States Nuclear Tests, xiii.

21 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 169– 177

160. For extended discussion on the po­liti­cal and diplomatic lead-up to the treaty, see Higuchi, Po­liti­cal Fallout. Conclusion

1. Norman Cousins, epigraph to Peter J. Ognibene, “The Nightmare That W ­ on’t Go Away: Nuclear Game Plans at the Pentagon,” Saturday Review, April 17, 1976, 14. 2. Boyer, “From Activism to Apathy,” 826. 3. Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 133. 4. Robert Jay Lifton, “Beyond Psychic Numbing.” See also Boyer, “From Activism to Apathy,” and, more recently, Knoblauch, Nuclear Freeze in a Cold War, 11–33. 5. See also Rubinson, Redefining Science, 118–19. 6. Edward R. Roybal, “Speech of Representative Roybal, September 17, 1963,” Congressional Rec­ord (September 23, 1963). 7. Homeland Security National Preparedness Task Force, Civil Defense and Homeland Security, 13. See also Blanchard, American Civil Defense, 1945–1984, 11–15. 8. Knowles, Disaster Experts, 299–312; Homeland Security National Preparedness Task Force, Civil Defense and Homeland Security; Rose, One Nation Under­ground, 201–9. 9. On the 1970s and American nuclear history, see Zaretsky, Radiation Nation. For the 1970s more broadly, see Cowie, Stayin’ Alive; Self, All in the ­Family. 10. Jeremi Suri provides a notable exception, arguing that “the strains of nuclear destruction” provided a backdrop to the “language of dissent” in the late 1960s and paved the way for détente. However, more deserves to be said about how the personal lived experience of the early Atomic Age contributed to wider grassroots activism during the same era. See Suri, Power and Protest. 11. For renewed civil defense mea­sures, see Scheer, With Enough Shovels. For an excellent collection on nuclear culture in the 1980s, see Conze, Klimke, and Varon, Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear. 12. Katz, Ban the Bomb; Rubinson, Redefining Science; Wittner, ­Toward Nuclear Abolition. 13. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Radio and Tele­vi­sion Address to the American ­People on the State of the Nation,” The American Presidency Proj­ect, April 5, 1954, https://­ www​.­presidency​.­ucsb​.­edu​/­documents​/­r adio​-­and​-­television​-­address​-­the​-­american​ -­people​-­the​-­state​-­the​-­nation. 14. See Hansen, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. 15. Numbers estimated in September 2020. See Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Status of World Nuclear Forces,” Federation of American Scientists, last modified March 2021, https://­fas​.­org​/­issues​/­nuclear​-­weapons​/­status​-­world​-­nuclear​-­forces. 16. May, “Security against Democracy.” 17. Masco, Theater of Operations, 5. 18. For a consideration of the connections between civil defense and modern survivalism, see Alexis-­Martin, Disarming Doomsday, 68–78. 19. “Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Minority Groups,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last modified February 12, 2021, https://­www​.­cdc​ .­gov​/­coronavirus​/­2019​-­ncov​/­community​/­health​-­equity​/­race​-­ethnicity​.­html.

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Index

Page numbers in italic refer to figures. activism. See antinuclear movement; grassroots civic engagement activist scientists, 8, 92, 100, 102, 105, 109–11, 169, 175 A Is for Atom (1953), 80–81 Alas, Babylon (Frank), 156–57, 162 Alsop, Joseph and Stewart, 102–3 American exceptionalism, 2 American Friends Ser­vice Committee (AFSC), 124–25, 166 American Institute of Architects, 27–28 American Institute of Decorators, 149, 156 American Legion, 21–22, 32, 49, 54 American Revolution, 1–2, 3, 109 American way of life, 2, 17, 33, 117, 154, 159 AMVETS (American Veterans), 21 Anti-­Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), 172 anticommunism, 4–5, 17, 43, 58, 126–27, 154, 159. See also McCarthyism antinuclear movement, 4–5, 8–10, 89, 90, 98, 104–5, 138–39, 166–69, 172–75. See also demonstrations; test ban advocates arms race, 8, 12–13, 58, 65, 85, 93–94, 97, 126–27, 129, 136–37, 142, 158, 167, 169, 172. See also deterrence; disarmament; espionage; nuclear weapons Associated Universities, Incorporated (AUI), 70–73, 191n3 “Atom Bomb House,” 27–28 Atom Comes to Town, The (1957), 80 Atomic Age: beginning of, 14–18; use of term, 180n3. See also civil defense; nuclear citizenship; survival Atomic Alert (1951), 78–79 Atomic Attack (1950), 76–78 atomic bombs, 86, 180n3. See also nuclear weapons Atomic Energy Act (1946), 45

