Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2017 Crawl Out through the Fallout?: Civil Defense, the Cold War, and American Memory Matthew Byrne Storey Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “CRAWL OUT THROUGH THE FALLOUT?” CIVIL DEFENSE, THE COLD WAR, AND AMERICAN MEMORY By MATTHEW BYRNE STOREY A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2017 Matthew Byrne Storey defended this thesis on March 24, 2017 The members of the supervisory committee were: Jennifer Koslow Professor Directing Thesis Michael Creswell Committee Member Jonathan Grant Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii For my parents iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. v Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... vi 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 1 2. THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE OF CIVIL DEFENSE ......................................................... 11 3. PUBLIC NARRATIVES OF CIVIL DEFENSE ................................................................... 39 4. CIVIL DEFENSE AND THE COLD WAR IN COLLECTIVE MEMORY .......................... 67 5. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................... 91 References ................................................................................................................................ 95 Biographical Sketch ................................................................................................................ 100 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: “Wake Up, Mr. and Mrs Tallahassee!” ....................................................................... 21 Figure 2: “Archie” ..................................................................................................................... 57 Figure 3: “Governor Bryant in his Bunker” ............................................................................... 58 v ABSTRACT Frequently dismissed in popular culture, “civil defense” conjures images of Bert the Turtle cheerfully retreating into his shell after a cartoon explosion. Though Bert’s advice was meant for children, there were countless versions of the message geared towards an adult audience. Surely, some historians argue, such information was made available to the public out of a desire to make them feel safe when in reality there was nothing that they could do in the face of a nuclear attack on the United States. Studies like these echo popular objections to civil defense that arose in its heyday, which treated the issue with satire or even fatalism. Focusing initially on Florida, this thesis explore the roots of contemporary views of civil defense, and it argues that they arose out of fundamentally different narratives of survival between those working in civil defense and the general public. This thesis also traces the development of both official and public narratives into contemporary cultural memory, where the fears and concerns surrounding civil defense have endured beyond the Cold War. In the first chapter, I draw from internal communications and after action reports from Florida’s own civil defense agency, as well as the agency’s interactions with the national office of civil defense. These documents were expressions of a practical narrative for surviving a nuclear war that did not answer the concerns of the public. The American people were by far more occupied in trying to discern the nonmaterial costs of the civil defense program. In chapter two, I use materials which would have been readily available to the public, especially newspapers and periodicals to outline the public narrative of civil defense. These materials include reporting on the state of civil defense nationally, as well as popular editorials and articles which entered the civil defense debate directly. In the third chapter, I approach cultural and collective memories through popular movies and novels. By comparing selected works of vi nuclear apocalyptic fiction from the 1950s and 1960s to more recent offerings, we see that not only are the same fears at play, they have, if anything, grown more intense with time. Though many now think of civil defense as a quaint reminder of a tense era gone by, the collective understanding of it that Americans expressed and acquired through popular culture indicate that it was anything but. vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “Crawl out through the fallout, baby, when they drop that bomb […]”1 -Sheldon Allman, Folk Songs for the 21st Century. The Cold War was the backdrop for some of the most momentous events of the latter half of the twentieth century. In some ways, it shaped so much of the contemporary world that it can be hard to find the perspective to view it as a whole. Indeed, the American public has largely forgotten the Cold War. Short of service in the military or that of a loved one, for the average American most Cold War events existed in headlines and news reports. That is not to say that the memory of events like the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam wars is not alive. On the contrary, the many memorials and monuments that blanket the nation attest to that fact. One notable exception to the general abstraction of the Cold War in American experience is the civil defense system. Encompassing a chain from federal to municipal authorities, civil defense brought the central threat of the era, nuclear war, into homes, schools, and workplaces. Civil defense extended the frontlines of the Cold War into every American town. These programs were designed to reach out to individual Americans; for many, civil defense was their most direct interaction with the Cold War. The exact intent of the United States' civil defense efforts became, and remains, the matter of some debate. In their examinations of the subject, historians have discussed the true aim of civil defense in three basic ways. Scholars of the first school, such as Guy Oakes, discuss 1 My title is in reference to Sheldon Allman’s song of the same name. Sheldon Allman, Folk Songs for the 21st Century, Essential Media Group, first recorded in 1960. 1 civil defense in the larger context of nuclear deterrence by calling it a means of "securing the moral underpinning of deterrence."2 That is to say, a strategy of deterrence, though necessary to U.S. policy goals as a damper on Soviet ambitions, was inherently risky. If the United States were to threaten the use of nuclear weapons, the people of the nation had to feel ready for the Soviet Union to respond in kind. As a consequence of their government's course of action, the public had to be prepared to "make the sacrifices that were the burden of world leadership in the nuclear era."3 On the international stage, the United States also had to appear convincingly prepared for nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In this version of civil defense, the appearance was really all that mattered; it was a performance designed to make the Soviets doubt the efficacy of a potential nuclear attack. Whether or not the population of the United States would actually survive the consequences following the failure of such an illusion was beside the point. The installation of doubt in Soviet war planning was a major factor in the overall strategy of deterrence. Indeed, this was the thrust of President Dwight Eisenhower's "massive retaliation" deterrent strategy. As part of Eisenhower’s “New Look,” nuclear weapons were replacing comparatively more expensive American troops and bases in Europe as the chief check on Soviet aggression. It was Eisenhower’s belief that any response to Soviet action, even those on a limited scale, would inevitably lead to the strategic use of nuclear weapons.4 Therefore, the United States began to favor the development of its nuclear capabilities over more traditional forces in order to ensure that when the inevitable escalation to nuclear war occurred, the US would have the advantage. 2 Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 32. Oakes actually places civil defense in a propaganda context as well, as we shall soon see. The two are connected. 3 Ibid. 31. 4 Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1991), 138. 2 When Eisenhower outlined massive retaliation in his 1954 State of the Union Address, he called this advantage “maximum mobility of action.”5 Later in 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained further that an aggressor could no longer be “assured in advance that his attack would be countered only at the place and by the means which he selects.”6 Essentially, Eisenhower promised to meet potential Soviet aggression with enormous nuclear firepower at a time and place of the United States’ choosing. This disconnect between action and reaction eliminated a great deal of certainty from any hypothetical Soviet plan for an attack on the United