Product Description

"Kenneth Rose's One Nation Underground explores U.S. nuclear history from the bottom up—literally. . . . Rose deserves credit for not trivializing this period of our history, as so many retrospectives of the Cold War era have tended to do."
— Journal of Cold War Studies

"Important . . . One Nation Underground is an elegant account of the issues involved in the nuclear age."
—Pacific Northwest Quarterly

"A readable short history of the fallout shelters and the broader political debate over civil defense...Mr. Rose is a good storyteller, and One Nation Underground is engagingly writen, with an array of evocative photgraphs."
—The Wall Street Journal

"Rose writes well, with a good eye for the telling phrase and revealing example."—Journal of Social History

For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy—"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time—forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being.

Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism, what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Tracing the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national resolve, or rather encourage political and military leaders to think in terms of a "winnable" war?

Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail—including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon—One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #189696 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-01
• Released on: 2004-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 324 pages

From Library Journal
Although Rose (history, California State Univ., Chico; American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition) might have wished his popular history of the Cold War to work from below ground on up, his excavation of the great fear of the Fifties reveals a discourse overwhelmingly top-down. Government and civic elites propagandized for shelters built from theoretical funds that mostly were never appropriated; average citizens fretted that their neighbors were building bunkers to exclude them come Armageddon, yet apparently very few private spaces were ever erected. Rose demonstrates that the shelter was the leading if least visible icon of a civil defense debate that questioned whether nuclear wars were confinable, hence survivable, but also whether shelter was more practical or at least not incompatible with mass evacuation. Rose reconstructs Herman Kahn, the pro-limited nuclear war physicist/Dr. Strangelove model, as the most intriguing if possibly insane personage in his account but leaves much possibly fertile soil unturned. (What did history's most famous shelterists, the World War II British, think of their Yankee cousins' official mania only a few years later?) This book fails to live up to the originality promised by the subject but as a first-of-area undertaking should be acquired by academic libraries. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"An interesting and amply illustrate documentary on cold war concerns." -- ISBN: 0814775225 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

"Rose's entertaining tract surveys the Cold War debate on the survivability of thermonuclear war. A-" -- Entertainment Weekly

"Scholarly, well-documented and clearly written..." -- LIBRARY JOURNAL

Mr. Rose is a good storyteller and "One Nation Underground" is engagingly written, with an array of evocative photographs -- Melanie Kirkpatrick, Wall Street Journal

Review

"This fascinating and illuminating study ably traces Civil Defense from Bert the Turtle's school drills in the 1950s to backyard family shelters in the early sixties. As Kenneth Rose insightfully shows, Americans, panicked over Cold War tensions and the threat of thermonuclear incineration, talked inordinately about fallout shelters, but few were ever built. That discrepancy reveals much about American society, culture, and psychology. This book almost glows in the dark."

- W. J. Rorabaugh, author of Berkeley at War: The 1960s

"This compelling chronicle of the civil defense debate during the early years of the Cold War shows how discussions of the pros and cons of fallout shelters forced Americans to face the possible consequences of nuclear war and what kind of world any survivors would inhabit. In the national soul-searching that ensued, citizens confronted their deepest fears, values, and attitudes about themselves, their neighbors, and their world. One Nation Underground reminds us of the real terror that gripped the world in the tense years of nuclear brinksmanship."

- Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

"One Nation Underground vividly evokes a fast-fading era of U.S. history when millions of Americans contemplated the prospect of huddling in underground shelters to escape the blast and radiation of thermonuclear war. Kenneth D. Rose brings into sharp focus these years when nuclear fear pervaded American public life and culture, gripping Pentagon Strategists, civil-defense planners, theologians, magazine editors, and the authors of comic books and science-fiction stories. Beautifully written, copiously illustrated, and drawing upon an amazing range of sources, this engrossing book should be read by anyone interested in the domestic fallout of the Cold War nuclear arms race."

- Paul S. Boyer, author of By the Bomb's Early Light and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

"Rose critically nails the ambivalence of the general population toward sheltering."

- Technology and Culture

"Kenneth Rose's One Nation Underground explores U.S. nuclear history from the bottom up—literally. . . . Rose deserves credit for not trivializing this period of our history, as so many retrospectives of the Cold War era have tended to do."

- Journal of Cold War Studies

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Customer Reviews

Fascinating Analysis
One Nation Underground is a fascinating analysis of the Cold War fallout shelter, the global and political milieu in which it emerged, and the pervasiveness in which the concept of protection from nuclear destruction permeated the American psyche.

I came to this book out of a recent, amusing interest in the many remaining Fallout Shelter signs still posted on public buildings in my community. Where I live, Fallout Shelter signs still appear on a derelict retail board-up in the central city, a tidy ten-unit men's rooming house, an unused police station, and numerous school buildings including my old grammar school where I learned how to "duck and cover" in the basement lunchroom.

Rose's book not only documents the American preoccupation and political developments, prompted by President Kennedy's 1961 speech, but the moral dilemmas as well. There was, after all, a sense of doom at the prospects of thermonuclear obliteration.

The book is a serious, engrossing history that pulls from numerous sources and includes copious illustrations. It captures the fear, soul-searching, and debate during the first time in human history we faced the possibility of total destruction. This excellent book is a must read for anyone interested in American history, as well as the intellectually curious.

Fascinating Analysis
One Nation Underground is a fascinating analysis of the Cold War fallout shelter, the global and political milieu in which it emerged, and the pervasiveness in which the concept of protection from nuclear destruction permeated the American psyche.

I came to this book out of a recent, amusing interest in the many remaining Fallout Shelter signs still posted on public buildings in my community. Where I live, Fallout Shelter signs still appear on a derelict retail board-up in the central city, a tidy ten-unit men's rooming house, an unused police station, and numerous school buildings including my old grammar school where I learned how to "duck and cover" in the basement lunchroom.

Rose's book not only documents the American preoccupation and political developments, prompted by President Kennedy's 1961 speech, but the moral dilemmas as well. There was, after all,, a sense of doom at the prospects of thermonuclear obliteration.

The book is a serious, engrossing history that pulls from numerous sources and includes copious illustrations. It captures the fear, soul-searching, and debate during the first time in human history we faced the possibility of total destruction. This excellent book is a must read for anyone interested in American history, as well as the intellectually curious.

Digging This Book
If you're a student of Cold War culture, many of the source materials used throughout One Nation Underground will be familiar to you. That's not to imply that One Nation is boring, regurgitated, or any such adjective. Rather, Rose has crafted and extremely interesting look at how fallout shelters, for a brief period of time, was on the tip of everyones tongue, and yet despite the warnings and fears, America as a whole pretty much refused to dig in. Rose not only looks at the politics behind fallout shelters, but the historical, scientific, and cultural aspects, providing many sides both for and against civil defense, and explaining why those against won the argument and America's psyche. Rose's prose is never boring and always enlightening. A must read for any CW culture afficionado.