conelrad's Xanga

Research Update

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:14:20 GMT

Wow. I really am not good at this whole "periodic updating" thing. Unless you count updating on an annual basis, which I, of course, do. That's not to say, however, that I've spent the last few months resting on my laurels. (Study question: What, exactly, are 'laurels'? Bonus: Can you rest on them? Show your work.) Rather, I've been organizing and re-organizing my stacks of research materials and mapping out several articles - including one on Plowshare, and another on radiological 'accidents' on file with the AEC - that I hope can be published alone and be incorporated into a longer work at a later date.

The Operation Plowshare research alone has taken up several months, but has been a great deal of fun as well. Frankly, when you've spent as much time with a topic as I have with Civil Defense, the novelty can begin to wear off. I think it might have happened around the decade mark, but I digress. Plowshare, with all its wacky lunacy, has reminded me why I enjoy this subject as much as I do. To think that there was a time, not too long ago, when major universities offered classes in 'nuclear engineering' (as in, civil engineering using nuclear explosives) is mind-boggling in its sheer 'what the heck were they thinking'-ness.

All of which is to say that my long-awaited (by me, and likely by me alone) book is progressing nicely. I did want to take a moment to mention a great new tool I discovered recently, Zotero. Zotero is a plug-in for Firefox that allows the user to organize and keep within easy reach all of their research materials - it can even generate a bibliography (following a number of styles) from selected works, a great time-saver for the writer. The iTunes-like interface allows for a practically flat learning curve, assuming of course that one is familiar with iTunes. Anyhow, one of the best features is Zotero's ability to take a 'snapshot' of a webpage the writer may want to reference at a later date. This produces an exact copy, stored on the user's local drive, as insurance against the page changing in the future. Users can even use a special set of Zotero tools to highlight and annotate these saved pages. There's much more info at the Zotero site, which is linked below. Check it out!

Zotero Home Page
Firefox Browser Site (Firefox is required for Zotero)

Thoughts on Method

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:59:53 GMT

For the past few weeks I've been working to gather material for an upcoming post (and, dare I say, potential chapter) about Eisenhower's 'peaceful atom' initiative. The ease of gathering together articles and images led me to consider the evolving state of historical research.

It's been a whopping seven years now since I first started assembling the boxes and boxes of material now littering my office. In that early phase, my research methods were - for lack of a better word - traditional. If it was magazines I wanted to check, it was off to the Readers' Guide. In accumulating my binders of New York Times articles, I started with the red-bound New York Times Index. From both of these catalogs, the next stop was the microfilm cabinet in the back of the first floor of Pikeville College's Allara Library, then to one of the several machines gathered in the research reading area.

It took multiple long evenings in the library to put together that first batch of research. Today, though, the same material (and actually more) can be had in just a few hours via various online databases. It's not that PC didn't have access to e-journals; indeed, I used J-Stor for almost all of my academic journal research, and ProQuest and other such services whenever paper copies of magazines could not be had. The online archives of The New York Times had yet to come into existence, so microfilm was the only option there. Having used both methods extensively, I feel qualified to point out that the online researcher is far more likely to miss some things than his or her traditional counterpart. For me at least, a big part of the fun of research lies in the discovery process. My hope is that undergraduate students (and even grad students, at this point -- jeez I feel old) will not rely solely on the new computer search tools and let the more traditional methods fall by the wayside.

Lest I sound like a porch-rocker at an assisted living facility, let me announce up front that I am pro technology. It's not as though I'm complaining about the ability to type in a few keywords and have my entire senior-year bibliography returned to me in nanoseconds. I can only imagine how much further along I would be had these capabilities existed from day one. So, I'm no Luddite. Rather, I feel the need to defend the older ways of doing things.

History, after all, connects the reader and researcher with the past. This connection means much more if it is a tactile experience. Seeing an electronic transcription of a magazine article on a computer screen, for instance, pales in comparison to actually having the magaizine in its original state and being able to turn the pages. In this way, the researcher knows not only that he or she is seeing the source in unadulterated form (most online database services use OCR technology to convert old issues, and even the best OCR packages available still make the occasional mistake) but also that he or she is sharing an experience with people contemporary to the topic at hand. Since magazines and newspapers typically provide more background for research than hard data, being able to experience exactly what the original audience saw lends a far more authentic tone to the resulting history.

