One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (American History and Culture)

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Description

For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was once a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy—”to dig or not to dig,” as Business Week put it at the time—forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being.

Given the much-touted nuclear threat during the 1960s and the truth that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism, what’s perhaps most striking is how few American if truth be told built backyard shelters. Tracing the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of pop culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national get to the bottom of, or fairly encourage political and military leaders to think in relation to a “winnable” war?

Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail—including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor all the United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon—One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of The united states’s Cold War experience.

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