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.
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.
This chapter examines ruin towns: civil defence training grounds that replicated urban war zones. The ruins provided a stage for enacting nuclear war, where the merely imagined was given a tangible expression. The chapter sketches the transnational extension-by-invitation of a British model of ruins to Denmark, and through architectural and historical analysis, it asks how it was re-embedded into a new national context and appropriated to local needs to become part of the common Danish civil defence landscape. The chapter, then, discusses how these ruin towns contributed to an affirmation of social norms and values, arguing that they caused a taming of the nuclear catastrophe as well as reflecting and reinforcing a specific political and historically situated understanding of social urban order and the good society.
The introduction to the volume lays out the rationale and ambitions of the book, delineates its chronological and geographical focus and situates it in the existing historiography of civil defence. One central ambition is to advance civil defence history by attuning it more explicitly to the study of science and technology and to pave the way for transnational and comparative efforts. We do so in two steps. We introduce and explore the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries developed by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, before applying and adjusting it to civil defence history. Finally, the introduction provides a brief overview of the chapters in the volume.
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