Atomic Energy Commission (AEC): civilian control over, 52; fallout information and, 102–11, 113, 135, 194n70, 199n74; FCDA and, 73–75; General Advisory Committee, 86, 94; information mono­poly, 10, 68, 75, 79, 111; nuclear research and testing, 8, 45, 59, 71, 79, 83, 87–91, 128, 133; OCM and, 63; Personnel Security Board, 95; secrecy and national security, 54–56, 75, 105–6 atomic scientists’ movement, 92 Atomic Scientists of Chicago, 105 authoritarianism, 43, 58, 155 authority, 44, 129; over survival, 146–52. See also scientific authority automobile culture, 28–29, 141 Baby Tooth Survey, 115, 116 Baldwin, Hanson, 47, 51 “ban the bomb” protests, 166–69 Baruch Plan, 47 Beers, Barnet W., 16, 63 Berkner, Lloyd V., 71 Berlin, 136, 139, 145–46, 163–64 Bert the Turtle, 10, 17 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 150 Bigelow, Albert, 117 Bikini Atoll, 15, 47, 87. See also Marshall Islands; Pacific Proving Grounds Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR, 1956), 106–7, 111 Black communities, 150–52, 154, 177, 184n52, 206n58, 206n60 Blue Book. See United States Civil Defense bomb shelters / blast shelters, 29, 89, 140, 143, 144, 146, 150. See also fallout shelters; shelters Boy Scouts of Amer­ic­ a (BSA), 22–25

225

22 6 I n d e x

Bradbury, Ray, 89 Bricker, John W., 55 Brookhaven National Laboratory, 71 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 14, 78, 89, 102, 121, 132, 136, 194n79 Bull Report. See Report of the War Department Civil Defense Board Bush, Vannevar, 97 businesses, 17, 26–30, 74 Caldwell, Millard, 140, 150 ­ astle Bravo test, 8, 78, 87–91, 100, 102–3, C 105, 113, 129, 131, 199n76 casualty predictions, 7, 41, 42, 46, 55, 114, 136, 138, 158–59, 209n104 censorship, 55–56, 73 Chicago, 36, 45 ­children: civil defense and, 23–25; fallout effects on, 115–18, 123, 126, 199n76; protests and, 151 cities. See urban vulnerability citizenship, 2–4. See also nuclear citizenship civic duty, 20, 26, 39–40, 66, 138, 146. See also rights and responsibilities civic organ­izations: civil defense and, 17, 21–26, 39–40, 74; protests against fallout, 120, 123–28 civil defense: chain of responsibility, 23, 24; citizen calls for, 14–40, 54; city governments and, 34–38; civic organ­izations and, 21–26; Cold War politics and, 41–45, 57–59, 65–66, 135–36; cultural and po­liti­cal consequences of, 5–6, 44; defined by WDCDB, 48–49; deterrence theory and, 157–63; funding for, 34–39, 143, 188n30; housing and consumerism, 26–30; hydrogen weapons and, 89; individual readiness, 30–33, 83, 103; interagency cooperation, 56; jurisdiction over, 44, 52, 62; Korean War and, 19–20; legislation, 62–65; military role in, 50–53, 65, 188n30, 188n44; national plan, 38–40; in 1950s, 139–45; public criticism of, 135–39, 146–52, 164–65; public support for, 16–17, 21–26, 203n11; rejection of nuclear absurd, 152–57; research on effects of nuclear weapons and, 45–50; state secrecy and, 49, 53–57; World War II and, 18–19. See also fallout shelters; self-­help civil defense

