The “Oh My God!” Phase

Abstract

This chapter examines the way in which the discovery of the fallout effects of thermonuclear weapons effected the development of American and Soviet civil defense during the mid-late 1950s. The realization that the fallout from large hydrogen bombs could produce potentially lethal radiation hazards over areas hundreds or thousands or miles away from the detonations undermined the assumptions that underpinned civil defense planning a few years prior. American and Soviet civil defense officials attempted to use fallout as an argument for more extensive civil defense programs. This gambit backfired in both superpowers as sceptical political leaders curtailed civil defense rather than expanding it. In the United States, Dwight Eisenhower sidestepped pressure from civil defense advocates in Congress via institutional reforms whose practical effect was to increase the institutional responsibilities of civil defense while significantly reducing federal funding for them. In the USSR, civil defense skeptics convinced the mercurial Nikita Khrushchev to shutter the Soviet civil defense program altogether at the end of 1959.