Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War (review)

David Monteyne's fascinating book, Fallout Shelter, extends the recent and growing literature on cold war structures in the United States. Focusing on institutional aspects of designing for civil defense, Monteyne's study examines hypothetical and built construction in the contexts of architectural ambitions, federal and municipal politics, and technological (mis)understandings in the 1950s through the 1970s. "Cold War civil defense," Monteyne argues, "was a discursive formation and spatial practice particularly well suited to representing the goals and powers of the welfare state," thus connecting civil defense then and now (p. xv). Monteyne links "preparation," a goal of federal agencies in the 1950s, to the message of today's Department of Homeland Security, in which being prepared for disaster is equated with responsible citizenship. The "bunker architecture" that emerged out of postwar modernism is similarly linked to "fortress urbanism," a planning response to more recent uprisings and terrorist acts. Monteyne notes that "the partnership between architecture and civil defense produced a discourse about shelter and national security that both guided professional practice and laid a framework for interpreting the cultural meanings of public buildings" (p. xxi).

Monteyne concentrates on the decade after 1962. Archival research and careful gleaning of contemporary journals and newspapers provide shelter examples ranging from the ludicrous—a wooden structure to appease the lumber industry—to the iconic: Boston City Hall. Government-sponsored competitions for schools, shopping centers, and libraries were intended to address shelter deficits in non-urban areas. Radioactivity served "as a design driver," fostering developments in mechanical systems, surveillance, and tectonics (p. 21).

An especially valuable contribution of the book is its discussion of the reproduction of racial, gendered, and economic hierarchies in proposed fallout shelters: "In an imagination of urban disaster and suburban survival, the fear of the bomb and the fear of the racial other merged at ground zero," Monteyne writes (p. 2). Cold war containment culture co-constructed white national identity, highlighting the toxic nature of both technical and social conditions during this time.

According to Monteyne, "narratives [about fallout] were based more on sensationalism and propaganda than on facts or analysis." (p. 5) The public was confused about specific nuclear threats in part due to the muddled messages of various federal agencies. The Office of Civil Defense, for example, struggled with "wide divergences in implementation and interpretation" of Protection Factor ratings. These ratings were dependent on "qualitative fluctuations in the national sense of threat, or in the political status of shelterees" (pp. 62-63). Furthermore, the power of nuclear weapons kept increasing, thus changing the requirements for "shelter."

Monteyne examines the technological illiteracy of bureaucrats and architects, noting that nuclear dangers were defined to suit architects' "professional interests and approaches" (p. 38). A comprehensive survey of available shelters was viewed as a way to "extend the responsibilities of architects into the realm of comprehensive urban planning . . ." whether or not such a survey made sense for protection (p. 43).

In the early sixties, Monteyne points out, many architects "were not merely apathetic or ignorant of the dangers of nuclear war . . . [t]hey were ardently opposed to the general premises of both fallout shelters and civil defense" (p. 45). The American Institute of Architects (AIA), the liaison with civil defense agencies, represented only about half of the registered architects in the nation, a point that Monteyne does not make. He does note, however, that The Architects' Resistance (TAR) organized to oppose the AIA's role in "concerted and strategic efforts" to be "lead consultant to government on civil defense" (p. 107).

I would quibble with Monteyne's organization of material, which leads to some repetition, and with the absence of a bibliography. But these complaints are minor for a volume that deepens our understanding of the "paranoid U.S. urban environment" (p. 42) in the sixties and contributes to broader conversations about professional conduct, government surveillance, and social implications of technological change.