| Review of: | Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked by Dee Garrison |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | David W. McFadden |
| Reviewed in: | Peace & Change |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 32, Issue 04, Pages 590-612 |
Book Reviews
In the fall of 1961, in the tense aftermath of the Berlin crisis and the failed, hostile Vienna summit between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy, a Gallup poll found that 93% of Americans surveyed "said that they had not given any serious thought to protecting themselves from a nuclear attack" (p. 118). In light of the heightened sense of crisis in U.S. society at the time and the clear ideological lines drawn between Kennedy and Khrushchev, this is a remarkable poll number. In a very real sense, explaining it is the task of Dee Garrison, Emeritus Professor of History at Rutgers University. Her taut and finely argued study relates the fascinating history of the failure of a succession of U.S. administrations, planners, think tanks, and bureaucrats to persuade the American public to buy in to the notion that there is any defense against thermonuclear war.
Garrison's thesis is simple yet finely nuanced. She argues that, from the beginning of the nuclear age (and most particularly at the event of the U.S. crash effort to create the hydrogen bomb), American nuclear defense policy was tied to two interlocking yet contradictory necessities: secrecy on the one hand and public support on the other. On the one hand, American planners and presidents, most notably Dwight Eisenhower, embraced the notion of Mutual Assured Destruction, realizing that there was no real defense against thermonuclear war. But on the other, they believed that the American people needed to believe that nuclear war, in a more "limited," targeted sense, could be fought and won, and the United States and the "free world" could prevail against an implacable and hostile Soviet communism. It is Garrison's contention, and the great strength of her argument, that the gradual and then increasing and overwhelming resistance to the stupidity, hypocrisy, and injustice of civil defense planning-which fueled the antinuclear movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and again in the 1980s-forced the eventual collapse of that planning and the entire U.S. nuclear strategy. This led Ronald Reagan to his breathtaking fantasy, the Strategic Defense Initiative of 1983, which Garrison credits (following Frances Fitzgerald's stunningly complete analysis,
Garrison draws on a lifetime of work on the intersection of peace and women's movements, and the rich archives of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection and the Smith College Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Collection as well as government and presidential papers, most notably the Eisenhower papers, a fascinating array of secondary literature, and numerous personal interviews. Most important among the interviews were those with women peace activists of the late 1950s and early 1960s, several of whom were essential to the beginnings of direct action against civil defense drills in New York City and elsewhere, particularly Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Many of these activists were instrumental in the formation of Women Strike for Peace.
This is a compelling and crucially important story that reverses, in the best tradition of social history, the prevailing orthodoxy. But there are several ways in which Garrison's argument is too perfect, and her work begs certain questions. One obvious question has to do with that period of crisis of 1961-1963, from Kennedy's inauguration through the Cuban missile crisis and the shift of both American and Soviet strategy to brinksmanship, buildup, and bluff. In Garrison's telling, the American people had already rejected or ignored civil defense by the time of the Berlin crisis, and neither the bluster of Khrushchev nor the ringing rhetoric of Kennedy (nor Robert McNamara's shift of American strategy from Mutual Assured Destruction to "flexible response") could change that. Little attention is paid here to Khrushchev's American strategy (a look at Vladimir Zubok and Constantin Pleshakov's
It was not just Catholic workers, radical pacifists, and suburban housewives who began to be alarmed. It was also ordinary American Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Baptists, in small towns and rural areas. Garrison understates and at times even ignores the fact that, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States remained an overwhelmingly church-attending and socially conservative nation. Yet it was in places such as Texas, Kansas, and rural Colorado that the sense of futility and fear communicated by the Khrushchev-Kennedy standoff became most palpable. I remember well the 1962 high school debate in which I participated in the rural eastern Colorado town of Fowler, population 1200, sponsored by the Modern Woodmen of America, on the subject of "Preventing Nuclear War." Everyone was there: Assembly of God, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Catholics. And my arguments came not just from Norman Cousins and the
Garrison also gives perhaps too much credit in the 1980s to the huge upsurge of antinuclear activism in the United States and Western Europe, from the nuclear freeze campaign in the United States to the campaign for nuclear disarmament in Britain, for persuading Ronald Reagan to shift course; in 1983, he shocked both the world and his own advisors with his vision of a nuclear-free world protected by an electronic, laser "shield." Mikhail Gorbachev's own breathtaking change of Soviet military doctrine (also dating from 1983 or before, as Michael MccGwire, in
Despite these lacunae, this is a superb book, which illuminates clearly and with a wealth of new archival and published material the role of women, radical pacifists, scientists, dissenting intellectuals, students, and opposition political figures in resisting the attempts of a succession of administrations to persuade the American people that nuclear war could be fought and survived. As Norman Cousins argued so eloquently in