Civil Defense, a Guide for Council & District Planning (BSA), 22 Civil Defense . . . ​An American Tradition (1960), 3 civil defense drills, 147–48, 164, 209n104; protests at, 150–52, 207n67. See also Operation Alert Civil Defense for National Security (1948), 35, 49–51, 60–61, 63, 70, 188nn30–31 civil defense media: distribution of, 147; films, 32, 76–85, 192n20; ­human be­hav­ior and, 71–73; idealized expert and, 81–85; individual readiness and, 31–32; as nuclear science education, 8, 66, 68–70, 75–81; vio­lence in, 154 Civil Defense Protest Committee (CDPC), 151, 152 civil rights activism, 132, 140, 150–52, 172, 206n65 class, 40, 79, 206n58 CNI (St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information), 115, 118, 197n42 Cold War ideologies, 2, 4–5, 20, 43–44, 56–59, 65, 164 Cold War politics, 1–2; in 1980s, 174–75, 181n8; civil defense and, 41–45, 57–59, 65–66; crises, 135–36; fallout and, 108–12; necessity of nuclear testing and, 126–27. See also anticommunism; arms race; deterrence; espionage; Soviet Union Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. See SANE Committee for Non-­Violent Action (CNVA), 124, 129, 133, 152, 201n110 communication, public. See nuclear information and knowledge; public information communism: antinuclear protests and, 167; fifth-­column infiltrators, 33, 56; perceived dangers of, 43, 56. See also anticommunism; Soviet Union Communist Party, 94–95, 198n44 compartmentalization, 73, 191n14 Comprehensive Nuclear-­Test-­Ban Treaty (CTBT), 175–76 Congress: civil defense planning, 43, 52–57, 63, 142. See also House Armed Ser­vices Committee; House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC); Joint Committee on Atomic Energy; Senate Committee on Armed Ser­vices (SCAS) Connally, Tom, 55

I n d e x consumerism, 26–30 consumer rights, 118 containment, 43 cosmic radiation, 78, 109–10, 113 Cousins, Norman, 104, 109, 122–24, 168, 172, 198n44 COVID-19 pandemic, 177 Cuban Missile Crisis, 139, 146, 163–65, 173 cultural institutions, 2, 17–18, 28, 39–40, 69, 91–92, 117, 134, 174 Dean, Gordon, 55 De Chant, John A., 25 democracy, 2, 9–10, 43, 53, 58, 86–87, 121–28, 170. See also grassroots civic engagement demonstrations, 150–52, 166–69, 175, 207n67 Department of Defense (DOD), 51, 54, 56, 59, 63, 70, 74–75, 143, 145 deterrence, 12, 65, 134, 136, 142–43, 152, 157–63, 172–73 disarmament, 9, 97–98, 121, 124–26, 133–34, 139, 166–69, 172–73 disloyalty. See loyalty and disloyalty Doomsday Clock, 14 Dr. Strangelove (1964), 162 duck and cover, 10, 17, 66 Dulles, Allen, 97, 109 educational films, 32, 76–85, 192n20 educational organ­izations, 23 Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (USSBS), 45–48 Effects of High-­Yield Nuclear Explosions (AEC), 103–5 Eisenhower, Dwight: 1956 presidential campaign, 90, 108; “Atoms for Peace” speech, 12, 67–68, 97–98; on shelters, 155, 208n88; on thermonuclear weapons, 175; War Department studies and, 48 Eisenhower administration: arms control, 166; avoidance of war, 210n118; civil defense planning, 67–70, 140–45, 159; massive retaliation strategy, 158; nuclear testing, 110, 168; public candor, 67, 97–98, 108, 195n105; test bans and, 125, 128, 134 emergency planning, 173–74 emotions, 71–73; fallout effects and, 112–19 Enewetak Atoll, 87, 91, 129. See also Marshall Islands; Pacific Proving Grounds

