Thinking the unthinkable: Civil defense, nuclear strategy, and popular culture in Cold War *America

Civil defense during the Cold War was a method of escape on the part of officials and public advocates who were obsessed with thinking the unthinkable. Unwilling to believe or admit that the U.S. was helpless in defending its population from Soviet nuclear attack civil defense advocates encouraged Americans to "stand-up to the bomb" and communist aggression by preparing for nuclear war. The task was a difficult one for these proponents. Though consistently favoring the general concept of civil defense, the complexity of the problem led the vast majority of the American people unable to generate the initiative to insure their own survival in a nuclear war. When it came to civil defense, most Americans, stricken by apathy or fatalism simply didn't want to think about it.;This dissertation analyzes the support for and opposition to civil defense between 1945 and 1988 and it has four objectives in mind. First, it tries to assess the role that civil defense played in the devising of nuclear strategic doctrine between 1945 and 1988 as a method of escaping the reality of nuclear war. Second, it attempts to evaluate the extent to which civil defense, which ultimately depended on public support for its implementation, serves as a barometer of the public's perception of nuclear war, its attitude towards survival, and its support of nuclear deterrence. Third, this project strives to measure the influence of cultural strategies used to promote civil defense, and the success or failure of such strategies within the public arena. Finally, it seeks to define the lines of the debate over civil defense and gauge the effectiveness of the opposition, particularly in the form of grassroots activists.