The same holds for newspapers on microfilm vs. online texts. The online archive of The New York Times, for example, offers a wealth of information from the late 1800's forward. Researchers can type in keywords -- analogous to the red-bound indices mentioned previously -- and retrieve a list of essentially every article containing those terms. The NYT database even takes research a step further, allowing the user to access either a plain-text version of the article or an image of the original as it appeared in the paper. While this preserves some level of the experience, it still stops short of the veritable time machine of microfilm.

Yes, I just called microfilm a time machine. Microfilm takes a while to load properly, there are a number of knobs to master, and there's always the issue of bringing the screen into focus. Once those are accomplished, however, the researcher can be transported back across the decades. Why settle for just those columns containing the sought-after article when you can peruse the whole newspaper? Admittedly, this is a much slower process than pulling up the PDF file, printing it, and moving on. When it comes to establishing context, though, there is much that the PDF image of the article fails to convey. For instance, I often found in the early stages of my research that I gleaned as much information, if not more, from the stories and items surrounding whatever specific article I had originally set out to find. Seeing just that specific item gives the researcher tunnel vision of a sort. By having access to the entire newspaper, however, it was a simple matter to determine other events happening contemporaneous to the original article. This sort of information proved vital when the time came to set the stage for the historical narrative.

One last advantage lies in the process of research itself. Often, I found side-bar items or photo captions near the articles I sought that, while important and pertinent to my topic, did not contain any of the key words I had used in the index. Such finds were valuable in the obvious sense that they added to my final product, but also in providing me with additional research paths to explore.

So, there you have what may be a lone voice in the wilderness amongst the current generation of historians. I certainly have yet to find the microfilm reading area of the University of Kentucky's William T. Young Library too crowded to use; in fact, I'm often the only researcher around. The computer labs are a far more popular spot. And when I do find I have company, it's often a colleague whose training dates to microfilm's heyday (note that I'm phrasing that as nicely as possible). I consider myself lucky to be among the select group whose academic career spans these two equally beneficial moments in research methodology.

Here We Go Again?

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:52:06 GMT

This is, in many ways, a continuation of my previous post. I'm afraid it's a common malady for historians to search the contemporary landscape for parallels to their areas of interest and/or expertise, but in the case of my thesis review and recent events I feel obligated to ponder a few similarities.

The overall main point of my thesis (my thesis thesis, if you will) was that the Civil Defense programs initiated by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations reflected the ideologies of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. That's not as soft a thesis as it might (admittedly) appear on first glance. Rather, I lined up what I believed, and still do, to be convincing examples of the individualism of the Eisenhower programs contrasted against the more paternal nature of the Kennedy approach. A key background element for the Eisenhower years was a pervasive fear -- of attack, of internal revolution led by the Communists who were hiding under every bed, of the unknown in general -- that provided ample opportunity for the government to peddle its agenda to the public.

A popular nostalgia has grown up around the fifties in America, not particularly related to the facts of the time. While the enduring images are of Lassie and Leave It To Beaver-esque visions of suburbia, people often forget that the decade also saw civil liberties fall increasingly to the wayside during anti-Communist crusades, the gathering desegregation storm, and the rising prominence of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

It is tempting, of course, to point to what would seem to be incontrovertible evidence of history repeating itself -- anti-terrorist crusades (c.f. my previous post), government-sanctioned discrimination against minority groups (illegal immigrants, homosexuals), NSA wiretapping sans due process, etc., but in many ways that doesn't present enough of a challenge to even warrant attention. However, I do find myself intrigued by what happens if we take this hypothesis and expand it somewhat. After all, the fifties led (in an astounding instance of mathematical purity) to the sixties. Does that mean that we may emerge from the current eight-year Republican epoch into a drug-fueled, protesting-in-the-streets counterculture, one perhaps even characterized by a return to quality popular music? Will we see an actual, honest-to-goodness literary scene? Riots on college campuses? Free love? Rather than Homeland Security telling us that we need plastic sheeting and duct tape in our cabinets, will government surveyors fan out across the country to find and mark appropriate community shelters against the hazards of radioactive dirty bombs?