227

espionage, 56, 69, 87, 91, 93–94, 96 ethics. See morality and ethics eugenics, 117–18 evacuation planning, 89, 140, 141, 143, 146, 150 exclusion, 4, 6, 40, 138, 150. See also insiders and outsiders experts: idealized, 81–85; insider-­outsider positions, 108–9; research proj­ects, 35, 48–51, 60–61, 63, 68–75. See also scientific authority Fail-­Safe (1964), 162 fallout effects, 99–134; dangers of, 8–9, 79, 195n2; global community and, 101, 128–34; grassroots activism and, 99–101, 110–28, 168, 173; politics and, 107–12; public information about, 99–107, 135–36; risk assessment, 112–19, 125. See also radioactive contamination fallout shelters, 1, 6, 66, 135, 142–50, 144; costs of, 205n48, 206n53; in ­family homes, 147–50, 152, 155, 208n88; numbers of, 210n133; race and, 150, 154; supplies for, 29, 37–38, 84, 141, 145, 147, 153, 155, 176. See also shelter morality ­Family Fallout Shelter (OCDM), 149 Federal Civil Defense Act (1950), 44, 61, 63–65, 142 Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA): AEC nuclear information and, 73–75; casualty predictions, 136; civil defense media, 68 (see also civil defense media); civil defense planning, 6, 16–17, 139–45; creation of, 38, 63–64; decentralized authority of, 44; fallout pamphlet, 120; Grandma’s Pantry campaign, 83–85; as in­de­pen­ dent agency, 203n20; public-­private partnerships, 30; race and, 150; research by, 70–75; scientists and, 81–82; scope of, 65–66; transparency, 75 Federal Emergency Management Agency, 174 federal government: interagency cooperation, 56; municipal civil defense and, 34–40. See also Atomic Energy Commission; Department of Defense; Eisenhower administration; Federal Civil Defense Administration;

22 8 I n d e x

federal government (continued) Kennedy, John F.; National Security Council; National Security Resources Board; Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization; Office of Civil Defense; Office of Civil Defense Planning; Office of Civilian Mobilization; Truman administration federal power, 7, 50–51, 58–59, 139, 186n3 Federation of American Scientists, 105 films. See educational films firearms, 153, 156, 176 fission reactions, 76, 90, 114, 180n3, 193n65 food safety, 88, 114–19, 126, 129, 199n73 Forrestal, James, 49 4 Wheels to Survival, 29, 141 Frank, Pat, 156–57, 162 freedom, 43, 58, 128 Fuchs, Klaus, 56, 87, 93–94, 96, 193n64 fusion weapons, 86, 180n3. See also thermonuclear weapons Gaither Report, 142–43, 144, 159 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 206n58 Geiger ­counters, 76–78, 82, 192n25 gender, 4, 32–33, 40, 83–85 General Electric, 80–81, 192n24 ge­ne­tic mutation, 90, 100, 106–7, 112–18, 127–28, 133, 156, 197n37, 199n72 global community, 101, 128–34 Golden Rule (ship), 129, 131 governance, 44, 55–56, 92, 121, 126–29, 155–56, 165. See also democracy; federal government; local governments; secrecy and transparency; state governments Grandma’s Pantry, 83–85 grassroots civic engagement, 9–11; civil defense and, 6, 14–40, 54; fallout threat and, 99–101, 110–28; government responsibility for survival and, 171–77; letter-­writing campaigns, 11; self-­help civil defense resources, 61. See also antinuclear movement ­Great Britain, 118–19, 166 ground zero, 41, 42 H-­bombs. See thermonuclear weapons Hersey, John, 15, 104, 107, 125 Hill, Arthur M., 62 Hiroshima. See Japan Hiroshima (Hersey), 104, 107 Hiroshima Maidens, 104–6

Hiss, Alger, 87 Holifield, Chester (Chet), 140, 142, 145, 159 Hollywood Bowl, protests at, 166, 167 Hopley, Russel J., 49 Hopley Report. See Civil Defense for National Security House Armed Ser­vices Committee, 63 House in the ­Middle, The (1954), 79 House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC), 92, 94 housing, 26–30, 184n52 ­human be­hav­ior, 71–73. See also psy­chol­ogy ­human rights, 101, 130–34 hydrogen bombs. See thermonuclear weapons inclusion, 4, 6, 40, 81. See also insiders and outsiders indigenous ­people, 131–32, 177 individualism, 60, 66, 152, 170, 176 infrastructure, 35, 37–38, 73, 89, 148 insiders and outsiders, 96, 108–9, 112, 153. See also exclusion; inclusion intercontinental ballistic missiles, 142, 158 Intermediate-­Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987), 176 international law, 131–32 Ivy Mike test, 42, 87, 129 Japan: antinuclear protests in, 166; atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 15–16, 31, 45–48, 104–6, 112–13, 187n9; test ban advocacy, 198n54. See also Lucky Dragon incident Jewish scientists, 91, 93 Johnson, Louis, 51 John XXIII (pope), 168 Joint Committee on Atomic Energy ( JCAE): civil defense planning, 35, 41, 42, 52–57; fallout dangers and, 110–12; national security and, 58 Kahn, Herman, 136, 158–59, 209n104 Kennedy, John F.: arms race and, 136; Berlin crisis and, 163–64; civil defense, 53, 137, 159–60, 173; Cuban Missile Crisis and, 163–65; deterrence and, 162; missile gap and, 145–46; nuclear testing, 166, 168 Khrushchev, Nikita, 162, 168 Korean War, 19–20, 39, 62, 64–65 Kuboyama, Aikichi, 102. See also Lucky Dragon incident

