This study is partly an exercise in revising mistaken perceptions of the early Cold War, like the conception that the USA was a weak state at the time, or that the state apparatus was insulated from society. Andrew Grossman refutes these views and asserts a continuity between the US institutions set up during the Second World War and their functioning during the late 1940s and 1950s. He shows that by 1945 – in some areas by an even earlier date – an ad hoc consensus had formed on the Soviet threat and soon afterwards, in the light of the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, a collective sense of America’s vulnerability had taken shape which was to influence US foreign policy. Grossman charts the gradual construction of the national ‘civic garrison’ and the projected continuous state of national emergency which accompanied it. Under the combined impact of the Soviet atomic test of 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War, in 1950 the Federal Civil Defence Administration was formed and it is the operations of this agency which form the central part of Grossman’s study.

Following a wartime strategy of media relations and propaganda techniques, in the early 1950s the FCDA began to produce a stream of reports, pamphlets (like Survival Under Atomic Attack) and special numbers of magazines like Collier’s, which issued a ‘future reportage’ coverage of World War III complete with simulated photographs. Local communities were mobilized (as described in Philip K. Dick’s novel Time out of Joint), elaborate nuclear drills were devised, and the Alert America convoy was formed. The latter was a sort of travelling side show designed to show the course of a nuclear war. These activities, together with the distribution of ‘home kits’ in case of attack, all formed part of the domestication of the nuclear threat. Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound has to date been one of the main sources for information on this civil defence programme, but Grossman takes her to task for assuming that this programme simply fixed women more firmly within a narrow domestic function, when in fact it opened up (again as happened in World War II) a range of roles for them. Grossman’s study is impeccable in its facts, figures and statistics, but we still need books like Homeward Bound to give a physical impression of the drills and all-pervading anxiety of this period.