Preparing for Cold War: Home front mobilization, state expansion, and civil defense planning in the United States, 1946-1954

Recent scholarship on industrial-strategic mobilization for the Cold War in the United States has painted a portrait of an almost frictionless process that spawned an economically efficient and socially benevolent "contract state." This dissertation challenges such a rosy interpretation of the early Cold War years. The institutional capacity to manage information in a highly sophisticated manner was one product of war mobilization during the mid-1940s. That capacity was then used after the Second World War ended to prepare the civilian population for the open-ended and highly risky Cold War project. Specifically when it came to "educating" the general public about nuclear weapons and their effects, the state used its links into the community, through its civil defense programs, to try and reconstitute nuclear reality by means of official dissimulation and the use of sophisticated wartime propaganda techniques.;The strategy of long-term, low-level, economic, military, and political mobilization for Cold War hinged on the support of the home front. This support was forged in large part by a select but robust postwar expansion of the central state, an expansion and centralization that fundamentally affected postwar American political development. The institutional capacity to mobilize the general public in a highly sophisticated fashion was enhanced during World War II, and this capacity of the central state was expanded, not demobilized at the war's end. Thus, key institutional and organizational aspects of the warmaking state of the 1940s were fixed in place so that the Cold War could be waged like a low-level "hot war." Accordingly, the immediate postwar period is viewed in terms of institutional continuity rather than discontinuity with the warmaking state of the mid-1940s. The dissertation examines the institutional bases of this domestic "civic education" program by focusing on the Truman Administration's National Security Resources Board's civil defense agency, the Office of Civil Defense Planning, and its line agency replacement the Federal Civil Defense Administration. The dissertation offers a more fateful interpretation of the effects of the early Cold War years on American society than the benign "contract state" thesis. To the contrary, the study claims that the early Cold War homefront mobilization laid a foundation for a civic garrison state, and that this process of garrisoning the home front had long term effects on American society and postwar American political development.