Bracing For Armageddon

Bracing For Armageddon Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Bracing For Armageddon book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.

Bracing for Armageddon

Author : Dee Garrison
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2006-03-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0198040407

Get Book

Bracing for Armageddon by Dee Garrison Pdf

In Bracing for Armageddon, Dee Garrison pulls back the curtain on the U.S. government's civil defense plans from World War II through the end of the Cold War. Based on government documents, peace organizations, personal papers, scientific reports, oral histories, newspapers, and popular media, her book chronicles the operations of the various federal and state civil defense programs from 1945 to contemporary issues of homeland security, as well as the origins and development of the massive public protest against civil defense from 1955 through the 1980s. At a time of increasing preoccupation over national security issues, Bracing for Armageddon sheds light on the growing distrust between the U.S. government and its subjects in postwar America.

Duck and Cover

Author : Melvin E. Matthews, Jr.
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2011-11-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780786488506

Get Book

Duck and Cover by Melvin E. Matthews, Jr. Pdf

During the 1950s and early 1960s, school air-raid drills, bomb shelters, and unnerving civil defense films served as constant reminders of the looming threat of nuclear war. Throughout America, a widespread civil defense effort used town meetings, public school educational programs, and the mass media--television, radio, and especially, motion pictures--to mobilize every citizen for a protracted Cold War. This volume explores how American popular culture has portrayed civil defense from mid-twentieth century to the immediate post-September 11 era. With analysis of everything from early government propaganda films and 1950s science fiction films to Happy Days, the Reagan-era TV movie The Day After, and the small-screen nostalgia trend after 9/11, it shows how popular culture reflects American fears and the hope of preparedness.

Atomic Age America

Author : Martin V. Melosi
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 576 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2016-09-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9781315509754

Get Book

Atomic Age America by Martin V. Melosi Pdf

Atomic Age America looks at the broad influence of atomic energy¿focusing particularly on nuclear weapons and nuclear power¿on the lives of Americans within a world context. The text examines the social, political, diplomatic, environmental, and technical impacts of atomic energy on the 20th and 21st centuries, with a look back to the origins of atomic theory.

The Harbinger Theory

Author : Robert Diab
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2015-03-11
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780190243258

Get Book

The Harbinger Theory by Robert Diab Pdf

North American law has been transformed in ways unimaginable before 9/11. Laws now authorize and courts have condoned indefinite detention without charge based on secret evidence, mass secret surveillance, and targeted killing of US citizens, suggesting a shift in the cultural currency of a liberal form of legality to authoritarian legality. The Harbinger Theory demonstrates that extreme measures have been consistently embraced in politics, scholarship, and public opinion, not in terms of a general fear of the greater threat that terrorism now poses, but a more specific belief that 9/11 was the harbinger of a new order of terror, giving rise to the likelihood of an attack on the same scale as 9/11 or greater in the near future, involving thousands of casualties and possibly weapons of mass destruction. It explains how the harbinger theory shapes debates about rights and security by virtue of rhetorical strategies on the part of political leaders and security experts, and in works of popular culture, in which the theory is often invoked as a self-evident truth, without the need for supporting evidence or authority. It also reveals how liberal advocates tend to be deferential to the theory, aiding its deeper entrenchment through the absence of a prominent public critique of it. In a unique overview of a range of skeptical evidence about the likelihood of mass terror involving WMD or conventional means, this book contends that a potentially more effective basis for reform advocacy is not to dismiss overstated threat claims as implausible or psychologically grounded, but to challenge the harbinger theory directly through the use of contrary evidence.

After The Bomb

Author : M. Grant
Publisher : Springer
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2009-11-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780230274044

Get Book

After The Bomb by M. Grant Pdf

Civil defence was an integral part of Britain's modern history. Throughout the cold war it was a central response of the British Government to the threat of war. This book will be the first history of the preparations to fight a nuclear war taken in Britain between the end of the Second World War and 1968.

