Citizenship In Cold War

way the government advanced the propaganda around nuclear war. The Air Force Association convention served as a grand publicity stunt to show the “common man,” how prepared the United States was for defense of a nuclear war. Air Force Magazine said, “A trip through the panorama provided a broad education in defense.” The primary goal of both the name and the convention was to normalize the idea of nuclear war to the American people. Universities across the country were targets of this propaganda because it was essential to win the minds of the young generation. The process was known as modernization theory, and it was touted by Henry Kissinger.
Beyond the evidence presented above, one only needs to look to the conflicting messages
of the time to identify civil defense as propaganda. The government simultaneously told the public the Soviet Union was preparing for a war that would bring an unprecedented level of destruction, but at the same time saying simple, well prepared civil defense measures will protect you from this new destruction. The next set of logical questions is, what was the purpose of this propaganda and was it successful?
Oakes defined the purpose of the message well when he wrote, “The actual protection of the public during a nuclear attack was not crucial to the role of civil defense in American national security. It was necessary only for Americans to believe they could be protected.” This echoes Leanings evaluation of the psychological purpose of civil defense, which was to create credibility for the United States when maneuvering in the international community. Garrison also makes this argument. Garrison claims Kennedy's campaign rhetoric against the missile gap, the idea that the Soviets had far more missiles than the United States, was not in the interest of strengthening civil defense or in the interest of civilian safety, but instead, it was meant to posture to the likes of Rockefeller and Kruschev.
The negative response from the public forced him to shut the program down for fear of its negative effects on his diplomatic efforts abroad. A second aspect of propaganda the American people were being led to believe was that their enemy was terrifying enough to justify nuclear war. Andrea Friedman discusses this in her book, Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibility of Dissent. Friedman focuses on the anti-communist propaganda produced by the United States during the Cold War. Friedman argues this propaganda played a vital role in the defense of the home front, and thus, a vital role in civil defense. Specifically, the propaganda focused on the areas of race and employment. The United States attacked the communist ideology for taking away the right of a person to get a job, and the desire to create free nations in Africa and Asia, This threatened both the economic and social hierarchy the country was founded on. Many scholars agree this was the second purpose of civil defense. The question that remains is whether or
not it was a success.In the view of most scholars, civil defense was a failure on all fronts. In his book, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America, Jon Wiener calls the nation-wide shelter building campaign a massive failure. Leaning also railed against the feasibility of shelters. Even if enough shelters could have been built, it would have been impossible to store enough food and water to survive long enough for the danger from fallout to pass. A second indicator that civil defense was a failure was the reluctance of many people to participate in the nation’s practice nuclear wars. The Government began conducting an annual nation-wide rehearsal for responding to a nuclear attack known as Operation Alert in 1954. The government would work with local civil defense leaders for months in advance of the exercises to create an attack scenario. The scenario would then be implemented at a time that would allow the most Americans to participate. Initially, Operation Alert would last just a weekend, but the operation grew over the years, it came to last a week. The scenarios also grew to include relocation of government officials and media outlets. It would be logical to expect a higher rate of participation in Operation Alert if the propaganda was working, but this was not the case. One of the most interesting instances of nonparticipation comes out of North Dakota.
The refusal of North Dakota to participate in Operation Alert is particularly surprising because North Dakota was on the front line of the Cold War.
North Dakota, at its peak, was home to hundreds of Minuteman III Missiles, in addition to many other potential targets of a potential Soviet nuclear attack. The fact that a state with so much at risk in the case of nuclear war did not participate in the nation's biggest civil defense preparation, Operation Alert, appears to be the final nail in the coffin of success of civil defense. If a State like North Dakota did not participate in Operation Alert, it appears as though the government propaganda had not convinced the American people civil defense was the way to prepare for and protect themselves from nuclear war. A closer examination of the history suggests this is an inaccurate conclusion for two reasons. The first reason is there is evidence of civil defense participation in the newspapers of North Dakota. The participation, if limited, could be explained away, but with the addition of a second factor, it cannot be. The second factor was the lack of protest when the missiles were being built in the mid to late 1960s. The issue becomes even more complicate when it is learned that the building of the Anti-Ballistic Missile System in 1970 brought tremendous protests in North Dakota, despite the fact that development of an Anti-Ballistic Missile System was favored by a majority of Americans as late as
1969.
If civil defense had truly failed, the protests would have started in 1964 when the construction of nuclear missiles began. Scholars have attempted to explain the lack of early protests with the economic opportunity the project brought to the state, but the Anti-Ballistic Missile System brought similar economic opportunity. In Order to truly understand the success