The basic mission of the BB was to convince the Dutch population that such pessimism was unwarranted, and that it could, and should, protect itself against aerial attack. This was presented as a civilian task. The name *Bescherming Bevolking* (BB) or 'protection of the population' avoided the word 'defence' because of its military connotation, which planners and PR people knew the Dutch population disliked. For the same reason, the BB was the responsibility of the Minister of Domestic Affairs, not the Minister of Defence. The basic elements of the organisation were local units of volunteers, a scheme called 'organised self-protection'. Citizens were to create shelters in their own homes (see Fig. 6.1).

Those who lived in high-rise apartment buildings should construct a shelter together, preferably in the basement, with some subsidy from the government. In peacetime, these shelters could be used for storage or as parking for bikes. For those caught in a public space at the time of an attack, public shelters would be built at busy junctures in cities. None of these shelters would be able to withstand the heat and shock of a close nuclear explosion, but several miles away from ground zero they would be able to save lives. This basic structure remained in place until the dissolution of the BB in 1986.

#### **Fig. 6.1 Civil defence: The patriarchal view of the BB**

Notice how the husband, as helpless as his wife and children, seems to protect them with his left arm, which extends to the stairways. No hint here of the mother as the protector, the idea behind the women'swomen voluntary efforts. The image is strikingly similar to the advertisements featuring families analysed in Goffman (1976: 37–39) and the description of the American situation in McEnaney (2010) (From the booklet *Toelichting op de wenken voor de bescherming van uw gezin en uzelf* [s.l., September 1961], p. 5. *Source* National Archives, The Hague. Archive of Organisatie Bescherming Bevolking, bloc 1960–1969, box 73)

No serious protection against air raids had existed in the Netherlands up to this point. During the 1930s, the government had made a half-hearted attempt to create a mostly voluntary organisation that would fight fires and dig trenches where the population could take shelter during an aerial attack, but people had never taken this seriously, and the government's advice to citizens for individual self-protection was largely ignored—a response that would later be repeated with the BB (Van der Boom 2000: 31–32; Bosma 2012: 76–91).

The BB estimated it would need 200,000 volunteers.7 The government started a big propaganda campaign in the spring of 1952, with short films, radio talks and pamphlets. It was aimed mainly at men, although women were eligible for the Social Care Service, that was to provide victims with food and comfort, 'work for which a woman's hand was created' (Van der Boom 2000: 51). BB recruiters reported that it was often women who persuaded their husbands to join the organisation. It was also much easier to find women to join the Social Care Service than it was to find men for the other units (Hueting 1995: 104, 107–108; Van der Boom 2000: 51, 63, 67, 69, 134). The overall result of the campaign was disappointing: only 123,000 people signed up. Recruitment therefore continued after 1953, with similar, if not worse results: volunteers had already begun leaving the organisation. This led to the attempt to recruit more women, which will be discussed below. Another way to solve the volunteer problem was to enlist young conscripts. This met with fierce opposition, but at least from the mid-1960s, the ranks were almost filled.

In 1955, the Minister of Domestic Affairs announced what experts had known for years and the population had feared for almost a decade: in the case of a war, the Netherlands would suffer several nuclear attacks, on Rotterdam, Amsterdam, The Hague (seat of the government) and several other strategic spots. The BB was reorganised to deal with this not-so-new threat. Regularly, the government announced that more shelters would be built, but actual building was often postponed or silently called off.8 In 1968, the Minister of Domestic Affairs reported to Parliament that at that time shelters with fallout protection were available, or under construction, for 66,200 persons; the total population at that time amounted to 12 million.9 From the late 1950s, an increasing number of experts and politicians expressed their scepticism about the organisation (Van der Boom 2000: 261–270). Prominent Dutch scientists argued that the government grossly underrated the effects of a nuclear attack. The BB's pretence of protection only served to prepare the Dutch population for a nuclear war, they said. The only sensible way to prevent such a war was to completely abolish nuclear weapons.10

In the summer of 1961, tensions around Berlin increased, and a nuclear war scare gripped the Western world. The Dutch government, like governments in other West European countries, responded by having a pamphlet delivered to each home, entitled 'Suggestions for protecting your family and yourself'.11 It explained what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. The main advice was to seek shelter at home or the nearest place available. Suggestions were given for creating a home shelter, what to keep in stock there and how to provide first aid. Three weeks later, an illustrated, 30-page brochure with further explanations was distributed. It emphasised protection against fallout, perhaps because that was more attainable than protection against the shock, heat and immediate radiation of a nuclear explosion (Weart 1988: 258). The overarching theme of this campaign and the booklet was to counter the widespread 'defeatism', the deep pessimism, that had taken root during the 1950s, and to convince the population that self-protection made sense: fatalism, the BB argued, allowed panic to take over and opportunities for survival to be wasted (Van der Boom 2000: 208; on 'panic management', see also the chapter by Bjørnsson in this volume).

The pamphlet and the brochure were not well received. According to a survey held shortly after the campaign, a little over half of the respondents said they had read them, but of those who had, only half could say what fallout was, and an even larger proportion had no idea what to do to protect themselves. A survey held in 1968 showed that hardly anyone had created a shelter at home—not even BB people and politicians (Van der Boom 2000: 232; Valkenburgh 1964: 231)—and municipalities had almost completely neglected their duties in this respect. One example is the small town of Barendregt, close to Rotterdam. The civil servant answering the questionnaire reported that the new municipal office had a shelter facility for the local government. He did not know how many people had a shelter at home, but he supposed there were very few. He announced that Barendregt was preparing further measures. But in 1972, the town reported that for about 12,000 of the 13,000 inhabitants there was no shelter. In short, Barendregt's citizens were not interested in the topic at all, and neither was their municipal government.12 This was typical of the Netherlands. The mayor of Amsterdam at first even declined to carry out the survey, because he found it meaningless (Van der Boom 2000: 248; Leenders 2001: 227–235).

