Scenarios for survival: Representations of nuclear war in American and Soviet civil defense manuals, 1954--1972

This thesis examines the way in which American and Soviet civil defense manuals conceptualized the nuclear threat for ordinary citizens during the height of the nuclear arms race. The two programs were dramatically different in the way they perceived the nuclear threat, and as a result created radically different programs to combat it. Whereas American civil defense was obsessed with the prospect of a Soviet sneak attack and perturbed by the prospect of home front militarization for civil defense, its Soviet counterpart regarded nuclear war as a foreseeable catastrophe and reveled in its role as a militarized effort at mass mobilization. As a result of these differences, the Soviet Union was able to create a far more formidable system of civil defense propaganda than the United States.