As much fun as it would be to see pretty much all of these things, it is, alas, unlikely. The decade of the sixties, as historians have shown time and again, was the product of a very unique set of circumstances all coming to simultaneous fruition. We don't have a baby boom giving us an unprecedented number of socially idealistic young people. We don't have a draft, so no matter how long the current war continues there's no danger (at least for the time being) of forced servitude such as that which drove the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era. With no anti-war movement, we'll likely not see the protests, the college uprisings, the incredibly fertile independent music scene that gave recognition to talented artists and led to Woodstock. We're probably facing at least another ten to twenty years of computer-rendered anodyne pop (CRAP) -- I really wish I could take credit for that, but sadly I heard it in "We Will Rock You," the Queen musical in London. Most college students can't write a coherent paragraph, so an explosion of underground poetry or experimental essay structures is probably still very distant on the horizon.

So what of civil defense? That is harder to predict. The Department of Homeland Security, like the Office of Civil Defense, was hastily assembled out of necessity to mobilize against an inherently spectral threat. CD administrators faced a dilemma -- do you lull people into a (false) sense of security to avoid irrational behavior, or do you keep everyone on an unsustainable high alert? I would suspect DHS will eventually have to face this question as well. How they address it will make great fodder for history theses by as yet unborn historians. Everything old will be new again.

Just Passing Through...

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:26:22 GMT

Oh, yeah. I have a blog. I vaguely remember that.

I'm beginning to question whether or not I have the level of devotion required by such an endeavor, as my eight-month break might have led one to believe. However, I dug out my master's thesis -- "Die, Dig, or Get Out: The Evolution of American Civil Defense, 1948-1963" -- this past weekend and I'm inspired. What can I say? I have that effect on, well, me. And so CONELRAD is back -- at least for now!

I revisited my thesis because at the time of my writing it I actually, consciously put an effort into making it fun and interesting to read for people who were not on my thesis committee and therefore being paid to do so. And, in short, I wanted to go back to it with somewhat fresh eyes and see how it's holding up. Maybe (just maybe) even do a little more on my perpetual project of turning it into an actual (dare I say it?) book.

It's not that bad, if I do say so myself. I did a decent job of exorcizing the passive voice (thanks to early-on advice from historian/author George Herring, who also told me it didn't matter what tense I used in historical writing as long as I just picked one), a demon that has rendered much of my undergraduate writing painful to read. Passive voice, truly, is to be avoided. I found I laughed in the right spots; it's a sort of dark comedy for the scholarly set. I also only made it a few pages in before finding a glaring typo -- unless, of course, the Japanese actually did bomb Pear Harbor, perhaps on their way to their ultimate target.

I did much of the research prior to 9/11, and the research process, regardless of how impartial one might claim to be, still in the end influences greatly the overall direction of the work. Even though I did the writing post-9/11 (the attacks took place just a couple of weeks into my first semester of grad school), I realize now that the context for the entire civil defense topic had shifted a great deal more than I accounted for. In the conclusion, I wrote that the then-fledgling Homeland Security initiative could learn a great deal from the lessons of Civil Defense, but I didn't realize at that point how closely the two were going to end up mirroring each other just five years out. That would probably constitute an entire new chapter were I writing my thesis today.

Also, I was struck during my discussion of NSC-68 (United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, commissioned by Truman on January 31, 1950) by just how closely the language parallels that in use today at the top levels of the government. The text of NSC-68 I used for my thesis was included in a book (American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC-68, edited by Ernest R. May) which also included essays by a number of prominent historians. One of them, cultural historian Emily Rosenberg, wrote that NSC-68 served to establish a new militant nationalism by "trying to forge a national consensus through creation of a symbolic 'other' with mirror-opposite characteristics" (p. 162). Specifically, the authors of NSC-68 declared that "[t]he Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world" (text of NSC-68 in the May book). It's an enlightening process to go back and read such contemporary denouncements of communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular, substituting 'terrorist' for 'communist.' That, too, would make a good chapter -- perhaps even an entire book. I envision a lot of side-by-side comparisons; I think given the time and resources I could probably find a recent facsimile of nearly every period quote I used. Maybe Santayana was right -- we are condemned to repeat it.

