At the dawn of the nuclear age, the US government was faced with an impossible task: to convince the American public that it could survive a nuclear attack. And so civil defense was born. Numerous federal and state civil defense programs sprang up, intended to pacify the population and legitimize deterrence policy, as well as to justify the billions spent on secret underground bomb shelters reserved for the government elite. A generation of Americans was indoctrinated to the catchy tune of “duck and cover”. Yet the civil defense program was a complete failure. In the 1950s and 1960s, early pro ... More

At the dawn of the nuclear age, the US government was faced with an impossible task: to convince the American public that it could survive a nuclear attack. And so civil defense was born. Numerous federal and state civil defense programs sprang up, intended to pacify the population and legitimize deterrence policy, as well as to justify the billions spent on secret underground bomb shelters reserved for the government elite. A generation of Americans was indoctrinated to the catchy tune of “duck and cover”. Yet the civil defense program was a complete failure. In the 1950s and 1960s, early protests against federal nuclear air raid drills greatly strengthened public awareness of the deadly nature of nuclear war. The 1980s brought a second wave of protests, as millions of citizens throughout the United States rejected new forms of civil defense and a crisis relocation plan to evacuate urban populations into “safer” rural areas if nuclear war seemed imminent. Political leaders and members of Congress consistently starved civil defense initiatives, while most citizens ridiculed and rejected both its practice and its very premise. Widespread skepticism about civil defense came to threaten not just deterrence policy, but the entire Cold War system of nuclear crisis management. This book aims to pull back the curtain on the US government's civil defense plans from World War II through the end of the Cold War. Based on government documents, peace organizations, personal papers, scientific reports, oral histories, newspapers, and popular media, the book chronicles the operations of the various federal and state civil defense programs from 1945 to contemporary issues of homeland security, as well as the origins and development of the massive public protest against civil defense from 1955 through the 1980s.