Bracing for Armageddon Why Civil Defense Never Worked [Hardcover]

InBracing for Armageddon, Dee Garrison pulls back the curtain on the U.S. government's civil defense plans from World War II through the end of the Cold War. Based on government documents, peace organizations, personal papers, scientific reports, oral histories, newspapers, and popular media, her book chronicles the operations of the various federal and state civil defense programs from 1945 to contemporary issues of homeland security, as well as the origins and development of the massive public protest against civil defense from 1955 through the 1980s. At a time of increasing preoccupation over national security issues,Bracing for Armageddonsheds light on the growing distrust between the U.S. government and its subjects in postwar America.

Well researched and convincingly argued. Moving from the later 1940s to the post-9/11 era, this book effectively links civil defense to larger issues of U.S. nuclear strategy and illuminates how seemingly marginal oppositional movements can cumulatively influence the course of events. While documenting the more absurd aspects of civil defense propaganda, Garrison does not settle for easy ridicule but approaches the topic with the moral seriousness it deserves. --Paul Boyer, author ofBy the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

Garrison offers a superb introduction to the antinuclear movement....Bracing for Armageddon is an excellent book on a topic only increasing in relevance. --Andrew J. Falk, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Those interested in the history of the Cold War, the anti-nuclear movement, and how the construction of the military-industrial complex impacted on the lives of ordinary Americans cannot afford to miss this volume. --Wendy E. Chmielewski, Curator, Swarthmore College and past president of the Peace History Society

Historian Dee Garrison's latest work turns the timely issue of clÓ<