I n d e x Lapp, Ralph, 78, 89, 102–3, 199n76; The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon, 121–22, 194n79 Larsen, Paul J., 60 Libby, Willard, 102, 109–10, 127 liberalism, 7, 43 ­Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), 134, 139, 166–69, 173 Lipp­mann, Walter, 132 local governments, 6, 26, 34–38, 40, 74, 140, 143, 146. See also urban vulnerability loyalty and disloyalty, 4, 91–98, 108 Lucky Dragon incident, 88–91, 102–3, 105, 121–22 Manhattan Proj­ect, 15, 69, 79, 86, 89, 91–95 Marshall Islands, 8, 15, 47, 87, 129–32. See also Pacific Proving Grounds masculinity, 32–33 massive retaliation strategy, 158 maternalism, 151, 207n69 McCarthy, Joseph, 5, 56, 95 McCarthyism, 5, 72, 93, 100, 126. See also anticommunism McMahon, Brien, 7, 54–59, 65 media. See civil defense media; press coverage ­mental health, 33, 72. See also psy­chol­ogy Meyner, Robert, 152, 207n73 Mike test. See Ivy Mike test militarization, 6, 30, 43–45, 145, 163; public attitudes ­toward, 20, 52–53, 100, 128, 151, 188n44; Soviet, 43 milk contamination, 108, 114–19, 126, 133, 167 “missile gap,” 142, 145–46 Mitchell, Clarence, 150 modular and mobile housing, 27–28 morality and ethics, 4; fallout and, 101, 109–19, 131; hydrogen bomb development, 86–87, 96–97; nuclear testing and, 126. See also shelter morality Morrison, Philip, 15 Mumford, Lewis, 125 Muste, A. J., 124 NAACP, 150, 151 Nagasaki. See Japan National Acad­emy of Sciences (NAS), 74, 100, 106–9, 111, 113, 134, 197n25 national identity and community, 1–2, 39, 170, 203n12; anticommunism and, 17, 43, 58, 154, 159; shelter morality and, 152–57

229

National Institute of M ­ ental Health, 33, 72 National Military Establishment, 50, 53 National Plan for Civil Defense, 143 National Security Act (1947), 62 National Security Council (NSC), 87 National Security Resources Board (NSRB), 16, 19, 23, 24, 35–36, 51–53, 56, 59–60, 70 national security state, 5, 43, 52, 53–57, 72, 161, 176. See also loyalty and disloyalty National Shelter Policy, 143 national sovereignty, 101, 129–34 national survival, 4–5, 18–19, 66, 72, 81, 138, 152, 159. See also survival Nevada Test Site (NTS), 103, 114, 124, 129, 133 New York City, 37–38, 41, 45, 89, 149, 151 nongovernmental organ­izations, 17. See also civic organ­izations Non-­Proliferation Treaty (1968), 172 nostalgia, 13, 84 NSC-68 report, 58, 87, 157–58 nuclear citizenship: antinuclear protests and, 171–77; citizen calls for civil defense, 14–40; civil defense and Cold War politics, 41–66; defined, 4–9; dilemmas of, 12–13; expert public and nuclear dissent, 135–70; fallout ­hazards and test ban advocates, 99–134; fractures in, 34, 38, 66, 128, 170; scientists and scientific authority, 67–98 nuclear dissent movement. See antinuclear movement nuclear information and knowledge, 8–9; on effects of nuclear weapons, 45–50, 76, 99–107 (see also fallout effects); public access to, 7–8, 20–21, 49–50, 81, 101, 121 (see also public information); scientific expertise and, 67–81. See also civil defense media nuclear science and technology: developments in, 7, 85–91; peaceful uses of, 67–70, 80–81, 97–98, 175, 186n3; survival and, 12. See also experts; scientific authority nuclear testing, 8–9, 15, 47, 70, 87–91, 103, 193n65; as Cold War necessity, 126–27 (see also Soviet Union); film documentation of, 79–80; moratoriums on, 90, 118–19, 163; support for, 108, 109–19, 127. See also C ­ astle Bravo test; fallout effects

