Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (review)

The end of the cold war brought the declassification of many secret government documents and, with it, histories that could not have been written before 1989. Several recent books have focused on the fear and incompetence that generated the massive programs of civil defense (CD) designed to protect citizens after a nuclear attack. Davis’s analysis, States of Emergency, deploys strategies from theatre and performance studies to understand these programs in three NATO countries—the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—with mixed results.

“Rehearsal” is a key term for Davis. As she points out, the exercises intended to educate the populace for nuclear emergencies in these three countries do not fit most definitions of “performance.” Instead, like theatrical rehearsals, the aim of these simulations was to get people to behave “in a constructively predictable manner” by shaping “corporal behaviors and cognitive memories needed in an emergency” (85). Military and civilian officials planned and enacted hundreds of these rehearsals, ranging from setting up field clinics to evacuating whole cities, from the early 1950s into the ’70s.

States of Emergency is at its best in detailing these exercises. Davis provides a wealth of interesting information about the scenarios rehearsed for helping the wounded, communicating emergency procedures, maintaining governmental functions, burying the dead, and for restoring the many social, economic, and political operations that a nuclear war would destroy. The CD planners knew that they would be dealing with thousands of injured and traumatized citizens, and they rehearsed what they believed were appropriate measures. Davis traces the ongoing debates among CD bureaucrats about whether to advise citizens to stay put in shelters, or to attempt to leave their cities and suburbs before the bombs rained. After 1960, when it became evident that the new nuclear missiles had radically shortened the time for civilian evacuations, U.S. officials began to advocate bomb shelters.

Davis also outlines the decline of CD credibility among citizens in the three NATO countries. The bomb-shelter debate (partly about whether shelter owners would be willing to “Gun thy Neighbor” in the event of war) and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 (when millions feared that nuclear Armageddon was only minutes away) exposed the moral contradictions and improbabilities of the CD campaign in the United States. These events, plus public discussion in Canada and the United Kingdom, gradually moved most citizens toward the view that a nuclear war would be so devastating that few could survive the “nuclear winter” that followed.

That did not stop all three governments from continuing their rehearsals for disaster, however. By the late 1960s, computers were assisting the CD bureaucrats in their planning, and advocates like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was more interested in computer printouts than human vulnerabilities, dismissed knowledgeable critics of CD as unrealistic naysayers. In addition, politicians in all three countries focused more of their CD scenarios on preserving their governments after an attack than on saving the lives of citizens.

Self-serving motives aside, Davis wonders why the CD rehearsals lasted as long as they did and speculates that “theatre itself” may have been the culprit: “What if using its techniques and the ontology of rehearsal created a sense of false security, the millennia of dramatic tradition seeming to create satisfactory closure despite unresolved time lines or chaotic plot lines? What if acting insufficiently enabled participants to get intellectual distance from the problems being explored, or proximity to problems being ignored?” (330). As many theatre artists will attest, rehearsals certainly can induce a bubble of false security (which often bursts on opening night), and Davis presents some evidence to support her contention.

But this position ignores other possibilities that may afford more straightforward explanations. Bureaucratic inertia is one; once begun, massive governmental programs are difficult to stop. Politicians seeking cover from citizen anxiety is another; CD exercises, despite their patent absurdity by the mid-1960s, at least allowed national politicians to claim that they were...