Bracing for Armageddon

Author : Dee Garrison
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2006-03-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780195183191

Get Book

Bracing for Armageddon by Dee Garrison Pdf

This text presents a survey of the US government's civil defense plans from World War II. It argues that the purpose of federal civil defense was to legitimize deterrence policy and the arms race through false assurances to the masses that they could survive nuclear war.

Cold War in a Cold Land

Author : David W. Mills
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2015-03-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780806149387

Get Book

Cold War in a Cold Land by David W. Mills Pdf

Most communists, as any plains state patriot would have told you in the 1950s, lived in Los Angeles or New York City, not Minot, North Dakota. The Cold War as it played out across the Great Plains was not the Cold War of the American cities and coasts. Nor was it tempered much by midwestern isolationism, as common wisdom has it. In this book, David W. Mills offers an enlightening look at what most of the heartland was up to while America was united in its war on Reds. Cold War in a Cold Land adopts a regional perspective to develop a new understanding of a critical chapter in the nation’s history. Marx himself had no hope that landholding farmers would rise up as communist revolutionaries. So it should come as no surprise that in places like South Dakota, where 70 percent of the population owned land and worked for themselves, people didn’t take the threat of internal subversion very seriously. Mills plumbs the historical record to show how residents of the plains states—while deeply patriotic and supportive of the nation’s foreign policy—responded less than enthusiastically to national anticommunist programs. Only South Dakota, for example, adopted a loyalty oath, and it was fervently opposed throughout the state. Only Montana, prodded by one state legislator, formed an investigation committee—one that never investigated anyone and was quickly disbanded. Plains state people were, however, “highly churched” and enthusiastically embraced federal attempts to use religion as a bulwark against atheistic communist ideology. Even more enthusiastic was the Great Plains response to the military buildup that accompanied Cold War politics, as the construction of airbases and missile fields brought untold economic benefits to the region. A much-needed, nuanced account of how average citizens in middle America experienced Cold War politics and policies, Cold War in a Cold Land is a significant addition to the history of both the Cold War and the Great Plains.

Imperial Debris

Author : Ann Laura Stoler
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2013-05-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780822353614

Get Book

Imperial Debris by Ann Laura Stoler Pdf

Imperial Debris redirects critical focus from ruins as evidence of the past to "ruination" as the processes through which imperial power occupies the present. Ann Laura Stoler's introduction is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people's bodies and minds. In their provocative, tightly focused responses to Stoler, the contributors explore subjects as seemingly diverse as villages submerged during the building of a massive dam in southern India, Palestinian children taught to envision and document ancestral homes razed by the Israeli military, and survival on the toxic edges of oil refineries and amid the remains of apartheid in Durban, South Africa. They consider the significance of Cold War imagery of a United States decimated by nuclear blast, perceptions of a swath of Argentina's Gran Chaco as a barbarous void, and the enduring resonance, in contemporary sexual violence, of atrocities in King Leopold's Congo. Reflecting on the physical destruction of Sri Lanka, on Detroit as a colonial metropole in relation to sites of ruination in the Amazon, and on interactions near a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the contributors attend to present-day harms in the occluded, unexpected sites and situations where earlier imperial formations persist. Contributors. Ariella Azoulay, John F. Collins, Sharad Chari, E. Valentine Daniel, Gastón Gordillo, Greg Grandin, Nancy Rose Hunt, Joseph Masco, Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Ann Laura Stoler

Acts of Conscience

Author : Joseph Kip Kosek
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : History
ISBN : 9780231144193

