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

One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture. By Kenneth D. Rose. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Pp. x+313. $28.95.

The militarization of the airplane quickly followed its transformation from novelty to icon of modernity. Following Zeppelin raids on London in 1917 came recognition that aerial bombardment was potentially decisive militarily. But during the First World War the effect of bombing—like that of gas—was principally psychological; only 5 percent of total fatalities were civilian. In One Nation Underground, Kenneth Rose states that this figure increased to 50 percent by the end of the Second World War, significantly due to the targeting of cities. Aerial bombardment posed a dilemma for governments; should they contemplate the wholesale sheltering of civilian population, or were there alternatives? This book is an account of America's consideration of these questions.

The civilian air raid has not been part of the American experience of war; the practical and moral complexities that racked British government in 1939 over the provision of a credible national shelter program formed no part of the American political landscape before the mid-1950s. Yet, as Rose's chapter on "The Nuclear Apocalyptic" reveals, literary America's preoccupation with air attacks on the homeland (whether by bomb or missile) surfaced almost immediately after Hiroshima and spanned the following two decades. Both serious scholarship and fission-obsessed pulp fiction examined the buildup to nuclear attack and its aftermath. Rose recounts how an initial pride in the power of nuclear weapons gave way to imaginative descriptions of local ethical conflicts—such as sharing a family shelter with others ("to gun thy neighbor")—class divisions connecting shelter to income, and finally expressing the collective realization of millions of urban dwellers that they might be considered expendable in the event of attack.

Rose states that the Bikini "Baker" A-bomb test of July 1946 definitively established for the American public the destructive credentials of their new arsenal. The issues of fallout and fallout protection that this test raised are conventionally presented as dominating the cold war era. But it was not until President Kennedy's July 1961 speech on the division of Berlin and the ensuing Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 that political and popular attention in America focused on the practical implications of nuclear attack. Rose rightly makes this period the focus of his book, demonstrating the shifting political terrain the shelter lobby had to navigate and showing how demands for a nationwide system of protection ultimately failed. Chilling anecdotes of B-47s perched on runways with tanks fuelled, engines running, and holds full of nuclear warheads during the Cuban crisis are interleaved with accounts of spiraling civil defense budgets and the hardening of ICBM installations.

Against this, Rose describes the often naïve appraisals of what nuclear attack might really mean. There was inadequate comprehension both of radioactivity and the thermal effects of nuclear attack; shelters for dairy cows were proposed in the early 1950s. It is apparent that the question of what constituted "protection" from nuclear attack was confused, and that the administration itself offered little definitive guidance. Media support for a national program of sheltering faltered in early 1962, and if Americans were encouraged to build shelters at all it was in a distinctly self-help, low-technology way.

Roger S. Cannell's Live: A Handbook of Survival in Nuclear Attack (1962) suggested an ethos of "from junkyard to backyard"—the "door over hole shelter" or "car body shelter." Because national programs for sheltering included only key government personnel, shelter provision became, inevitably, the responsibility of the individual. Rose is unclear on the exact numbers of shelters built during the cold war, but suggests that by March 1960 there may have been only sixteen hundred shelters distributed over thirty-five states. What is apparent is that, as in wartime Britain, a large but short-lived private industry developed to satisfy those who...