ONE NATION UNDERGROUND: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture.

• Author: Schaffer, Michael
• Position: Review

ONE NATION UNDERGROUND: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture by Kenneth D. Rose New York University Press, $28.95

AMERICANS NEVER ACTUALLY had to live in fallout shelters, but shelters wound up living in us: Forty years after nuke-fearing suburbanites set about digging up their backyards, the underground sanctuary survives as a supreme example of mid-century kitsch, the civil-defense version of the malt shop. These days, the once-secret Greenbrier shelter, built to protect Congress from the Soviets, offers tours for curious nuclear buffs. A single-family shelter, meanwhile, stars in the 1999 romantic comedy Blast From the Past, playing the inadvertent time capsule in which hunky Brendan Fraser--along with his tight pants, Perry Como records, and love of Jackie Gleason--travels to contemporary America.

According to California State University's Kenneth Rose, the actual story of the fallout shelter turns out to be a little more complicated than the histories of Chevrolet tail-fins and martini-glass design. Americans may have been convinced that Khrushchev was going to drop the big one, but only a few of them proved willing to build radiation-proof hideaways under their petunias. In explaining why, Rose has crafted a broad-ranging narrative that covers the politics, culture, religion, and even engineering of the Cold War era.

And as a new political generation, facing less of a global threat, weighs its own antimissile program, Rose crafts a story about the disparate interests that work to make these sorts of pipe dreams happen--or manage to get in their way. As it turns out, the high profile and massive scale of the perceived nuclear threat may have actually helped doom efforts to build an organized shelter system. The debate over the moral, financial, and geopolitical consequences of the fallout shelter was hard to escape. In the face of that debate, most Americans came to a conclusion that was at once practical and essentially decent: They said no. This time around, though, it may well turn out to be tactical concerns--war is unleashed on Americans via hijacked planes, not ICBMs--rather than moral dilemmas that turn us against the scheme.

One Nation Underground opens with a look at the global and domestic politics of the early Cold War. Long isolated from the home-front carnage of war, Americans were understandably frightened by the threat of domestic tragedy. As the perception of Moscow's strength increased, and with President Eisenhower...