“There Are No Civilians; We Are All at War”: Nuclear War Shelter and Survival Narratives during the Early Cold War (2007)
In civil defense pamphlets, individuals survived atomic attack much as they would survive natural disasters; good citizenship led to survival, and survivors helped society to recover and rebuild. Civil defense pamphlets tended to be highly depoliticized: citizens survive and recover from atomic attacks of unspecified origin. Civil defense depictions of nuclear attack often stressed the metaphoric bond between self and nation, reassuring that personal survival equaled national victory. On the other hand, popular culture texts tended to emphasize personal character traits as the key to survival, from rugged individualism to brutal self-interest and deeply anti-social behaviors. Popular culture depictions of survival emphasized that society might have to be largely destroyed in order for our way of life to continue. This too, linked personal behavior with the behavior of the state. Even though the possibility of nuclear war terrified many Americans, the logic of its necessity was personalized and justified in stories of individual survival. The correspondence of self and nation in survival narratives implicitly linked the ethos of personal survival with the necessity of national nuclear war fighting.
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