Greenbrier Bunker Reopens for Tours

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 15:42:30 GMT

The topic du jour is a secret program put in place during the Eisenhower administration known broadly as Continuity of Government, or 'COG.' I've been holding off on writing about this topic, because I have so much research piled up about it I was afraid a post would quickly become so gargantuan I would never be able to finish it. Thus, I plan to break it into several smaller and hopefully more readable and interesting segments.

I got my final 'push' to start this series this past weekend while visiting with my wife's parents in West Virginia over Independence Day. While watching the local news Saturday evening, a story caught my attention -- it seems the Greenbrier fallout shelter has been renovated and is now open once again for tours. The Greenbrier bunker was one of the facilities that made up the COG program, which I just realized I should probably explain somewhat.

COG got its start practically as soon as the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949. Governmental higher-ups, realizing the vulnerability of Washington, D.C. as a target area, began drawing up plans to relocate in time of emergency. The defense department and some executive offices began work on a facility at Mount Weather, just outside the Washington Metro area in northern Virginia. The judiciary set up digs (pun very much intended) at Raven Rock in Pennsylvania, and work began on a presidential shelter at Camp David. The legislative branch scouted out a location many Senators and Congressmen knew well -- the posh Greenbrier Resort in the hills of West Virginia.

The Greenbrier has long been a destination resort for heads of state from around the globe, and certainly the power-players in Washington, D.C. were familiar with its amenities and its relatively isolated location. Thus, the architect of the capitol approached CSX (the railroad owned the land and the resort) and the idea for Project Greek Island was born. The plan was compartively simple: the resort would announce an expansion project that would include a new wing attached to the main hotel. This activity would serve as cover for the government's building project.

In a remarkable feat of secrecy, contractors crafted a massive reinforced concrete bunker under the site. The West Virginia Wing, as the hotel expansion was christened, quickly took shape, hiding the unusual excavation project. Construction began in 1958 and was complete by 1961. The fallout shelter (technically, the facility was never meant to serve as a 'bunker' -- though constructed of reinforced concrete, it was not engineered to survive a direct, or even indirect, hit) comprised over 100,000 square feet and could accomodate every member of the legislative branch and their staff.

Massive blast doors (the one pictured to the right is one of the facility's vehicular entrance doors) were custom-made by the Mosler Safe Company and shipped via rail -- hence the further strategic importance of the cooperation with CSX -- to the site. Though tipping the scales at 25 tons, the doors open with a mere 50 pounds of pressure. During my personal visit to the site, an older gentleman (an employee of the Greenbrier) demonstrated just how easily the door would swing on its hinges. He also demonstrated for our group the deafening (and quite ominous) boom when the door swings back into its frame and the bolt is thrown. (Yes, for those few attentive readers who have yet to glaze over, I went on a tour of the shelter. What else would you expect? And, in a testament to the power of love, the trip was actually a graduation (from undergrad) present from my then-fiance, now long-suffering-yet-still-supportive-despite-my-weird-leisurely-pursuits-wife. But, more on my visit in a later post).

And thus you see how easily I can devolve into mind-numbing specifics. Thus I will cut this post off here, and suffice it to say that if you ever want to see where Congress and the Senate planned to ride out Armageddon, you can do so on a convenient guided tour. Just check out the link below.

For further reading:

50 Years of Interstates

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:35:27 GMT

With the fiftieth anniversary of the Interstate system (my post from a few weeks ago), many of the major media outlets are doing retrospectives. While I apologize for this blatant departure from my norm, this entire post consists of a link to the best (in my opinion, anyhow) of these, on the NPR website. Many of the NPR programs (Morning Edition, All Things Considered, etc.) are broadcasting special segments, and these are archived on the site as audio files. There is also a lot of other neat stories that are exclusive to the web. Anyhow, check it out!

Computers in the Cold War

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:09:46 GMT

CONELRAD returns this week from yet another unplanned hiatus, this time the result of technical difficulties (read: hard drive crash). I installed a new hard drive, but being a freelance history blogger I lacked the resources to purchase a new operating system to get it up and going (FYI, 'recovery disks' don't work if they sense your hardware has changed). Thus, I am proud to announce that this post was completely written and uploaded via Linux, a powerful (and FREE!) alternative to Windows or Mac OS. There are links at the bottom of this post.

