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Zusatztext Well researched and convincingly argued. Moving from the later 1940s to the post-9/11 era, this book effectively links civil defense to larger issues of U.S. nuclear strategy and illuminates how seemingly marginal oppositional movements can cumulatively influence the course of events. While documenting the more absurd aspects of civil defense propaganda, Garrison does not settle for easy ridicule but approaches the topic with the moral seriousness it deserves. Informationen zum Autor Dee Garrison is a Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University who specializes in the history of American social movements, gender history, and peace history. Klappentext In Bracing for Armageddon, Dee Garrison pulls back the curtain on the U.S. 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, her 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. At a time of increasing preoccupation over national security issues, Bracing for Armageddon sheds light on the growing distrust between the U.S. government and its subjects in postwar America. Zusammenfassung Presents a survey of the US government's civil defense plans from World War II. This book argues that the purpose of federal civil defense was to legitimize deterrence policy and the arms race through false assurances to the masses that they could survive nuclear war and to hide the astronomical expenses of programs to protect the political elite.
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Well researched and convincingly argued. Moving from the later 1940s to the post-9/11 era, this book effectively links civil defense to larger issues of U.S. nuclear strategy and illuminates how seemingly marginal oppositional movements can cumulatively influence the course of events. While documenting the more absurd aspects of civil defense propaganda, Garrison does not settle for easy ridicule but approaches the topic with the moral seriousness it deserves. Paul Boyer, author of By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
