Prepare or resist?: Cold War Civil Defence and Imaginaries of Nuclear War in Britain and Denmark in the 1980s

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942110319
Author(s):  
Rosanna Farbøl
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Nuclear Space ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
Shared Understandings ◽  
Global Cold War

The article explores how the global Cold War conflict was made sense of and situated in local political, cultural and physical landscapes and communities during the 1980s in Britain and Denmark. Using civil defence as a prism, the article employs a comparative approach to explore variations within and between countries of how local authorities prepared or resisted the prospect of nuclear war. The article finds that two main imaginaries emerged that shaped shared understandings of society before, during and after the imagined future war: one emphasized the possibility of nuclear survival and even welfare, the other urged resistance and renounced the futility of civil defence preparations. The article argues that local actors used these imaginaries to empower themselves, to define how nuclear space was imagined and lived and to construct desirable (and undesirable) visions of the future. The imaginaries were multiscalar and interacted with developments at global and national levels, and the article sheds light on this three-way dynamic of understanding and articulating the nuclear age.

scholarly journals Why Arms Control?

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-115
Author(s):  
Jon Brook Wolfsthal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

America survived the nuclear age through a complex combination of diplomatic and military decisions, and a good deal of luck. One of the tools that proved its value in both reducing the risks of nuclear use and setting rules for the ongoing nuclear competition were negotiated, legally binding, and verified arms control agreements. Such pacts between the United States and the Soviet Union arguably prevented the nuclear arms racing from getting worse and helped both sides climb off the Cold War nuclear precipice. Several important agreements remain in place between the United States and Russia, to the benefit of both states. Arms control is under threat, however, from domestic forces in the United States and from Russian actions that range from treaty violations to the broader weaponization of risk. But arms control can and should play a useful role in reducing the risk of nuclear war and forging a new agreement between Moscow and Washington on the new rules of the nuclear road.

Urban civil defence: imagining, constructing and performing nuclear war in Aarhus

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Rosanna Farbøl
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Catastrophe

Abstract During the Cold War, cities were seen as likely targets of modern total warfare and systems of civil defence were created to protect cities and their inhabitants. Yet existing civil defence histories have focused little on the specifically urban aspect, and urban historians likewise have paid civil defence little attention. Using Aarhus, Denmark, as a case-study, this article examines civil defence through planning, practices and materiality in a specific urban landscape. By analysing how civil defence was organized, performed and built in Denmark, the article sheds light on the mutual imbrication of urban planning, geography and materiality and local civil defence. I argue that through biopolitics, local civil defence authorities imagineered an idealized survivalist community of city dwellers who would pull together to protect and save their city and that this contributed to taming an incomprehensible, global, nuclear catastrophe into a manageable, localized, urban calamity.

Systemic Theory and the Future of Great Power War and Peace

2018 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Dale Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Great Power ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Security Dilemma ◽  
Systemic Theory ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Future ◽  
Relative Decline

Drawing from theories that examine security-dilemma spiraling and the dynamics of relative decline, the chapter shows that established theories of major war can be made relevant to the nuclear age—once they have incorporated the importance of Cold War spiraling and inadvertent war.The chapter argues that any theory of international relations that seeks to explain changes in the likelihood of nuclear war must incorporate into its causal logic the willingness of states to take actions that risk an inadvertent slide into war. While it may not be rational to initiate a nuclear war against another great power, it may indeed be rational, under certain circumstances, for leaders to switch to hard-line actions that raise the probability of a war neither side would have actively desired prior to the onset of a crisis.

scholarly journals ‘The World is Her Home’: The Role of Women Volunteers in Dutch Civil Defence in the 1950s and 1960s

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-156
Author(s):  
Dick van Lente
Keyword(s):  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The World ◽  
Women Volunteers ◽  
The Government ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Civil Defence

AbstractThis chapter describes, and attempts to explain, the contrast between a successful campaign by women volunteers to prepare women for protecting their families in the event of nuclear war and the stumbling efforts of the official Dutch civil defence organisation. The explanation is sought in the perception (or sociotechnical imaginary) of these women of their role in the nuclear age, and the grassroots quality of their work, as opposed to the top-down views and practices of the civil defence organisation, in a society which had a low opinion of the government’s efficacy in the extreme emergency of a nuclear war. The chapter illustrates the influence of widespread and deeply engrained perceptions, such as trust in the government and gender stereotypes, on attitudes towards a new threat.

Civil defence in the city: federal policy meets local resistance in Baltimore, 1957–1964

Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERIC S. SINGER
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Federal Policy ◽  
Local Resistance ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Urban Neighbourhoods ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
The City ◽  
Policy Shifts

ABSTRACT:Between 1950 and 1964, as a result of slight federal policy shifts, Cold War civil defence went from a pro-urban policy dedicated to the preservation of communities to an anti-urban policy focused on social control in the wake of an attack. Civil defence volunteers in Baltimore along with some of the city's civil defence paid staff, who had bought the federal message that they could protect themselves and their communities for nuclear war, allied with anti-nuclear activists against an increasingly militarized programme – one that by 1961 prioritized post-attack policing and de-emphasized the imperative to preserve urban neighbourhoods.

The Hazards of Operations Involving Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton Leitenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

This article provides an overview of the perils of U.S. and Soviet nuclear war planning during the Cold War. In particular, the article discusses instances of false alarms, when one side or the other picked up indications of an imminent attack by the other side and had to take measures to determine whether the indicators were accurate. None of these incidents posed a large danger of an accidental nuclear war, but they illustrate the inherent risks of the war preparations that both the United States and the Soviet Union took for their immense nuclear arsenals.

Comparative Area Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ivory Coast ◽  
Qualitative Comparative Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
International Context ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Cross Area Studies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Analytical Approaches

Area studies have undergone significant changes over the last two decades. They have been transformed from mostly descriptive accounts in the international context of the Cold War to theory-oriented and methodological analytical approaches. More recent comparative methods such as “Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (QCA) and related approaches, which are particularly suitable for medium N studies, have significantly contributed to this development. This essay discusses the epistemological background of this approach as well as recent developments. It provides two examples of current “cross area studies,” one concerned with successful democratic transformations across four regions (Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia), the other with political participation in marginalized settlements in four countries (Brazil, Chile, Ivory Coast, Kenya) in a multilevel analysis. The conclusion points to the theoretical promises of this approach and its practical-political relevance.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

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