Log in
Free trial

One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture


For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being.


Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.