Some people were angry. They said the BB suggested that a nuclear war could be fought and survived.13 A well-known young writer, Harry Mulisch, wrote a savage satire, which was published a few weeks after the BB's brochure: 'Suggestions for protecting your family and yourself on Judgment Day'. It alternated horror scenes from the biblical Book of Revelations with suggestions from the BB, including sandbags and ice cubes (Mulisch 1961). Most other reactions published in newspapers were scathing or angry. After this PR disaster, the BB kept a low profile, and in the 1970s, many people wondered if it still existed at all. Opinion polls showed that the number of people expecting nuclear war decreased rapidly during the second half of the 1960s.14

Why was the organisation so unpopular? First, neither the central government nor municipal governments believed in civil defence. The budget was kept low and the organisation was set up half-heartedly. During the first few years, BB volunteers had to wear unimpressive overalls as a uniform, local leadership was often weak, courses were uninspiring, and exercises were not taken seriously. Leading figures were often retired army officers who regarded their job as a kind of sinecure. Mayors and councillors commonly showed a complete lack of interest. The BB increasingly became a laughingstock, and its volunteers were ashamed to be seen by their neighbours wearing their uniforms or doing their exercises (see Fig. 6.2).15

One result of this lack of funding and leadership was continuous underperformance. The delays in shelter building illustrate this. Most people were unaware of the location of shelters (Van der Boom 2000: 158–159). In practical tasks, the BB also cut a bad figure. When the organisation was called on to assist during emergencies—at a railroad disaster in 1962, at an accident at a chemical plant in 1972 and on a few other occasions—its performance was considered worthless (Leenders 2001: 230–231).

# Dutch Women in the Cold War: Social Position, Ideals and Voluntary Work

While the BB became increasingly unpopular, women volunteers set up their own, vigorous campaign to instruct women in self-protection. What motivated them? And how did they deal with the BB? In order to understand this, we have to consider the postwar debate about the role of women in society.

The Second World War shook Dutch society to its roots, including the relations between men and women (De Liagre Böhl 1987; Van Liempt 2009: 265–314, 366–416; Schwegman and Withuis 1993: 568– 570). The illegitimacy of the occupying German authorities during the war encouraged illegal activity. This included hiding, and feeding, some 25,000 Jews, and 300,000 non-Jews, a very risky business in which women played a key role. Towards the end of the war, when food and fuel became scarce, pilfering and prostitution spread. After liberation,

#### **Fig. 6.2 BB ridiculed**

Self-mockery in the BB magazine *De Paladijn* 1964, no. 10. Notice how marginal women are

300,000 men who had been deported to Germany to work in the factories returned home. Many others had escaped deportation by going into hiding. Women therefore had taken up the task of feeding and holding together their families. When liberation came, many young women had brief affairs with Canadian soldiers, which led to a spike in illegitimate births, divorces and cases of venereal disease a year later. The public humiliation of young women who had been too friendly with German men (*moffenmeiden*) can easily be interpreted as revenge for this afront to Dutch male pride (Judt 2005: 42–43). In other words, the war had not only made women heroines but also put them morally at risk. It had inspired a collective self-confidence in women while diminishing the standing of men.

Small wonder that genuine moral panic broke out among politicians and church leaders after the euphoria of liberation had waned. They believed the country had to restore not only its buildings, harbours and bridges, but even more so its decency and orderly habits. As a journal for mental health put it: 'The sense of mine and thine, and respect for the authority of the government have been severely weakened, pent up aggression has not yet found constructive outlets, and the absence of fathers and the sexual misbehaviour of mothers have created unacceptable situations' (Mol and Van Lieshout 1987: 80). The response to this state of moral emergency was the creation of a range of institutions for social work and therapy which focused on re-establishing traditional family relations. The motto was: 'Restoring the family will restore the nation' (*Gezinsherstel brengt Volksherstel*) (De Liagre Böhl 1987: 28). This was not difficult: it entailed the restoration of the organisational networks created before the war that were dominated by the protestant and Roman Catholic churches which embraced a patriarchal view of society.

This restoration clearly succeeded.16 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, most young women married and had children. Divorce was unusual until the late 1960s. Very few women, a much lower percentage than elsewhere in Europe, worked outside the home, in spite of the shortage of labour. Even in 1965, 83% of the respondents in a survey rejected the idea of mothers of schoolchildren working away from home. But there were changes too. The legal position of women began to improve from the late 1940s. For example, both parents acquired equal authority over their children (1947), married women were given the same rights as their husbands to their common possessions (1957), women no longer automatically lost their job upon marriage, and equal pay for equal work was introduced (1957). Many of these rules were routinely evaded, but clearly, the position of women was no longer fixed—it was debated, changes were proposed and sometimes adopted, and even if not fully implemented, they were 'in the air' (Brinkgreve and Korzec 1978: 97– 99; Schwegman and Withuis 1993: 575). And many women believed the war had proven that their role in society was essential.

Profound and lasting changes in attitudes started only in the late 1960s, brought about by economic growth, the introduction of the contraceptive pill, and the second feminist wave (Brinkgreve and Korzec 1978: 115, 126–127; Pott-Buter and Tijdens 1998: 139–141; Schwegman and Withuis 1993: 579–581). Women became more highly educated and more eager to pursue a career. Motherhood was no longer idealised; women were now expected to 'develop themselves' beyond the family. The number of children per family started to decline and divorces increased (Van Setten 1987: 25–26; Brinkgreve and Korzec 1978: 114).

The high tide of women's participation in civil defence therefore occurred during the period before the second feminist wave, when a restored patriarchal order collided with a new sense of responsibility and competence among many women. Although feminism is often thought to have almost disappeared during this period, the role of women in society was actually a big topic of debate. Simone de Beauvoir's *Le deuxième sexe* (1949) and Margaret Mead's *Male and female* (1950) were only the most famous of several books on this topic that appeared during these years.17 In this section, I will sketch the ideas of four widely read Dutch authors and one lesser known one. While different in many ways, they shared key assumptions and concepts about women in society, ideas that also informed the activities of the volunteer organisations and which we can compare with the imaginary of the BB.

