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Notes Introduction 1. Urban theorist Robert Goldston referred to the megalopolis as simply “the explosion of the city” (154); he concluded his anti-suburban treatise from 1970 on an apocalyptic note: “megalopolis is doomed. . . . Its existence is incompatible with human life and will therefore be terminated in the interests of human survival. Possibly by the conflagration of war” (181). While still nuclear-inflected, it is a softer terminology—the suburban “boom,” the “mushrooming” of the suburbs— that has been applied to the rapidly developing exurban environment (see also D. Rose 26–30). 2. Yet in addition to their solid construction, schools were often the only locus of civil defense awareness and drilling in otherwise indifferent or un-mobilized urban and suburban environments (Weart 15–16). 3. Deen and Browning’s assessment of post-nuclear survival is especially upbeat regarding the benefits of sheltering in large, high-rise structures (82–83), suggesting none of the downsides considered in other texts referenced in this discussion. 4. See also Hayes and Leyson, whose WWII-era survival guides described civil defense for conventional, not atomic, bombs but who even then questioned the adequacy of tenement houses and “modern apartments” (Hayes 58–61) and “older types” of buildings (Leyson 69) during an air raid. Leyson places great faith in the structural soundness of modern office buildings, but regards most apartment housing, subways, and “shelters that have been built” (65) as inadequate urban shelters. He even worries that privately-built, suburban shelters would be useless against most conventional bombs, unless these shelters were “sixty to eighty feet beneath the surface of the ground” (70). Postwar, atomic-ready shelters were regarded even by their advocates as expensive and difficult to build (Hassard 87; Martin and Latham 256–61, 264, 271; Ring 78–79). 5. See Weart 13; also, Martin and Latham observe that in 1961 only $532 million was spent on civil defense, less even than the Congressional appropriation of $620 million, although both of these sums pale in comparison to the $19 billion spent annually on military defense during this period (262–63, 265). Hassard noted similar patterns of de-funding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the early 1980s, while “[o]nly the funding for the protection of the leadership and continuity of government seems to have escaped [budgetary cutbacks ]: in fact, it was increased from $140 million to $155 million” (87). 6. Notably, the white middle-class was not the only group enjoined to “run toward the fire” in a nuclear emergency. McEnaney shows that civil defense planners sought to mobilize America’s industrial forces by inspiring (or contractually obligating ) them to man their machines throughout or immediately after a nuclear 213 attack, so as to re-establish America’s military and economic superiority as quickly as possible (126–34). Yet the majority of unionized, skilled, “essential” workers at this point were white, so that, even as members of the working class, African Americans were still considered expendable in the nuclear scenario. 7. See also Town of the Times (1963), in which African American characters (mainly children) are featured very briefly, and The Day Called X (1957), a network television staging of Portland, Oregon’s successful preparation for attack, in which an Asian-American girl of primary-school age plays a brief featured role. Notably, one film appearing late in the CD era, Occupying a Public Shelter (1965), features an unnamed black male character who surely integrates the shelter during his several scenes yet is carefully segregated at all times as well: this character functions as the communication specialist who immediately moves to a reserved seat at the radio desk in the shelter control area, away from the white shelterees identified as ordinary citizens. He spends all of his scenes at his radio controls with his back to the group, interacting amiably with other (white) shelter managers but never eating , sleeping, or talking with the rest of the occupants. 8. P. Boyer has read an array of hopeful speculations, based on the promise of unlimited atomic energy, whose politics also tend to match those of the speculators themselves. For instance, “the splitting of the atom, exulted a 1946 Socialist Party pamphlet . . . had ‘made it possible to transform nature into the servant of man, giving him food infinitely beyond the capacity of the human appetite, clothing far more abundant than he can wear, homes for all to fill our streets with palaces’” (114; see also 164). Here atomic energy promises the classless society feared...

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