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

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 antinuclear activists against an increasingly militarized programme -one that by 1961 prioritized post-attack policing and de-emphasized the imperative to preserve urban neighbourhoods.

Nuclear landscapes

“…During the 1950s, at the NTS, nuclear war was waged on a ‘Survival City’ (or ‘doom town’) that featured various icons of American (sub)urban domesticity (Kirk, 2017; Masco, 2008; Vanderbilt, 2002; Wills, 2001). The relationship between Cold War fears and the planning and shape of cities has been a subject of significant debate (for example, Collier and Lakoff, 2008; Galison, 2001; Light, 2003; Singer, 2015), inquiries that have usefully focused on the gendered and racialized aspects of schemes to ‘protect’ populations (Loyd, 2011; McEnaney, 2000; Zarlengo, 1999), while slowly widening beyond the US (see Farish and Monteyne, 2015). Even as weapons were developed and tested in ‘remote’ locations, the home became a ‘discursive site of Cold War struggles’ (Loyd, 2011: 847) and a repository of contamination (see, for example, Brown, 2013; Petryna, 2002; Pitkanen, 2017).…”