My first witness is Martina Tjeenk Willink (1905–1992), a lawyer and the only female member (for the Social Democratic Party) of the senate. At a meeting of the Union of Women's Volunteers in 1948, she gave a speech on 'Woman in leading positions'.18 The recent war and the current nuclear threat, she says, show that our culture is in deep trouble. This is caused by three potentially valuable tendencies which have run amok: individualism has isolated humans from their deep connections with the world, rationalism has blocked from view the spiritual values hidden in the mysteries of life, and technology, developed to serve us, has enslaved us (she mentions the atom bomb and the assembly line to illustrate this). All three, according to her, are products of 'centuries of male dominance'. To prevent disaster, we should foster qualities that are 'generally human', but that are more strongly developed in women: connectedness with life, which seeks to bind rather than divide, and which is engendered by our motherhood—whether or not we become mothers ourselves—and a balance of thought and feeling: 'the mind should respect the wisdom of the heart, as the heart should learn the discipline of the mind'. In her reasoning, that is why women should serve 'the human family', the world in which they want to see their children grow up. In her assessment, the recent war has widened women's sense of social responsibility and given them confidence in their capabilities. These are gains that have to be developed further, both for our personal development and for society.

A few years later, the physician-philosopher Frederik Buytendijk (1887–1974) published his influential study *De vrouw* (*Woman*, 1951), framed as a reply to De Beauvoir's book, which he called the *most important* work on the subject (his emphasis) (Buytendijk 1969: 25). *De vrouw* was reprinted 16 times until the late 1960s. Like De Beauvoir, Buytendijk argued within an existentialist framework, but he differed from De Beauvoir and Sartre in emphasising the meaningful relationship of human beings to their world.19 His core argument was that being human meant being physically in the world. From birth, a person's body was the 'preliminary sketch of his existence', and being male or female invited a certain relationship with the world, without being deterministic. A woman's body invited her to develop her caring qualities, which culminated in motherhood. However, a woman could cultivate all human capacities, including those that were usually associated with men, as had become evident during the war and on many other occasions (Buytendijk 1969: 9). And the gift of caring for life was human, rather than exclusively female. Buytendijk's learned treatise did not differ basically from Tjeenk Willink's short speech: he too spoke of the need for qualities that women can develop more naturally, and he also liked to speak of the 'mysteries' of human existence that could not be grasped by scientific analysis.

Two years before Buytendijk's book came out, in 1949, a stage play, *De wereld heeft geen wachtkamer* (The world has no waiting room), written by Maurits Dekker, caused a small sensation in the Netherlands (Van Lente 2012: 155–156). It portrayed a group of researchers working on a military-funded project to develop a more powerful explosive than plutonium. When a young researcher becomes fatally ill after exposure to radiation, the elderly housemaid of the professor who leads the project observes how the militarisation of research has changed the atmosphere in the team. No longer do the students come and visit the professor, making jokes, she says, but 'bigwigs in uniform who have secrets and suddenly shut up when you enter the room'. The professor, she has noticed, has become tense and sleepless. 'What for?' she exclaims, 'Why don't people just live?' She expressed what Tjeenk Willink and Buytendijk had formulated as a typically female rejection of the destructive, male pursuit of nuclear weapons research. No doubt, the author was on her side and wanted the audience to feel the same.20

Perhaps the most profound (and beautifully written) exploration of the role of women in the atomic age was the well-known novelist Hella Haasse's (1918–2011) long essay *Een kom water en een test vuur* (A vessel of water and bowl of fire, 1959). The 'vessel of water and bowl of fire' of the title were the gifts that, in Roman times, the bridegroom offered to his bride as she entered the home of which she was to be the *domina* dressed in an orange and saffron robe, as if she were a flame. The fire stood for erotic passion (the origin of all culture, said Haasse), but also for the oven that magically transformed dough into wholesome food, and of course for her womb, which would produce new life. And water was the symbol of life itself. According to Haasse, the modern age, in which water comes from a tap and light from an electric lightbulb, has lost contact with these elementary phenomena. The awareness of women's deep and mysterious connection with the basics of life is gone. Brides now wear a white dress, symbolising their untouched delivery to the closed-off space of the home where the man rules. This state of affairs is deeply troubling now that water and fire have entered into a monstrous contract in the hydrogen bomb. As humanity is going through its most drastic transformation ever, women should reconnect to this 'cosmic space', symbolised by water and fire. For '[t]he whole world is the home of woman' (Haasse 1959: 17, 77). Their special mission was to help others to reconnect to the larger whole, both in a mystical and in a practical sense: to devote 'all our attention, love, and energy to what is given to us, 'earthy reality', things, human beings, nature' (Haasse 1959: 34–36, 150). This would serve as a counterforce to the male tendency to dominate nature, which had led to the frightening, soulless world of modern machinery.

My final witness, much less well known, is Jo Le Rütte (1888–1972), a retired secondary school teacher, who in 1962 published a pamphlet called *De vrouw en het Atoomtijdperk* (Woman and the atomic age). She was a pacifist, Esperantist and an early member of the Dutch pacifist party, which was founded in 1957.21 Like Haasse, Le Rütte characterised her time in terms of technology: on the one hand, spectacular material improvement after the war, and on the other hand, the coming of the atomic age, bringing constant fear of utter destruction (Le Rütte 1962: 6). She identified technology with male power: certainly not bad in itself, but potentially deadly. 'If we walk the same road as we do now, humanity will be destroyed by technological violence' (Le Rütte 1962: 29, 31). This can be prevented only by placing international affairs in the hands of men and women together, just as children are brought up by a father and a mother. Like the other authors, she regarded the family as the core of society, and motherhood the core quality of women, endowing them with a caring disposition. This care should be extended to the world at large. She proposed, among other things, giving women prominent positions in economic and financial policy—which were similar to managing the family budget—general disarmament and the spread of Esperanto, so that people around the world could get to know each other (Le Rütte 1962: 42).

Le Rütte's pamphlet reminds us that the maternal drive could lead to pacifist activity as well as to supporting civil defence. Lawrence Wittner has documented the prominent role of women in antinuclear movements in several countries from the mid-1950s onward (Wittner 2000). I have not found much evidence for this in the Netherlands, although members of the pacifist party to which Le Rütte belonged sometimes explained their convictions in these terms. One of them wrote later, during the 'second feminist wave': 'Even if you reject the mother role, you don't have to discard your caring and emotional capacities. After all, we have to teach men to also become more caring and "maternal"' (Denekamp et al. 1987: 68).

These women shared the notion that they had a special, caring task in society. This idea had originated in the first feminist wave, but the war and the threat of nuclear war had increased its urgency: women's participation in public affairs was necessary to stymie destructive male tendencies.

