Cold War Ruralism

Abstract

The year 1954 saw the first public detonation of an H-bomb, a weapon whose radioactive fallout challenged the existing spatialized notions of targeting and post attack recovery by making a whole country vulnerable to the vagaries of drifting toxic clouds that drew no distinction between urban centers and rural periphery. In response, the UK government established a network of 1,518 underground nuclear fallout monitoring posts spread uniformly across the country. This article considers how planning for this new reality brought a diffusion of cold war urban anxieties and practices into the UK countryside, but in a way that was awkward and approximate.