Anyhow, all of this has gotten me thinking about the role computers played in the Cold War. Most students are aware that ENIAC came about during World War II, and the ones who got 'A's' probably realize it helped the army calculate missile trajectories. However, well after the war ended the defense department continued to be one of IBM's best and most loyal customers.

Computers aided the American cause on both the offensive and defensive fronts. Offensively, the machines could perform complex mathematical calculations in minutes that would have taken scientists days or even weeks to work by hand. This greatly sped up the development process for new generations of nuclear bombs. Furthermore, as the computers became more powerful in their simulation capabilities, time-consuming wind-tunnel tests for new missile and plane designs could instead be perfected in the design phase -- thereby also speeding development of alternative warhead delivery systems.

As for the defense, one of the first orders of business for the Air Force in the aftermath of the war was to install mainframe computer equipment to centralize and coordinate the American radar stations. Since air defense could then monitor the nation's entire airspace border at once, any anomalies could be quickly reported and acted upon. As a side note, these massive defense supercomputers were also spoofed in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. There is a scene when the President is inviting the Soviet ambassador into the war room (where, remember, there is to be no fighting!) and Ripper tries to discourage this breech of security. Gesturing to the gigantic computer display over the conference table, Ripper pleads, "He can't come in here! He'll see everything! He'll - he'll see the big board!" (Sorry. I am an unapologetic fan. An unapologetic fan who apologizes, apparently.)

Computer technology and the Cold War advanced together -- indeed, one could make a persuasive argument that the two propelled each other forward. With the end of hostilities, much of the once-proprietary military technology became available for the public. GPS is a prime example, as is the internet. Elsewhere, the same algorithms that once helped design nuclear warheads now help plan for their disposal, and NORAD continues to keep a watchful eye on radar screens from deep within Cheyenne Mountain in Wyoming.

And that's about it for our brief introduction to computers and the Cold War. Feel free to follow the links below to learn a little more about Linux. Also, I should point out here that any discussion of a FREE and powerful alternative operating system on a blog that derives its inspiration from the defeat of an evil empire is purely and wholly coincidental.

Links:

On the Road Again

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 02:14:12 GMT

Since the masses have spoken, CONELRAD returns from a brief hiatus today. The idea for this post came to me during an 18-hour drive to Florida for vacation. Today's topic is one of the largest engineering projects ever undertaken: the federal Interstate Highway system.

Most survey American History II courses convey that Eisenhower saw the Autobahn (specifically, auf Deutsch, the Reichsautobahn) in action during his time as commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II. Enamored, Ike returned home intent on building a similar system in his own country. This version is nicely compacted, which makes it perfect for that week at the end of the semester when the prof realizes it's time for finals and the class just learned about the Spanish-American war. However, its compactness leaves out a great deal of detail.

Eisenhower's mission to improve American transportation can be traced to a little jaunt he took years before heading for Europe, a 1919 military convoy from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. It took 62 days to cross the continent and the convoy only managed to average five miles per hour (Tom Lewis, Divided Highways, 90 -- see additional resources below). The 'road system' of the time was more theory than anything else; automobiles began as playthings for hobbyists, and the trails their local clubs established were cobbled together into a national highway network. The drawbacks to such a ragtag transportation system are obvious, and Eisenhower himself devoted a chapter of his memoirs to recounting the travails his group experienced as they made their way across the country.

The man who (pun alert) paved the way for the Interstates (apologies) was Thomas Harris MacDonald, director of the Federal Bureau of Public Roads. MacDonald got his start in Iowa working to perfect road-building techniques for automobiles and advocating engineering standards so that roads in different locations could easily interconnect. The group that he helped found, the American Association of State Highway Officials, known (I am NOT making this up) by the unfortunate acronym AASHO, became a powerful lobbying group in Washington and brought MacDonald to the attention of federal officials.