This idea found practical expression in the rise of voluntary movements, especially in the 1930s. In 1938, when international relations were tense and war loomed, a group of ladies (most were from wealthy families and many held academic degrees) established the *Korps Vrouwelijke Vrijwilligers* (Women's Volunteers Corps), which trained its members to help protect the population against the consequences of air raids. The Korps presented itself as 'an instrument for the government when it needs the population to provide help'. This might be in the event of war, a flood or some other disaster (Hueting 1995: 10, 16). Hundreds of women joined the Korps, and very soon there were 30 local chapters all over the country (Hueting 1995: 28).

In May 1940, three days before the German invasion, the Korps offered its services to the National Inspection for Protection against Air Attacks. The government officials rejected the offer. The women, baffled, decided to continue work on their own (Hueting 1995: 37). When the inner city of Rotterdam was destroyed by German bombs a few days later, the Korps provided shelter and food to hundreds of refugees. At the end of the war, girls and women from the Southern part of the country, which had been liberated first, went to help exhausted housewives in the North to clean up and repair their homes. And in 1953, when the South-Western part of the country was inundated during a storm, women volunteers again provided essential help.

In the early postwar years, a conflict arose between the *Unie van Vrouwelijke Vrijwilligers* (Union of Women Volunteers, or UVV), the successor organisation of the Korps, and several local women's voluntary organisations that did not want to be part this organisation. A new umbrella organisation was created in 1951, the *Nederlandse Federatie voor Vrouwelijke Vrijwillige Hulpverlening* (FVVH) (Hueting 1995: 71–86). The UVV declined to join the new federation. The English Women's Voluntary Society, the UVV's admired example, declared that it would only deal with the UVV. This complicated conflict, although not important to our topic in itself, does explain the strange way in which women's voluntary organisations became involved in civil defence a few years later.

# Women volunteers and the BB

When the government began recruiting volunteers for the BB in 1953, the UVV and other women's organisations encouraged their members, except mothers of small children, to join. As we saw, many women volunteered for the Social Care Service and prompted their husbands to join the organisation too. Later that year, the Department of the Interior sent three women, including the president of the UVV, to England to learn about civil defence from the Women's Voluntary Service. As the BB struggled to get started, the UVV decided to follow the example of the WVS, which had initiated a campaign in 1955 to educate small groups of women in 'self-protection'. The campaign was called 'One-in-Five', indicating that it aimed to reach one fifth of all adult British women, a goal that seemed more realistic than attempting to reach all women (Hunt 2012). Women were invited in groups of ten to twelve persons, who would meet three times to be instructed on how to minimise the impact of fire, radiation and blast caused by a nuclear explosion, and how to care for the injured. Instruction was provided by a volunteer who had followed a short course.

When the BB began its campaign to recruit more women in 1956, it used the rhetoric of women's natural caring talents.22 A recruitment folder said that although the BB was not usually associated with women and girls, their female qualities made them perfectly suited to this kind of work. 'All women share the quality of self-sacrificing love', the pamphlet said, and every woman's heart was inclined 'to help, to serve' people in need, as had been demonstrated so well during the flood of 1953. While some tasks were obviously suitable for women (first aid, providing food and shelter, administration, communication), no position in the BB was unattainable for them—including higher staff functions.

As it turned out that new women volunteers were recruited mainly in areas where the BB had hardly campaigned (Van der Boom 2000: 71–72), the organisation asked the FVVH, in February 1958, for help educating Dutch women in '*Individuele Zelfbescherming*' (individual selfprotection).23 The BB official responsible for recruitment explained that while there were now 166,000 volunteers, including 30,000 women, 250,000 volunteers were needed. He calculated that about two million Dutch women would be eligible for the BB—not counting elderly women and young mothers. Because men would have to do military service or be at their jobs in the event of war, women would have to take responsibility for protecting their homes. And 'obviously', he said, the FVVH was needed to recruit these women. He then repeated the formula of women's fitness for all positions in the BB, their natural caring qualities and their sense of responsibility, which had been proven during the Second World War and the flood of 1953. Their participation would also help give the BB a stronger position in society. In this way, they could contribute to defending the West, which was one of the BB's purposes.24

The FVVH agreed to help the BB, but then discovered that two women from the UVV were already taking a course on the One-in-Five campaign conducted by the British WVS, and that these ladies were determined to set up a similar programme in the Netherlands. As the UVV ladies' trip was financed by the Department of the Interior, which was also responsible for the BB, this was a curious mistake for the BB to make and not the last one. The minister, by the way, had approved both the UVV's plan and that of the FVVH.

The UVV's One-in-Five programme was at first directed towards the four large cities in the West: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. The mayors of those cities were to determine when and where the instruction meetings would be held. The three-part course was devoted entirely to protection in the case of nuclear war, and all women in these cities would be invited. The FVVH set up a rather different programme. It consisted of a much more loosely structured course about all kinds of accidents that could happen in and around the house ('Safety in the home'). Protection against radiation was only one part of the programme. The course was meant for members of the organisations that belonged to FVVH.

When the board of the FVVH discussed its plans with the two UVV ladies, the latter criticised the looseness of the FVVH course and said that they had already been invited by mayors of other cities, besides those of the four large ones. They were very displeased that the FVVH was setting up a programme of its own. But when the FVVH consulted its member organisations, several of them showed strong resistance against the UVV's approach. They rejected being at the beck and call of the mayors, or of the BB. One woman argued that having completed a course to become an instructor, no mayor could keep her from teaching the members of her organisation. Another said that the members of her organisation did not want to deal with emergencies relating to nuclear war only.25 And the secretary of the Liberal Protestant Women's Federation wrote to the BB that several women in her organisation were anti-militarist, and therefore rejected cooperation with the BB.26

Clearly, One-in-Five was much more in line with the BB's purposes than the FVVH's plan. Like the BB (and like its British example, the WVS), the UVV tried to convince women that a nuclear war was not likely to destroy the whole country, and that preparing for an attack strengthened the defensive stance of the country. It also argued that the population's attitude towards the BB should be bent in a more positive direction.27 The Minister of the Interior supported the UVV. He wrote to the FVVH that instruction meetings should be organised only upon the request of the mayor, and that the FVVH did not hold a monopoly on this activity.28

Both the UVV and the FVVH seem to have realised that in order to be successful, they should keep their distance from the BB, as that organisation was unpopular with the wider population. For example, when the BB proposed providing the FVVH with pre-printed meeting invitations which also contained BB slogans, the FVVH replied that they preferred other means of reaching their members. Aversion to the BB was expressed frequently in meetings. It must have been aggravated when BB made another tactical mistake: it distributed its brochure 'Suggestions for protecting your family and yourself' (September 1961) without consulting, or even informing, the women's organisations.

