Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1 A New Age Dawning; 2 The Nuclear Apocalyptic; 3 Morality and National Identity at the Shelter Door; 4 Taking Government, Business, and Schools Underground; 5 The Theory and Practice of Armageddon; 6 The Shelters That Were Not Built, the Nuclear War ThatDid Not Start; Postscript; Notes; Index; About the Author
Summary
For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy--"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time--forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being. Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear w