23 0 I n d e x

nuclear war: accidental, 162; avoidance of, 46–47, 161, 210n118; detonation scenarios, 41, 42; fear of, 14–18, 210n130; national recovery from, 27, 29, 104, 152–57 (see also survival); threat of, 1–13, 127–28 nuclear weapons: ambivalence about, 175–77; global inventory of, 176; international control of, 46–47, 64, 90, 92, 105–6, 130, 133; terminology, 180n3. See also antinuclear movement; arms race; atomic bombs; thermonuclear weapons Nuclear Weapons Freeze march (1982), 175 Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM), 3, 143, 149, 150, 204n26, 205n41 Office of Civil Defense (OCD), 145, 150, 156, 173, 209n104 Office of Civil Defense Planning (OCDP), 49, 51 Office of Civilian Defense (during World War II), 42 Office of Civilian Mobilization (OCM), 51–53, 62–63 Office of the Secretary of Defense, 49, 52 Office of War Information, 45 One World or None (1946), 15 On the Beach (1959), 132, 162–63 On Thermonuclear War (Kahn), 136 Operation Alert (or Opal), 148, 150–51, 164, 209n104 Operation Candor, 67, 97–98, 195n105 Operation ­Castle, 87. See also ­Castle Bravo test Operation Crossroads, 47 Operation Cue (1955), 83 Operation Plumbbob, 110 Operation Teapot, 73, 83, 103 Operation Tooth, 115, 116 Operation Upshot-­Knothole, 73 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 86, 93, 94–97, 195n105 Pacific Islanders, 131–32 Pacific Proving Grounds, 100, 129–32. See also Marshall Islands panic, 18, 33, 35, 44, 54–57, 65, 72, 88, 102, 109, 136 partisan politics, 43, 90, 108 patriotism, 1–2, 26, 108, 126 Pauling, Linus, 110–11, 121, 124, 161

peace, 172; in 1960s, 165–69; activism for, 100, 104, 123–24; deterrence and, 12, 162–63 Peterson, Val, 140 physical fitness, 32–33 Pickett, Clarence, 124, 125 Pittman, Steuart L., 156 po­liti­cal institutions, 2, 17–18. See also federal government; local governments; state governments Portland, Oregon, 164, 165 postapocalyptic images, 152–57 prefabricated housing, 27–28 preparation, 44, 46, 48, 68, 82, 147, 154, 202n2 prepper movements, 176–77 presidential campaigns, 90, 107–8, 145 press coverage: of civil defense planning and practices, 1–2, 32, 49, 208n81; of fallout effects, 88–91, 102–7. See also nuclear information and knowledge Proj­ect East River (PER), 70–75 propaganda, 33, 43, 45, 101 psy­chol­ogy, 33, 55–57, 71–74 public health, 32–33, 114–19, 126 public information, 31–32; on fallout effects, 99–107; government transparency and, 53–57, 73, 102–3; on nuclear science, 81. See also nuclear information and knowledge Rabinowitch, Eugene, 132 race, 4, 40, 206n58. See also Black communities; indigenous ­people radiation, 76–79, 82, 106–13, 199nn72–74; effects of, 8, 47, 88. See also ge­ne­tic mutation; radioactive contamination radicalism, 151–52 radioactive contamination, 90, 102–8, 114–19, 126, 129, 133, 167 radio industry, 31–32, 192nn24–25 RAND Corporation, 71, 136, 142 rationality and irrationality, 33, 44, 55–57, 73 Reagan, Ronald, 174 Report of the War Department Civil Defense Board (1947), 48–51, 60–61, 70, 188n30 rights and responsibilities, 2, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 73, 101, 118; global community and, 128–34; individual, 39–40; for nuclear survival, 171–77 (see also survival). See also civic duty; ­human rights Robbins, C. A., 36 Rocke­fel­ler, Nelson A., 135, 148, 157, 207n73 Rocke­fel­ler Foundation, 106, 197n25