In 1960, the two organisations managed to reach a compromise and created one programme, which was rather similar to the One-in-Five plan. The FVVH would coordinate the project. Two years later, the FVVH had managed to recruit and train 1,600 volunteer instructors.29 The campaign proceeded smoothly and was rather successful. The wives of mayors played an important role in propagating the meetings. Instructors often reported the lively interest of their audiences and requests from several organisations to organise courses for their employees.30 The 'Suggestions' brochure led to a short boom in requests for meetings, but the ridicule of the BB that followed must have harmed the demand for courses too. There was another brief increase of interest in 1965, when the FVVH organised meetings following a course on television about accidents at home (not specifically nuclear war). 4,577 women participated. But in January 1966, fatigue set in. One of the main organisers said that most people did not want to hear about war, and that she had become averse to giving courses. Many women said they felt the same way.31 By that time, 43 municipalities had attained the target of reaching one-infive women. Most of these were in the countryside. In the cities, interest was much lower (for variations in the urban–rural divide in Britain and Sweden, see the chapter by Cronqvist and Grant in this volume). Overall, only 12% of the number aimed for was reached. Still, 88,594 women had taken the FVVH's course.32

In 1965, the government learned from a preliminary survey that, for many people, creating a shelter in their homes was more difficult than had been assumed. It was decided to investigate precisely how many shelters actually existed (Van der Boom 2000: 157–167). The FVVH was asked in 1966 to suspend its courses until the results were known. This took several years. The Minister of the Interior asked the FVVH to maintain its corps of volunteers in the meantime, so that they could pick up their activities as soon as the government knew more about the shelter situation in the Netherlands. The FVVH responded by organising regular meetings for its instructors, with invited speakers who discussed the latest developments in international politics.33 When the survey was finally completed in 1971, the minister informed the FVVH that its courses were no longer needed, but that he would appreciate the organisation staying on standby.34

# Conclusions

It is evident that the FVVH worked much more effectively towards preparing the population for nuclear attack than the BB. Hundreds of women volunteered to become instructors; they often reported successful and well-attended meetings, and were invited to give presentations by several organisations. Although they did not meet the 'one-in-five' target, they did reach a large number of Dutch women. That the FVVH and the UVV managed to overcome fundamental differences in approach and worked out an effective programme together was another indication of their creativity and tenacity. Even when the BB decided to discontinue the courses in 1966, the FVVH kept its corps of instructors up to date on international affairs and the risks of nuclear war, so that they would be well prepared in case the government requested their assistance again.

All of this scores very favourably when compared to the failed recruitment efforts of the BB, the sluggish participation of members in their exercises and the public relations disaster of the 'Suggestions' folder. The FVVH could probably have been even more successful if the BB had not operated so clumsily, first overlooking the government-supported initiative of another organisation, and then publishing and distributing a brochure without consulting the women's organisations first. Its bad reputation must have made the work of the women more difficult, which is why they kept their distance from the BB.

The relative success of the FVVH can be attributed partly to its solid philosophy, as expounded by Tjeenk Willink, Haasse and Le Rütte, that fostered a conviction that the BB lacked. It was an elaboration of the 'maternalist ideology' of the first feminist wave, made more urgent by the threat of nuclear war. It received broad recognition, for example through professor Buytendijk's widely read book, and it inspired women to provide crucial services at the beginning and the end of the war and during the 1953 flood. Another factor was that the FVVH was a grassroots organisation. A sociological survey carried out in 1962 showed that most Dutch people felt they had no influence on political decision making, and that in international affairs, the Netherlands was simply powerless. The debacle with the 'Suggestions' brochure in 1961 must have reinforced this scepticism towards the state (Valkenburgh 1964: 208, 229–231, 239).35 Given such a lack of confidence in state authorities, an organisation such as the FVVH, run by women throughout the country, which had proven its competence and organisational power, could much more easily recruit volunteers and keep them engaged. The same survey showed that women tended to be more nationalistic than men and more supportive of military defence, which can be interpreted as indicating their willingness to serve their compatriots in times of a national emergency (Valkenburgh 1964: 239).36 And finally, as was the case in West Germany (see the chapter by Molitor in this volume), including preparations for a nuclear war in a range of first-aid activities around the house made it much less controversial than, say, shelter building.

Several features of Jasanoff's description of sociotechnical imaginaries clarify this analysis. First, contestation was a conspicuous aspect of the development of civil defence imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015b: 323). All conceptions of civil defence had to be articulated in the face of fierce criticism and scorn, which was basically similar, though not equally intense, in all countries examined in this book. We can add that very different practices could be legitimated with the same maternalist imaginary: not only participation in civil defence, but antinuclear activism and *rejection* of civil defence as well. Second, the women's organisations *performed and enacted* this imaginary, rather than proclaiming and expounding it in articles, books or other documents. Theirs was 'a continually rearticulated awareness of order in social life and a resulting commitment to that order's coherence and continuity' (Jasanoff 2015a: 26). To be sure, this awareness was conceptually well-grounded, and expounded in the work of well-known authors such as Haasse and Buytendijk. It had also proven its practical efficacy. But in spite of all this, the women volunteers failed to undermine the dominant paternalist imaginary embodied in the BB. Jasanoff writes that a new imaginary can only assert itself if 'an imagined new order draws on deeper notions of how societies ought to fit together', or when they 'fall in line with the way things are remembered as being' (Jasanoff 2015b: 339). Neither was the case in the Netherlands until in the late 1960s. Only then did the so-called second feminist wave launch its attack against the paternalism that was so deeply ingrained in society. This illustrates how entrenched 'infrastructures' of thought and feeling in this case gender conceptions and (dis)trust of government—profoundly co-determine sociotechnical imaginaries.

