Armageddon insurance sells … but who’s buying?

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Notes

1 For a brief overview of Soviet efforts, see Edward M. Geist, “Was There a Real ‘Mineshaft Gap’? Bomb Shelters in the USSR, 1945–1962,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2012), pp. 3–28.

2 Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018); David F. Krugler, This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006); Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and the American Cold War Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Harry B. Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield: The U.S. Civil Defense Program in Historical Perspective (Washington, DC: Federal Emergency Management Agency, 1981).

3 Geist, Armageddon Insurance, p. 10, quoting Aaron Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the United States Become a Garrison State?” International Security, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1992), pp. 109–42.

4 For other characterizations of the US Cold War state system see, for example, Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civilian Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001).

5 Graff, Raven Rock; Stephen Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998).

6 See, e.g., Steven Kull, Minds at War: Nuclear Reality and the Inner Conflicts of Defense Policymakers (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

7 Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” trans, Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1988), pp. 20–31.

8 Dee Garrison argues that American civil-defense planning and exercises were important to the success of antinuclear-weapon and antinuclear-war activist movements. For additional (of myriad possible) examples of heterogeneity of beliefs about civil defense, see Hazel Gaudet Erskine, “The Polls: Atomic Weapons and Nuclear Energy,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1963), pp. 155–90; Dee Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Nathan Hare, “The Ghetto Is a Perfect Target … Can Negroes Survive an Atomic War?” Negro Digest, May 1963, pp. 26–33; Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

9 On imaginaries, see Sheila Jasanoff, “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity,” in Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds., Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 1–33. See also Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977),” Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1988), pp. 58–89; Brigittine M. French, “The Semiotics of Collective Memories,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 41 (2012), pp. 337–53.

10 Andrew D. Grossman, “Segregationist Liberalism: The NAACP and Resistance to Civil-Defense Planning in the Early Cold War, 1951–1953,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2000), pp. 477–97; Hare, “The Ghetto Is a Perfect Target”; Vincent J. Intondi, African Americans against the Bomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Jonathan Leib and Thomas Chapman, “Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen Bomb: Race, Evacuation Planning, and the Geopolitics of Fear in 1950s Savannah, Georgia,” Southeastern Geographer, Vol. 51, No. 4 (2011), pp. 578–95.

11 For example, see Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red; Oakes, The Imaginary War; Rose, One Nation.

12 United States Department of Agriculture, “Defense Against Radioactive Fallout on the Farm,” Farmer’s Bulletin, No. 2107 (1961), <https://osf.io/utr89/>.

13 Kerr, Civil Defense, 1983; Rose, One Nation, 2004.

14 Graff, Raven Rock, p. 451.