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  • Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis
  • Megan Barnhart (bio)
Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis. By Alice L. George. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii+238. $29.95.

In Awaiting Armageddon, Alice George examines the American public's response to the Cuban missile crisis, the point during the cold war when the United States came closest to nuclear annihilation. She fills a gap in the historical literature, which has regarded the crisis almost exclusively from diplomatic and military perspectives. She also highlights the peculiar and contradictory relationship between Americans and nuclear technology; by focusing on the missile crisis, she is able to pinpoint the nature of that relationship in a way that few other historians have done. Examining the response of ordinary Americans to this imminent threat of nuclear war brings out nuances in the public's views of technology and cold war politics that have not been articulated so concisely. On the whole, the book is a worthwhile addition to the growing body of literature on cold war culture.

George helpfully begins with a brief summary of events during the week when the crisis peaked. While the missile crisis went on for thirteen days, the public only learned of it midway through, and thus confronted the possibility of imminent nuclear war for a total of seven days. In successive chapters, George deals with different aspects of the public response. Chapter 1 is an overview of American attitudes toward communism, the cold war, and nuclear weapons. Chapter 2 deals with the federal government's haphazard attempts to prepare the nation for the possibility of a nuclear strike, and chapter 3 extends George's indictment of civil defense via an examination of local and individual responses to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Here her analysis builds upon prior studies and reaffirms the conclusions of scholars such as Guy Oakes, Kenneth Rose, Laura McEnaney, and Andrew Grossman that civil defense was at best a dismal failure and at worst an insidious deception by the federal government.

Chapter 4 focuses on the Kennedy administration's manipulation of the media during the crisis. Although the nation's journalists largely accepted the administration's version of events as the crisis was unfolding, in the aftermath the media became more skeptical. Chapter 5 deals with the political ramifications and repercussions of the crisis, and concludes that it [End Page 635] largely benefited Kennedy and the Democrats in the 1962 midterm election. Finally, chapter 6 centers on the experiences of American children and young adults during the crisis. Children who faced the threat of nuclear annihilation also began to confront the "unthinkable" concept that perhaps the policies of adults were foolish and dangerous; this would contribute to the generational conflict that erupted in the latter 1960s.

For scholars concerned with the interactions of technology and culture, the most interesting parts of George's book are her introduction and first chapter, in which she examines the complex relationship between the American public and nuclear technology. She provides a convincing answer to a question many other historians of cold war culture have pondered: Why was the American public so apathetic about the threat of nuclear war? George argues that "The Cold War created an immobilizing stalemate between two driving forces in American culture," the traditional American affinity for technology and the progress it promised, and the "nagging fear of infiltration, subterfuge, chaos, and a loss of civilization to 'the other'" (pp. 6-7).

During the cold war, the fear of communist aggression and the realization that technology could no longer save the U.S. (indeed, that technology might very well prove to be its undoing) combined to create an overriding sense of powerlessness. "For many," George writes, "it became easier to forge ahead, focusing on the parts of life that were controllable and ignoring the overwhelming threat of nuclear war" (p. 11). Thus, while George's analysis is centered on the missile crisis, she provides a persuasive explanation of the complexities of cold war culture in general.

Megan Barnhart

Megan Barnhart is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation focuses on the...

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