Kenneth D. Rose (1)

Somewhat interesting, although dated (copyright 2001) and often reads too much like a doctoral dissertation. Rose keeps coming back to the same arguments again and again which becomes tedious after a while. I'm a bit confused by the organization also. It seemed as if much of the most relevant and interesting tidbits of information came towards the back of the book rather than the beginning. Certainly, a discussion of how fallout shelters appeared in post-apocalyptic literature of the 1950s and 1960s is worthwhile in a book such as this, but is it more important than a discussion about what types of people were actually buying or building shelters? Perhaps if I had lived in the 50s and 60s this book would have had more meaning to me.… (más)

In One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, Kenneth D. Rose argues, “The main reason Americans rejected [fallout] shelter building had to do with the troubling moral aspects of shelters. These included questions of personal ethics and relationships with one’s neighbors, as well as questions of national identity and the ultimate morality of the kind of world that would be created by a nuclear exchange” (pg. 10). In his cultural history, Rose draws upon political, academic, and popular texts as well as the historiography of the early Cold War, including Paul Boyer and Margot Henriksen.
Rose writes, “By 1960…Americans by overwhelming margins had not only made no preparations for nuclear war, they had not even thought about making such preparations. In part this was because Americans believed that civil defense was properly a government responsibility rather than a private one” (pg. 18). Turning to nuclear apocalyptic literature, Rose writes, “The basic question of the survivability of nuclear war and the efficacy of civil defense is a recurrent theme in these works, mirroring the same debate on the fallout shelter issue that was taking place around the country. The anxiety-producing potential of this form of literature is obvious. But there was also a sense in which this was a genre of thrills, with both author and reader exulting in the terrible maiming and devastation visited by nuclear weapons. There is often an unmistakable pride in the raw power that produces such carnage, and a supernatural awe as author and reader contemplate the effects of such a force” (pg. 41). He continues, “In On Thermonuclear War and other works that would follow, [Herman] Kahn would display a genius for inciting critics, especially with his suggestion that it was possible to stage-manage nuclear war to ‘limit’ its effects, and that recovery from nuclear war would not only be possible but even probably – if the right preparations were made beforehand” (pg. 67). According to Rose, “Mainstream writers were often tempted to put an apocalyptic spin on Cold War politics – a struggle between good and evil with the Soviet Union standing in for the Antichrist” (pg. 72). Of popular fiction, Rose concludes, “This genre may not have affected overall nuclear policy, but in the many depictions of the uselessness of civil defense in general and shelters in particular, and in the grim descriptions of life after nuclear war, the nuclear apocalyptic may have helped turn public opinion against a national shelter program” (pg. 77).
Of the shelters themselves, Rose writes, “Even before the rush of shelter building that occurred in 1961, there was already some inkling of what would eventually become one of the most troubling moral quandaries of the fallout shelter. In 1959 the director of civil defense for Los Angeles complained that one of the difficulties in knowing the exact number of fallout shelters built in the city was that people were building shelters but were not designating them as such through building permits. Some people did not want it known that they had a fallout shelter, he said, ‘because they do not want their neighbors to know it exists’” (pg. 93). According to Rose, most Americans could not conceive of the realities of nuclear war. Characters such as Bert the Turtle in Duck and Cover demonstrate this by minimizing the threat while “implying that [children] already knew what to do in certain dangerous situations” (pg. 128). Drawing on gender theory, Rose writes, “Civil defense during the 1950s and 1960s would be ‘feminized’ to the extent that links would be suggested between a woman’s home and her fallout shelter, and between her domestic responsibilities and civil defense preparedness” (pg. 141). More to the point, “Even if prohibitively expensive urban shelters were built, there was no guarantee that such shelters would be able to protect a city population against nuclear weapons” due to the risk of a firestorm (pg. 159). According to Rose, “If nuclear blasts created firestorms only rarely and within a limited radius, then fallout shelters on the periphery of target areas would provide significant protection for those within. But if the side effects of a nuclear attack included huge firestorms spreading out in a wide radius from the center of the blast, then ordinary fallout shelters would serve as little more than burial vaults for those inside” (pg. 169).
Rose concludes, citing a “1962 study that compared eighty shelter owners with eighty non-shelter owners [that] indicated that the two groups held fundamentally different worldviews. Non-shelter owners were generally more optimistic about the prospects for world peace, while shelter owners expressed a corresponding pessimism. Paradoxically, shelter owners believed that shelters reduced the chance of war, but were more convinced than non-shelter owners that war would occur” (pg. 187). Finally, “While Americans were often reluctant to fully face up to the realties of nuclear holocaust (it is not an easy subject to keep constantly in mind), they were less passively fatalistic than they were often accused of being. Americans actively took part in the debate over shelters, and their rejection of fallout shelters was a conscious decision based on the social, moral, and economic implications of building those shelters” (pg. 207).… (más)