**Acknowledgements** I would like to express my profound gratefulness to the people who helped me in this project: A. Le Rütte-Veringa and Iris Le Rütte, niece and grand-niece of Jo Le Rütte, who shared their reminiscences of their aunt Jo with me; Roselle Servage and her colleagues, who received and helped me at the Atria archive, even while the rooms were being renovated; Manuel Kaal at Kantar Group in Amsterdam, for locating and sharing NIPO polls with me; Jop Ewijk and Rolf Boost for helping me with the copyrights of Wim Boost's cartoon; and the editors of this volume for their excellent direction of this collective enterprise.

# Notes

CND, urged WVS to stop the One-in-Five campaign, which it saw as war preparation. See Hunt, 'One-in-five'.

### References

#### Unpublished Sources

Stadsarchief Rotterdam, no. 1438, Archive of the municipality of Barendrecht.

Stadsarchief Rotterdam, no. 537, Archive of the City District Head (Wijkhoofd) J.M. Coppens.

#### Newspapers and Periodicals

*De Paladijn* (1961–1970). https://www.delpher.nl/: newspaper database. *Panorama* (1946–1961).

#### Literature

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Ruins of Resilience: Imaginaries and Materiality Imagineered and Embedded in Civil Defence Architecture

# *Rosanna Farbøl*

In April 1951, Director General of the Danish Civil Defence Directorate (DCDD) Arthur Dahl went on a study trip to the UK. During the course of his stay, he visited the British Civil Defence technical school at Eastwood Park, near Bristol, where he was particularly thrilled by a unique feature: a village that looked like it had been destroyed by atomic bombs. There were bombed-out houses, streets blocked by debris, a crashed airplane and an overturned truck. In these authentic surroundings, civil defenders were trained in basic rescue, firefighting, debris clearance, handling of gases and first aid.1 The debris and rubble of this ruined village gave 'mass and solidity' (Jasanoff 2015b: 322) to the imaginary and dystopian war civil defence prepared for. Upon his return to Denmark, Dahl declared that a similar facility, a town of and in ruins, was 'absolutely necessary' in Denmark, at least in the capital, Copenhagen, to

© The Author(s) 2022

R. Farbøl (B)

Department of History, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. Cronqvist et al. (eds.), *Cold War Civil Defence in Western Europe*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84281-9\_7

improve the education of civil defence instructors.2 Realistic ruins were needed to make the instructors capable of performing their vital skills under the direst circumstances, a nuclear war. In this Cold War vision, ruins were key to resilience and national survival.

From the outset of the Cold War, it was generally recognised that in the next war civilians and not just military installations would be targets of atomic bombs. Cities were considered particularly vulnerable. In consequence, the Danish welfare state sought to protect its citizens through a system of civil defence and emergency planning—in return, of course, for the loyal collaboration of the citizens and on the assumption that the citizens themselves contributed to basic civil defence (Bjørnsson et al. 2020). Undoubtedly, the nuclear condition placed this social contract under stress; particularly with the advent of the H bomb, the state was, in fact, unable to offer total protection from total nuclear war. Still, the ruins could demonstrate to civil defenders and ordinary citizens alike how plans for protecting the population in the imagined aftermath of a war were real: they were based on the material realities of built structures of everyday environments.

Drawing on ruinology literature3 and on scholarship associated with New Materialism, this chapter focuses on the ruin as both physical form and representation in the analysis of the Danish civil defence's preparation, performance and imagination of a Third World War. The chapter contends that the ruin 'imagineered' (Monteyne 2011) a stage for enacting and performing a future war, whereby the merely imagined was given a concrete, tangible expression. The ruin town added materiality, spatiality, realism and presence to what was largely speculative, discursive and imaginary.

This chapter sketches the transnational extension of the British model ruin to Denmark and examines how the ruin town travelled to a new national context and was appropriated to local needs (and restraints). In Denmark, the ruin town embedded a sociotechnical imaginary that emphasised resilience, survival and regeneration, where welfare triumphed over warfare. Then, disrupting the ostensible linearity in the 'life cycles' of sociotechnical imaginaries (see the Introduction to this book), the chapter demonstrates that the ruin town was re-extended all over the country through a standardisation of ruins that fostered homogeneity and uniformity to become part of the common Danish civil defence landscape, while simultaneously serving to re-embed the imaginary in local contexts. The chapter, finally, discusses whether these ruin towns contributed to an affirmation of social norms and values, arguing that they, in fact, caused a 'taming' (Clark 1999) of the nuclear catastrophe, as well as reflecting and reinforcing a specific political and historically situated understanding of social order and the 'good society'.

# Ruins and Catastrophe Imagineered

The ruin is an ambiguous structure that can signal both the loss and the endurance of the past. As physical structure and representational form, the ruin complicates intellectual dialectics between absence and presence, fragment and whole, universal and specific, utopia and dystopia. Gazing at ruins, we not only see the actual structure but also draw on a transhistorical iconography of decay and catastrophe, a 'vast visual archive of ruination' (Hell and Schörle 2010: 1). Though ruins are usually seen as tokens of darkness, death and degeneration, they are also associated with romanticism, gothic tales and the sublime, and taken as heralds of hope, new beginnings and the ability of humans to shape the future (Edensor 2005; Eshel 2010). The Cold War ruin town must be understood as embodying both: it represents abyss and redemption, obliteration and resilience. It offered a spectacular stage for the 'performative dimensions of society's self-reproduction' (Jasanoff 2015a: 5), a stage for enacting, or, we might say, *pre-enacting* (Sylvest 2021), the ability of society to overcome the war and extend existing ways of life into a postwar future.

In 1984, Derrida famously stated that nuclear war was 'fabulously textual' (Derrida 1984: 23): it depended on structures of information and communication because a nuclear war had not taken place. It was, and still is, a non-event (the atomic bombs over Japan in August 1945 ended a conventional war, but they did not spark a nuclear one). The ruin town, however, gave the fiction of war a materiality, a presence beyond discourse. Architectural historian David Monteyne has coined the phrase 'imagineering' to describe the merging of concrete, tangible engineering and architecture with fantasy and imagination (Monteyne 2004, 2011). The ruin town is an often overlooked yet striking example of the apocalyptic city imagineered. It represented the ordinary, everyday townscape rendered into a violent, catastrophic urban battlefield. These civil defence environments made it possible to rehearse and enact the imaginary war in realistic, palpable settings and provided immediate physical as well as sensual access to experiences that seemed to defy representation.