Get Book

Acts of Conscience by Joseph Kip Kosek Pdf

In response to the massive bloodshed that defined the twentieth century, American religious radicals developed a modern form of nonviolent protest, one that combined Christian principles with new uses of mass media. Greatly influenced by the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi, these "acts of conscience" included sit-ins, boycotts, labor strikes, and conscientious objection to war. Beginning with World War I and ending with the ascendance of Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Kip Kosek traces the impact of A. J. Muste, Richard Gregg, and other radical Christian pacifists on American democratic theory and practice. These dissenters found little hope in the secular ideologies of Wilsonian Progressivism, revolutionary Marxism, and Cold War liberalism, all of which embraced organized killing at one time or another. The example of Jesus, they believed, demonstrated the immorality and futility of such violence under any circumstance and for any cause. Yet the theories of Christian nonviolence are anything but fixed. For decades, followers have actively reinterpreted the nonviolent tradition, keeping pace with developments in politics, technology, and culture. Tracing the rise of militant nonviolence across a century of industrial conflict, imperialism, racial terror, and international warfare, Kosek recovers radical Christians' remarkable stance against the use of deadly force, even during World War II and other seemingly just causes. His research sheds new light on an interracial and transnational movement that posed a fundamental, and still relevant, challenge to the American political and religious mainstream.

Bioterror in the 21st Century

Author : Daniel M Gerstein
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2009-09-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781612510200

Get Book

Bioterror in the 21st Century by Daniel M Gerstein Pdf

Daniel Gerstein draws on twenty-nine years of experience in the security and defense sectors to address the threat of bioterrorism in the twenty-first century. He warns that while the proliferation of knowledge and capabilities in the field of biotechnology offers ever-increasing opportunities for scientific breakthroughs, the potential for the misuse of that knowledge also increases. Gerstein takes a classic game theory approach in his analysis of the potential for a bioterror attack in the future. His examination provides an objective capability for assessing threats, understanding emerging trends, and developing mitigation strategies. However, in the end the book is less about predicting future behavior than about understanding the framework in which dangerous capabilities are allowed to proliferate. The study also makes a valuable contribution to the debate over perceived threats and vulnerabilities in this new global environment.

The Government of Emergency

Author : Stephen J. Collier,Andrew Lakoff
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2021-11-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780691199283

Get Book

The Government of Emergency by Stephen J. Collier,Andrew Lakoff Pdf

"In the middle decades of the twentieth century, in the wake of economic depression, war, and in the midst of the Cold War, an array of technical experts and government officials developed a substantial body of expertise to contain and manage the disruptions to American society caused by unprecedented threats. Today the tools invented by these mid-twentieth century administrative reformers are largely taken for granted, assimilated into the everyday workings of government. As Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff argue in this book, the American government's current practices of disaster management can be traced back to this era. Collier and Lakoff argue that an understanding of the history of this initial formation of the "emergency state" is essential to an appreciation of the distinctive ways that the U.S. government deals with crises and emergencies-or fails to deal with them-today. This book focuses on historical episodes in emergency or disaster planning and management. Some of these episodes are well-known and have often been studied, while others are little-remembered today. The significance of these planners and managers is not that they were responsible for momentous technical innovations or that all their schemes were realized successfully. Their true significance lies in the fact that they formulated a way of understanding and governing emergencies that has come to be taken for granted"--

On a Farther Shore

Author : William Souder
Publisher : Crown
Page : 522 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2013-09-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780307462213

Get Book

On a Farther Shore by William Souder Pdf

A New York Times Notable Book of 2012 Rachel Carson loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world. Silent Spring was a chilling indictment of DDT and other pesticides that until then had been hailed as safe and wondrously effective. It was Carson who sifted through all the evidence, documenting with alarming clarity the collateral damage to fish, birds, and other wildlife; revealing the effects of these new chemicals to be lasting, widespread, and lethal. Silent Spring shocked the public and forced the government to take action, despite a withering attack on Carson from the chemicals industry. It awakened the world to the heedless contamination of the environment and eventually led to the establishment of the EPA and to the banning of DDT. By drawing frightening parallels between dangerous chemicals and the then-pervasive fallout from nuclear testing, Carson opened a fault line between the gentle ideal of conservation and the more urgent new concept of environmentalism. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, On a Farther Shore reveals a shy yet passionate woman more at home in the natural world than in the literary one that embraced her. William Souder also writes sensitively of Carson's romantic friendship with Dorothy Freeman, and of Carson's death from cancer in 1964. This extraordinary new biography captures the essence of one of the great reformers of the twentieth century.