I n d e x Roo­se­velt, Eleanor, 123, 125 Roybal, Edward R., 173 rural areas, 27, 36, 206n58 SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), 124–26, 128, 132–33, 151, 166, 168–69, 175, 201nn114–15 Schweitzer, Albert, 109–11, 121–22, 125 scientific authority, 8–9, 67–85, 91–98, 108, 111–14, 198n58 Seattle, 35–36 secrecy and transparency, 8–9; civil defense and, 49, 53–57; Eisenhower and, 67–68, 97–98; Manhattan Proj­ect, 15; national security and, 53–57; public information and, 73, 101, 105; scientific expertise and, 67–68, 81 self-­help civil defense, 6, 60–61, 65–66; fallout shelters and, 140, 145–46; fear and, 79; information access and, 72–73; neighborly vio­lence and, 153–54; scientific authority and, 75–76; survival and, 157 Senate Committee on Armed Ser­vices (SCAS), 52–57 Sharmat, Mary, 151, 207n69 shelter morality, 152–57, 164, 167, 208n81 shelters, 48, 89, 143, 144, 155, 160–61, 163–64. See also bomb shelters / blast shelters; fallout shelters Smith, H. Alexander, 131 Smith, Janice, 151, 207n69 Snow, C. P., 128 social control, 72 Soviet Union, 53, 124, 127–29, 142, 160, 161–62; espionage, 56, 69, 87, 91, 93–94, 96; nuclear weapons testing, 15, 34, 38, 42, 64, 86, 93, 97, 190n84; test moratoriums, 90, 118–19; totalitarianism, 43, 58–59. See also Cuban Missile Crisis Sputnik, 129, 142, 208n90 state governments: civil defense, 6, 26, 37, 40, 63, 202n2; funding for civil defense, 143; power of, 58–59 Steelman, John, 51 Stevenson, Adlai, 90, 107–8, 123, 126, 169, 197n42 Strauss, Lewis, 102, 103, 108 strontium-90, 90, 114–19 suburbs, 29–30, 117 Super program, 85–91, 94. See also thermonuclear weapons

231

survival, 1–13; authority over, 146–52; good citizenship and, 66, 138; government responsibility and, 10, 171–77 (see also civil defense); as individual responsibility, 30–33; likelihood of, 152–57 (see also casualty predictions); nuclear information and, 68; peace and, 139. See also national survival survivalist movements, 176–77 Teller, Edward, 96, 121, 127, 136 test ban advocates, 100, 108–34, 198n54 test ban treaties, 134, 139, 166–69, 172–73, 175–76 thermonuclear weapons, 70, 79, 89, 140, 193n65; development of, 85–91, 94, 96; terminology, 180n3. See also nuclear weapons Thomas, Norman, 124, 125 totalitarianism, 43, 50, 55–56, 58–59 transparency. See secrecy and transparency trauma, 12, 33, 104, 154, 164, 174 Truman administration: arms race and, 157–58; civil defense and, 15–16, 25, 31, 36–37, 39, 42, 47, 52, 61–65, 190n81; Fair Deal, 59; NSRB and, 51; Super program, 85–91; White House bomb shelter, 89 Trump, Donald, 176 Twilight Zone, 153–54 Tydings, Millard, 41 United Nations, 64, 67–68, 97–98, 106, 130–31, 166, 175–76. See also nuclear weapons, international control of United States Civil Defense (1950), 24, 63–65, 70 United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), 31, 45–48 Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights, 130 urban vulnerability, 29–30, 34–38, 46–48, 79, 140, 149. See also local governments US military, 47, 50–53, 65, 80, 188n30, 188n44. See also militarization veterans, 19–22, 33 Veterans of Foreign Wars, 21–22 Vietnam War, 172–74 Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (Lapp), 121–22, 194n79 Wadsworth, James J., 130 War Department Civil Defense Board (WDCDB), 48–50, 187n20

23 2 I n d e x

Warren, Shields, 55 War Resisters League, 124, 151 war­time mobilization, 20, 27–28 Washington, DC, 36, 41, 45, 89, 124, 148 Weaver, Warren, 108 Williams, G. Mennen, 36 Willoughby, George, 124, 131 Winchell, Walter, 50 Wittner, Lawrence, 166, 207n67, 207n69

­Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 124, 151 ­Women Strike for Peace, 123, 151, 207n69 World War II, 18–19, 48–49, 59, 91–92 X-­rays, 104, 109–10, 112–13, 123 York, Herbert, 86, 94 You Can Beat the A-­Bomb (1950), 78–79, 82–85 Young, Stephen M., 146, 152