The construction of ruins was a way of mitigating disaster. The ruin town signalled a belief that material structures, the built environment and technical skills could offer protection (Deville et al. 2014), while it also in itself constituted a materialisation of the conception of risk. It is important to keep in mind that it is not just the material structure as such that matters but the co-production (Jasanoff 2015a, b) of the ruin and the ideas, fears and ambitions that turn imaginaries into practice and comes to constitute a social reality. The townscapes were, on the one hand, a result of the imagination of civil defence officials and technicians: they literally set in stone the official civil defence sociotechnical imaginary of what a future war would look like and how it could be prepared for based on the capabilities of the organisation. On the other hand, it in turn came to define and structure the imagination, fostering a certain inertia and immutability.

In highlighting the material powers of the ruin towns, I am inspired by approaches of New Materialism that attempt to overcome 'the enduring separation between thing and meaning, concrete and abstract, physical and mental' (Ireland and Lydon 2016: 2) by shifting analytical focus from what things *mean* to what they *do*. These insights are useful to substantiate and operationalise Jasanoff's notion of materiality, which often appears simply to mean technology (Jasanoff 2015a: 8, 20, 22; 2015b: 324). The concept of 'the material' in this chapter refers in an intentionally ambiguous manner to both the material substances (the built structures and infrastructures of the ruin town) and 'the palpable power effects flowing from the strategic arrangement of material objects' (Frohman 2011). Like shelters or scale models, ruin towns not only reflected risk but also produced, performed and transformed risk and preparedness by materialising statements of the plausibility of war and concretising the idea of state-led preparedness and protection (Deville et al. 2014; Puff 2010). The buildings not only framed but also structured the anticipated event. Ironically (but following the logic of co-production), in the attempt to provide technological solutions for an attack feared likely or even inevitable, the architects of the ruin town contributed (psychologically) to the very construction of the probability or inevitability of this event.

The architect Eyal Weizman suggests that 'the ruin has an 'architecture' in which controversial events and political processes are reflected and from which they might be reconstructed and analysed' (Weizman 2011: 111). While Weizman is concerned with the authentic ruins of Gaza, his approach of 'forensic architecture' (Weizman 2012) can be employed in the study of the artificial ruin town because it is not just an illustration of (anticipated) violence but a source of knowledge about historical tensions, social norms, expectations and fears. As an embedding of a sociotechnical imaginary, it is not innocent but must be understood in a specific historical, social and political context that simultaneously shaped and was shaped by rationalities, behaviours and imaginations of future (and past) war(s).

I have combined these theoretical approaches with original field investigations in a selection of ruin towns still in existence (and use) in Denmark. I have analysed and compared the ruins, interiors and exteriors, as well as the spaces between the ruins, the infrastructures and general townscapes. I have consulted the Danish National Archives, local archives and municipal building construction archives to track down blueprints, situation plans, and technical and statistical calculations, as well as correspondence between the DCDD, local civil defence, contractors, architects and engineers. Finally, I have employed a wide array of national and regional newspapers in order to examine the impact of the ruins on national and local communities and identities.

# Getting to Denmark

A couple of months after Arthur Dahl had returned home from his visit to the UK, he sent the DCDD's preferred architect F. Grut and Brigadier Chief O. P. Petersen to inspect the technical school at Eastwood Park with the aim of establishing a similar structure in Denmark. They were received by architect Lewis E. Trevers, Home Office Consultant for technical schools. Trevers suggested that a Danish training ground be initially constructed as a set of few buildings with multiple purposes instead of multiple, single-purpose buildings like Eastwood Park. This would reduce the estimated costs to around DKK 300,000–400,000. According to Trevers, the total construction costs of Eastwood Park had been approximately DKK 1,200,000.4 A gradual expansion could then take place every year with financial allocations on the national budget.

Both Grut and Petersen made reports following their visit, which make it possible to trace their journey and impressions. Clearly amazed by the facility, Petersen described how training was conducted in the village and specified which civil defence functions (including rescue, work in confined spaces, reinforcing buildings) each of the buildings served.5 Grut's report was more technical in nature. Focused on the professional construction of realistic ruins, he detailed how the more or less undamaged part of a building was constructed in an ordinary fashion. Then, debris was added based on a combination of empirical knowledge and technical calculations. Grut made an apt observation when he remarked that '[t]he planning of the construction as a whole, moreover, demands a not inconsiderable display of imagination in order to obtain as realistic an effect as possible'.6 Back in Denmark, architect Grut set to work designing a training ground based on his notes, photographs and sketches. However, a lack of funding meant that Dahl and Grut's ambitious plans for a ruin town near Copenhagen were shelved. The idea, nevertheless, was realised elsewhere, where there were fewer bureaucratic restraints on the display of creativity.

At the civil defence barracks in Tinglev, a village in the countryside of Southern Jutland (about as far from Copenhagen as possible), section leader K. M. Nielsen set about acquiring a bombed-out village—or ruin town as it became quickly known—for the training of his detachment of the South Jutland mobile column.7 With assistance from platoon leader (and architect by training) L. Weisdorf, a blueprint was drawn up (Fig. 7.1).

The ruins were built between 1952 and 1955 by conscript personnel in their spare time using only free materials from houses designated for demolition in the vicinity.8 Initially, the ruin town contained four blocks of houses consisting of six one- to two-storey houses, including a shop and a church-like tower, as well as some wooden sheds. The houses were located around a main street (*Storegade)*, a parallel street called Fire Avenue (*Brandallé*) and two smaller streets across. As a whole, it represented a fragment of an urban environment. More buildings were soon built, including a three-storey factory, and a short stretch of railway tracks was added as well. As it turned out, the approach was not unlike the one Trevers had originally suggested. The streets were blocked by rubble and debris, as well as crashed cars, buses and trams.9 Telephone poles, sewers, electricity and gas were installed, so personnel would also have to take this utility infrastructure (or, rather, broken infrastructure) into account during the exercises. The recruits would face burning houses, smoke or gas-filled basements, and there would be live casualties to be rescued from the buildings. A loudspeaker installation was used to make sound effects, such as of air raids.10 The exercises often took place after sunset, and the scene was set for an inferno: a town ravaged by firestorms and reduced to

#### **Fig. 7.1 Plan of Tinglev**

(Original plan of Tinglev as envisioned by K. M. Nielsen and L. Weisdorf. The factory looks out over Main Street (Storegade), which is outlined by houses in various stages of ruination. To the North-East is an area of concrete debris that were used for practising how to run with stretchers and victims across impassable terrain. Printed with permission from S. Weisdorf)

ruins, the screams of victims filling the night. Training in the ruin town was a corporeal and sensory experience as well as a practical one.

