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

Stages of Emergency offers a cautionary tale about what can happen when a topic with a great deal of potential falls victim to a dubious theoretical framework. The subject is civil defense exercises, in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The framework that dooms the enterprise is "performance studies," which is portrayed by Tracy Davis as history's philosophers' stone, the analytical tool that turns the most difficult materials into gold because everything, it seems, is either a rehearsal or a performance. Civil defense public policy agendas, for instance, are described by Davis as "priorities for rehearsal" (p. 22), and everyone who participates in a civil defense drill becomes an "actor" ("everyone had a role to play"; p. 23). Even Geiger counters and potassium iodine capsules are mere "props" (p. 322). If civil defense preparations constitute "rehearsal," then what is the "performance?" Nuclear war. As Davis puts it, an extended stay in a fallout shelter "is not, in fact, a performance but a rehearsal for a performance; performance would transpire only if real bombs and fallout rained outside" (p. 90). That this suggestion trivializes what should be among the most serious of subjects is obvious, and one can only hope that there are few among us who would be willing to view civil defense preparations and nuclear war in the same manner as, say, a summer stock production of Showboat.

Davis delves deeply into her subject and has completed one of the few cross-national comparisons of civil defense exercises. She uncovers some intriguing national differences. For instance, Britain created a Civil Defense Corps, and a similar system evolved in Canada, but the United States for numerous reasons never created a national civil defense force (pp. 35-40). Davis also provides some wonderful anecdotes, such as the tale of Canada's 1955 civil defense exercise dubbed Operation Lifesaver. The plan was for a large number of people from a Calgary neighborhood to evacuate to reception centers in the countryside. When a blizzard blew in, however, the exercise had to be postponed, and instead of taking in Calgarians fleeing a nuclear disaster, "civil defense workers took in 100 travelers stormbound on the Number 1 Highway" (p. 160). Davis should also be praised for the excellent photographs and illustrations featured in the book.

Sadly, the good in this book is overwhelmed by the bad. At 440 pages, the book is too long by half, and the pacing ranges from turgid to soporific. This is the consequence of overly long block quotes throughout and Davis's tendency to use five or six examples to illustrate a point when a couple would do. Stages of Emergency contains twelve chapters that, like the number of pages, could have been cut in half. An entire chapter, for instance, is devoted to "Acting out Injury" when a much shorter treatment would have been preferable. There are also some jarring chronological shifts (chapter five ends with a 1994 report and chapter six begins with a 1949 report) as well as sections that only a bureaucrat could love (such as chapter eight's detailed discussion of the differences between Plan C and Plan D-minus). An editor could have done much to make this book more readable, but no editorial oversight was apparently available at Duke University Press.

The main problem, however, is Davis's reliance on a half-baked theory and the jargon that goes with it. Why practitioners of cultural studies continue to insist on employing a vocabulary that obfuscates rather than illuminates is one of the mysteries of our profession. With whom, exactly, are they trying to communicate? The only reasonable answer seems to be "each other." No one else could possibly want to read this stuff. By now even the novelty of the cultural studies approach has faded, and words that once titillated because of their obscurity have themselves become shopworn clichés. Davis continues to plug away, however, regaling the reader with methexis and...