Journal of Design History, Design History Society/Oxford University Press, Spring 2006.
If a man's home is his castle, in the early years of the atomic age his castle was also part fortress–or at least, that's the way the government wanted it. Unable to shoulder the costs and inef-ficacy of a federal shelter program to protect Americans in the event of nuclear attack, the government urged citizens to take their safety into their own hands. “The family fallout shelter” was “your one defense against fallout,” warned the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization in 1958.
Fewer than 3 percent of Americans ever built a shelter, yet what other domestic space can claim such a wide berth in the collective American conscious–despite having been abandoned decades ago?
The home fallout shelter was “an ideologically charged national do-it-yourself project that permeated America's postwar conscious more than its physical landscape,” observes Parsons New School for Design faculty member Sarah A. Lichtman in the Spring 2006 Journal of Design History. “By constructing, repairing, or redecorating a part of their own home, new American homeowners, like mythological frontiersmen, could become even more personally invested in defending their homestead and homeland,” writes Lichtman in “Do-It-Yourself Security: Safety, Gender, and the Home Fallout Shelter in Cold War America.” The idea of shelters, which were never called upon to serve their primary purpose, actually had many psychological functions that had little to do with physical security.
Forty-five years ago, an American could walk into Sears and buy an off-the-shelf, do-it-yourself fallout shelter. Using just a screwdriver and wrench, it supposedly took two men only four hours to assemble the steel-panel structure from the low-cost kit. These spaces and others–such as the blueprints for the “Big Pipe in the Backyard Under Three Feet of Earth” published by Life magazine or the “Under the Patio” shelter plans detailed in Popular Mechanics in 1961 were often advertised as offering far more than protection in the event of nuclear war, Lichtman says. (The actual protective ability of shelters was another matter: “Virtually useless as shields, shelters shared more in common with tombs than sanctuaries,” she writes.) Advocates promoted the projects not just as a way to escape radiation but also as value-added enhancements for homeowners: “The shelter, it was suggested, could be used as a workshop, a darkroom, a wine cellar, a guestroom, or even a child's playroom.”
[DISASTER AREA] “Until recently, disaster scholars and practitioners have hardly engaged in climate change debates,” observes the kickoff essay for the March 2006 issue of Disasters. Specialists from around the world seek to remedy that shortcoming, weighing in on such topics as how rising sea levels threaten the Philippines and exploring lessons to be learned from Peru's encounter with El Niño. Laurens M. Bouwer and Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts of the Netherlands-based Institute for Environmental Studies offer detailed prescriptions for financing efforts to help nations, particularly those in the hardest-hit developing world, adapt to climate change.
[PICKET FENCES] A big happy family Europe might never be, despite the best efforts of the European Union (EU). Recent relations between the Czech Republic and its neighbor to the south, Austria, were never worse than when the two squared off over the Czech Republic's Temelín nuclear plant in 2000, according to Rick Fawn, senior international relations lecturer at St. Andrews University, who analyzed the dispute in the March 2006 Communist and Post-Communist Studies. Tensions eased only after the EU brokered an agreement to ensure the Soviet-era plant's safety, demonstrating a valuable mediating role for the EU, Fawn writes.
There was more than practical utility offered in the shelter come-ons; a more subtle promise, Lichtman suggests, was one of a successful nuclear family. Building a shelter together was portrayed as a family activity, a kind of survivalist multitasking that allowed fathers to bond with sons while acting as provider and protector for the rest of the clan. Despite the wartime influx of women into the U.S. labor force, pro-shelter literature strongly reinforced traditional gender roles, tasking women with domestic chores such as stocking shelters smartly and keeping them clean. Cultural historian Paul Boyer has written that Americans knew right after the atomic bombings of Japan that “things would never be the same again.” As evidenced by Li-chtman's look at the culture of home fallout shelters, some things didn't change that quickly.
[FEAR FACTOR] The ideology of fear goes global as the special theme of the Winter 2006 New Perspectives Quarterly, which features essays by novelist Salman Rushdie, Pakistani politician Imran Khan, and Somali-born Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The controversial Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan sets the tone for the issue, arguing that “global terrorism and the global war against terrorism both fuel, in equal and pernicious ways, the global ideology of fear.”
[DOCTRINARIANS] From James Monroe to Ronald Reagan, the March 2006 Presidential Studies Quarterly surveys nearly two centuries of presidential doctrines. As University of Texas at Austin history professor H. W. Brandis notes in the introductory essay, doctrines have “ranged in breadth from the regional to the global and in duration from the fleeting to the essentially permanent.” (The Monroe Doctrine weighs in as the reigning champ, having been routinely cited for 160 years.) Ohio University's Chester Patch recounts how the Reagan Doctrine, which pledged U.S. support for anticommunist resistance groups, wasn't articulated by Reagan himself but was essentially the creation of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.
[WAG THE DOG] Swinging when you're down could be a winning diplomatic strategy. When a U.S. president's domestic popularity is low, he might use a conflict to unite an otherwise dissatisfied population, writes Graeme A. M. Davies, an international politics lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in an upcoming issue of International Relations of the Asia Pacific. Accordingly, a potential target state-even the unpredictable North Korean regime-understands that a threat of force should be taken seriously when a president is unpopular. Davies's theoretical calculations are dense, but his conclusion is surprisingly simple: “Unpopular democratic leaders are far better able to coerce other states.”
[FUEL CHANGE] Don't expect to bid farewell to fossil fuels anytime soon-that's the takeaway message in a special forthcoming July issue of Energy Policy devoted to the hydrogen economy. Key stumbling blocks are the costs and risks associated with production: Hydrogen is a “clean” energy source, but it is sometimes produced by environmentally “dirty” methods. What's needed now is further development of safe, cost-effective, and clean production technology.
[LOVE/HATE] Anti-Americanism is a global trend with a momentum of its own. Or is it? When it comes to North Africa, all is not lost, write Yahia H. Zoubir of France's Euromed-Marseille School of Management and Louisa Aït-Hamadouche of the University of Algiers. In the March 2006 Journal of North African Studies, the authors report that many North Africans have complex views of the United States: a deep-seated animosity on the one hand and an attraction to U.S. products and values on the other.