During his tenure at the Federal Bureau of Public Roads, MacDonald brought his same pragmatic approach perfected in Iowa to the national level and laid out the first official American highway network -- denoted by a numbering system that assigned numbers to routes with odd numbers running north to south and even numbers running east to west. For example, US 1 ran up and down the eastern seaboard while US 66 ran, quite famously, from Chicago to L.A. For the first time, cities were connected by modern, hard-surfaced highways, uniformly identified by the familiar black-and-white shield. Smaller cities might be located along just one federal road, which would often serve as Main Street through the downtown area. Medium-sized and larger cities became junctions where several federal roads crossed. In Lexington, Kentucky, for instance, US 60 and US 68 served as the major east-west routes while US 25 and US 27 ran north-south.

During the post-World War II boom, however, the country quickly outgrew its highway system. Eisenhower noted the progress that had been made in the years since his cross-country trip, but realized as well that the existing federal highway system was more than an inconvenience to travelers -- it was, in fact, a threat to national security. The Interstate Highway system was born.

While casual students of history realize there is a defense component to the Interstate system, most such notions are vague. Some (e.g., that the roads were designed such that military planes could use them as landing strips at specific intervals) are just plain wrong -- urban legends for the Cold War era. The Interstates represented a duality of defense. On the one hand, modern, limited-access multi-lane highways would allow for quick repositioning of troops and equipment in time of war, a fact that Eisenhower learned first-hand in Germany during the war. On the other hand, such roadways would serve as evacuation routes for civilians in the event of attack. (Interestingly, what would happen if the fleeing citizens found themselves halted in the face of an advancing tank column never seems to come up in the literature).

The engineering feats alone would fill volumes; for example, the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel, on I-70 in Colorado, bores through the continental divide at a staggering 11,000 feet above sea level. Also, from a social-history perspective the city planning aspects of the Interstate system is even more fascinating. Much research has been undertaken in recent years to tell the stories of the economically underprivileged (and almost unilaterally minority) neighborhoods obliterated by the advance of the highways. Great political careers began in city-planning offices across the country -- for an example, check out Robert Caro's masterful biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. Also, social historians and commentators have begun to analyze the effects of the Interstates on American life in the aggregate; of these, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is a stellar example.

Whether for good or bad, the Interstate Highways tranformed America. They have become one of the most enduring legacies of the Civil Defense programs of the fifties and sixties. Generations exist now who can't imagine a lengthy automobile trip without an Interstate along the way. And, with the successful resolution of the Cold War, they can head out on such a trip at a leisurely pace without worrying about being run down by a humvee -- or not a military humvee, at least.

Additional Resources

Ethics for the Nuclear Age

Mon, 08 May 2006 03:28:29 GMT

To dig, or not to dig? When the Eisenhower administration first started talking about fallout shelters and the national Civil Defense authorities began to publish and distribute various construction plans to the public, Americans faced this fundamental question. As the fifties continued, the choices made by individuals became the basis for a terrifying, albeit enlightening, public debate.

To put it in a theoretical perspective (the perspective of choice for most things Cold War), let us suppose that you, a homeowner, decide to cede a corner of your basement to the Good of the Nation and construct a fallout shelter. You drive down to Concrete Blocks 'R' Us and load up your construction supplies, then return home to your copy of "The Family Fallout Shelter" (published in 1959 by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization; of course I have a copy of it). Following the step-by-step diagrams, you slowly build up a wall to enclose your corner, complete with a baffle wall to block the doorway from harmful radiation. You admire your handiwork and congratulate yourself on your prudence, but your neighbors all think you're a few blocks shy of total protection, if you follow. Not to be deterred, you stock your shelter as directed with two week's worth of non-perishable food for you and your family, water, a battery-powered radio (with wire antenna run outside), your first aid kit (see previous post), and all the necessities of a life-in-hiding. You mention in passing to a few neighbors and friends that your shelter is completed and stocked; they nod politely while taking a few steps back. In broad psychological terms, your acceptance of a new reality upsets those who prefer denial.

