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  • Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War
  • Kristen Reynolds and David Hill Reynolds (bio)
David Monteyne Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold WarMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 376 pages, 129 black-and-white photos, 11 color plates. ISBN 978-0-8166-6976-9, $27.95 PB ISBN 978-0-8166-6975-2, $84.00 HB

In Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War, David Monteyne traces the roots of contemporary fortress urbanism—“the militarization of everyday built environments due to overriding concerns for security, whether national, corporate, or personal”—to the civil defense campaign of the Atomic Age (xix). The author focuses on the collaboration between civil defense bureaucrats and commercial architects in the years when nuclear technology spawned an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Monteyne posits that this alliance transformed architects and architecture by foregrounding issues of security in building design and urban planning.

This study spans the 1950s and 1960s, when the U.S. government sought to make civil defense—planning for life after nuclear war—a national movement. Civil defense concerned the home front, where average citizens were expected to do their part in preparing for enemy attack. Among these citizens, American architects found their services sought after by civil defense administrators who focused on the built environment as it pertained to human survival. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) and its later incarnation, the Office of Civil Defense (OCD), needed architects to transpose their ideology onto real buildings and landscapes. In turn, the American Institute of Architects seized the opportunity to increase its stature at the national level.

There was, however, never to be a federal building campaign for sheltering the American public. Congress, fearing the growth of too large a welfare state, repeatedly blocked government spending on such a program. Therefore, as Monteyne details, the FCDA and later the OCD functioned largely as propagandistic endeavors. The onus for civil defense was always on the public—from suburban homeowners to commercial architects and engineers, commercial building owners, and small-town leaders. Civil defense bureaucrats offered the public advice and education with pamphlets, design manuals, and the like.

Using a variety of documentary sources including FCDA/OCD records and publications, architectural journals, magazine articles, and presidential speeches, Monteyne illustrates the shift in civil defense strategy over the 1950s and 1960s while also highlighting the socioeconomic and racial prejudices involved. Early attack scenarios almost always imagined dense urban centers as ground zero. These “typically crowded, poor, derelict, multiethnic urban neighborhoods” would be completely destroyed by the blast (6). Civil defense planning, the bureaucrats rationalized, should be focused on the suburbs where, as Monteyne points out, the processes of white flight had already resulted in the relocation of many middle-class homes and businesses.

Although it initially emphasized basement or backyard bomb shelters, the OCD conceded by the early sixties that protection from a hydrogen bomb with a megaton yield was simply not realistic. The focus of the civil defense initiative thus shifted from blast survival to nuclear fallout, which could spread thousands of miles beyond ground zero. Public buildings offering long-term community shelter therefore replaced backyard bunkers in civil defense propaganda.

The 1961 National Fallout Shelter Survey launched by President Kennedy sought to identify spaces in every community for protecting human bodies from radioactive fallout. The OCD hired architects across America to gather information on existing buildings [End Page 106] from windshield surveys, building permits, and fire insurance maps. Spaces were rated according to their Protection Factor (PF), which was quantified using measurements of square footage and allowable occupancy, among other considerations. Site inspections then evaluated building ventilation, drainage, auxiliary power, and so on. “By the mid-1960s,” Monteyne writes, “millions of fallout shelter spaces had been surveyed, marked, and stocked across the United States” (77). In contrast, there was barely enough new construction at that time to illustrate OCD booklets and other propaganda. Monteyne estimates that only a few hundred new buildings were designed to incorporate fallout shelters.

The civil defense initiative may have failed to produce significant additions to the built environment, but it did, Monteyne argues...

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