The Double Game

Author : James Cameron
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2017-11-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9780190459925

Get Book

The Double Game by James Cameron Pdf

How did the United States move from position of nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1960s to a period of arms control based on nuclear parity the doctrine of mutual assured destruction in 1972? Drawing on declassified records of conversations between three presidents and their most trusted advisors, this book provides a new and fascinating answer to this question. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon struggled to reconcile their own personal convictions on the nuclear arms race with the very different views of the public and Congress. In doing so they engaged in a double game, hiding their true beliefs behind a facade of strategic language while grappling in private with the complex realities of the nuclear age. The book shows how Kennedy and Johnson consistently worried about the domestic political costs of their actions, pushing ahead with an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system for the United States for fear of the domestic political consequences of scrapping both the system and the doctrine of strategic superiority on which it was based. By contrast, the abrupt change in U.S. public and congressional opinion in 1969 forced Nixon to give up America's first ABM and the U. S. lead in offensive ballistic missiles through agreements with the Soviet Union, despite his conviction that the U.S. needed a nuclear edge over the USSR to maintain the security of the West. By placing this dynamic at the center of the story, the book provides a completely new overarching interpretation of this pivotal period in the development of U.S. nuclear policy.

The Rise of Nuclear Fear

Author : Spencer R. Weart
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2012-03-19
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780674068667

Get Book

The Rise of Nuclear Fear by Spencer R. Weart Pdf

After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy. Building on his classic, Nuclear Fear, Weart follows nuclear imagery from its origins in the symbolism of medieval alchemy to its appearance in film and fiction. Long before nuclear fission was discovered, fantasies of the destroyed planet, the transforming ray, and the white city of the future took root in the popular imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century when limited facts about radioactivity became known, they produced a blurred picture upon which scientists and the public projected their hopes and fears. These fears were magnified during the Cold War, when mushroom clouds no longer needed to be imagined; they appeared on the evening news. Weart examines nuclear anxiety in sources as diverse as Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and the television show The Simpsons. Recognizing how much we remain in thrall to these setpieces of the imagination, Weart hopes, will help us resist manipulation from both sides of the nuclear debate.

Stages of Emergency

Author : Tracy C. Davis
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 457 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2007-06-27
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780822389637

Get Book

Stages of Emergency by Tracy C. Davis Pdf

In an era defined by the threat of nuclear annihilation, Western nations attempted to prepare civilian populations for atomic attack through staged drills, evacuations, and field exercises. In Stages of Emergency the distinguished performance historian Tracy C. Davis investigates the fundamentally theatrical nature of these Cold War civil defense exercises. Asking what it meant for civilians to be rehearsing nuclear war, she provides a comparative study of the civil defense maneuvers conducted by three NATO allies—the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—during the 1950s and 1960s. Delving deep into the three countries’ archives, she analyzes public exercises involving private citizens—Boy Scouts serving as mock casualties, housewives arranging home protection, clergy training to be shelter managers—as well as covert exercises undertaken by civil servants. Stages of Emergency covers public education campaigns and school programs—such as the ubiquitous “duck and cover” drills—meant to heighten awareness of the dangers of a possible attack, the occupancy tests in which people stayed sequestered for up to two weeks to simulate post-attack living conditions as well as the effects of confinement on interpersonal dynamics, and the British first-aid training in which participants acted out psychological and physical trauma requiring immediate treatment. Davis also brings to light unpublicized government exercises aimed at anticipating the global effects of nuclear war. Her comparative analysis shows how the differing priorities, contingencies, and social policies of the three countries influenced their rehearsals of nuclear catastrophe. When the Cold War ended, so did these exercises, but, as Davis points out in her perceptive afterword, they have been revived—with strikingly similar recommendations—in response to twenty-first-century fears of terrorists, dirty bombs, and rogue states.