Then, to take our scenario to the next level, let's suppose the unthinkable happens. The details are unimportant; the Berlin crisis might have gone the other way, perhaps the boats didn't turn around on their way to Cuba, or maybe there was even a fail-safe scenario of the type facing Dr. Strangelove in what may well be the best movie of all time. No matter. The bombs have dropped, more are on the way, and the fallout is headed in your direction. The announcer on the CONELRAD frequency is urging everyone to take shelter immediately. Suddenly, you're the most popular person on the block. Your friends and neighbors are forming a line outside your front door, many clutching a few personal items and waiting with fast-diminishing patience for you to do the 'right thing.' It's Aesop's ant and grasshopper tale, only with an atomic-age twist.

What to do? You built the shelter just the right size for you and your family. You did what the government asked you to do. To open your home and shelter to everyone on your block would lead to overcrowding, rapid supply depletion, and general chaos. Leave them outside, and they'll almost certainly be exposed and die.

Lest this turn into a choose-your-own-adventure book (weren't those cool?), let us turn back to the historical realities in which this scenario is rooted. The November 6, 1961 issue of Newsweek had as its cover story a piece on the fallout shelter debate as illustrated above. "There is evidence that the Administration policies, which seem to emphasize an every-man-for-himself approach, have succeeded in bringing out the worst side of human nature," the author lamented. "A number of happy shelter owners have announced that they would gun down their shelterless neighbors if their refuge were threatened by overcrowding" (p. 19).

In many ways, the ethics-in-the-shelter debate was an extension of the already fatalistic subject matter of the entire Civil Defense initiative. Build a shelter or not? Let the neighbors in or leave them out? Die alone or together? Heady content, to be sure, and perhaps best summed up by singing political satirist Tom Lehrer (think of him as the Mark Russell of the 1960's) in his opus, "We Will All Go Together When We Go":

When the air becomes uranious,
We will all go simultaneous,
Yes we all will go together when we go.

For further perusal:

Fallout Shelter First-Aid Kit

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 18:53:53 GMT

Over the past few years I've been slowly amassing quite a collection of Civil Defense paraphernalia from eBay and various other second-hand venues. There's quite a bit of cool stuff in my office; I have a dosimeter (it's about the size of a penlight and would be carried on one's person to measure radiation dosage), a charger base for it (you press the dosimeter down on the contact, and a light shines up through it to let you read the gauge inside), and a Geiger counter (it counts Geigers). At the rehearsal dinner for our wedding a couple of years ago, my wonderfully patient and supportive bride-to-be presented me with a flat package with a bow on it. I ripped the paper off, and there, in pristine condition, was a reflective aluminum black-and-yellow Fallout Shelter sign. It's on the wall near my desk as I write this.

I imposed a brief moratorium on my collecting when I first started grad school, due to space and budget constraints. Recently, however, I've been browsing more and this week I'm proud to announce the first new addition to my personal museum in nearly a year: an intact family fallout shelter first-aid kit from somewhere in Washington state! (Yeah, I actually am that excited about that. That should give you some idea of what you're up against here.)

It's a pretty neat little collection -- there are three bottles, one of Mercurochrome (which has actually been banned for sale in the United States by the FDA; secondary marketplace transactions -- read, eBay -- is the only way to get it legally), one of Absorbine, Jr., and one of what I assume to be Iodine but which is, in actuality, missing its label. There's also a box of sterile cotton and an Ace bandage, which according to its price sticker was 69¢ when it was purchased at a place called Bartell Drug Store.

The kit also came with several Civil Defense publications, including (of course) a couple of first-aid type manuals and a listing of supplies that should be kept on hand in one's fallout shelter.

For the purposes of my blog, however, the pamphlet on the far left of the photo is of the most importance. It's entitled "In Case of Attack! Tune Your AM Radio Dial for Official Information" and provides the basics behind the CONELRAD program as of 1953. I'll spare you a line-by-line recreation, but the inside back panel asks:

"What would you do if enemy bombers were to attack our country? How do you find out quickly what is happening and what to do? Prompt, accurate civil defense information could help save your life, your neighbor's ... your city. The CONELRAD system of Public Emergency Broadcasting is one of the surest and fastest ways of getting word to you under attack conditions. If our country is ever attacked, here's how and where you will get official civil defense news and instructions."

The pamphlet then goes on to describe the CONELRAD frequencies and the logic behind the initiative. All in all, a pretty good buy for seven bucks.