According to Arthur Dahl's successor as director of the DCDD, Erik Schultz, Tinglev ruin town was not perfect from an educational perspective because it was constructed on an ad hoc basis instead of according to Grut's original master plan. Still, it was functional and, significantly, cheap. Schultz estimated the costs at a few thousand DKK, though he stressed that, in effect, it was worth far more.11 The cost efficiency was also noted smugly in a newspaper article in *Horsens Social-Demokrat*, which compared Tinglev to the British prototype. Exaggerating a good deal, the paper asserted that they were 'similar in size and construction'.12 Tinglev ruin town quickly became a national source of pride. An article in the national newspaper *Jyllands-Posten* described it as 'an outdoor school room, where it is possible to create all the situations that will arise if the destruction of a war hits the civilian population in an urban area',13 revealing an expectation that due to the ruin town, the future had become knowable and possible to prepare for: this was what war would look like in Denmark.

Danish newspapers celebrated Tinglev as unique (on the European continent) and revelled in the fact that visitors came from all over the country and abroad on civil defence study trips. The guests were most often from Scandinavia, but also from the other Nordic countries, as well as Germany and the UK. More exotic visitors included Saudi and Thai delegations.14 The ruin town quickly grew to be the largest training ground in Northern Europe—and, at the time of writing, it still is—and the narrative changed from Tinglev being modelled on Eastwood Park to Tinglev being a template for others.

The success of the ruin town must account for the fact that Tinglev was chosen to become the (only Danish) Civil Defence Technical School in 1956. Instead of being a training ground for the local mobile section, Tinglev was now a national school where conscripts and volunteers from all over Denmark came for technical education and practical training. That meant considerable development and extension of the main building as well as the ruin town. Though initially sidelined, the DCDD now took charge. Architect Grut was called upon to do the work, and it appears likely that some of his original drawings may have been put to use.15

## Building the Perfect Ruins

During the 1960s, ruin towns mushroomed all over the country. A revision of the Danish Civil Defence Act in 1962 introduced conscript personnel to local civil defence in provincial towns, something local authorities had long called for due to problems attracting sufficient numbers of volunteers. With the sudden influx of large numbers of conscripts, a need arose for better educational facilities locally. In 1962, the DCDD decided to spend initially DKK 1.9 million on building ruin towns. Six larger provincial towns were selected as the first to receive funding for ruin building: Aalborg, Randers, Holstebro, Esbjerg, Århus and Odense.16 Just a decade later, there were 26 ruin towns spread across the seven Danish civil defence regions.17 It is not without irony that at the same time as geopolitical détente thawed the Cold War climate internationally, the imaginary war materialised in earnest as an urban reality in Denmark.18

Local authorities perceived ruin towns as vital to civil defence training and were eager to start building their own. The four towns of Kolding, Vejle, Fredericia and Middelfart decided as early as 1961/62 to join forces to build a common ruin town despite receiving no financial assistance from the DCDD (*CF-samvirket Gudsø* 1987). The importance and value of ruin towns seem to have been shared more generally by the local communities. When a town started building their own ruins, local newspapers celebrated the event. It was clearly a matter of great prestige and identity, as if the risk of becoming a target of the enemy's assault marked the town as particularly important. On 22 May 1966, the local paper *Vendsyssel Tidende* proudly reported that the ruin town that was being built in Hvims, Northern Jutland, 'can already demonstrate significant achievements even though it is only half-finished', and that local civil defence had 'already benefited greatly' from it.19

The ruin towns were all centred on the so-called standard ruin (Fig. 7.2). It was the perfect ruin. First, it was realistic in two ways: it

#### **Fig. 7.2 DCDD blueprint of standard ruin, 1.16 Structures B and C, perspective**

(Structure B imitated a relatively unharmed building with an intact ground floor, partly damaged first floor and attic. C was a heavily damaged building, where it was just possible to discern the structure of walls at ground floor; the above floors were completely damaged. In addition, there was an undamaged basement. In order to protect the interior from bad weather, a flat roof construction covered the building. The pile of rubble in front of the houses was the "remains" of a completely ruined building A. *Source* Aalborg Kommune Byggesagsarkiv C-18316 1965)

looked like a real ruin, and it resembled common Danish townhouses. Second, it was safe: the training would not become too realistic as a result of actual collapse. Third, it was created with the essential civil defence tasks in mind. The standard ruin consisted of five buildings, named A–E, which represented the remains of five originally neighbouring houses in various stages of ruination.20 (Figs. 7.3 and 7.4).

The buildings embodied different types of collapse as described in the *Basic rescue textbook* (Civilforsvarsstyrelsen 1965), fitting them for use in civil defence exercises for different types of rescue operations. The textbook did not differentiate between damage caused by conventional or nuclear bombs (Civilforsvarsstyrelsen 1965: 58). The rationale was that the main difference between the two concerned the extent of the damage and only to some degree the character of rescue tasks. The latter mainly referred to the location of potential victims, as they would not primarily be located in basements but on all storeys, because modern weapons technology (rockets and short warning times) meant that people would have little time to seek shelter (Civilforsvarsstyrelsen 1965: 58). The corresponding textbook about firefighting likewise operated with few distinctions between a conventional and a nuclear attack and drew heavily on the experiences of the Second World War (particularly the fire storms in German cities). The book noted that the nuclear attacks on Japan caused similar fire phenomena, and therefore, conflagrations would likely occur no matter what kinds of weapons were used in a future war (Civilforsvarsstyrelsen 1971: 71).

The standard ruin was built according to a fixed set of architectural blueprints developed by the DCDD. This made it possible to re-create the ruins almost identically everywhere, and the ruins became in a sense trans-spatial. In order to receive financial assistance for the construction of a ruin town, local civil defence had to use the official blueprints for the standard ruin. This ensured a standardisation of ruin building and a uniformity and homogeneity of ruins across Denmark. To make a proper ruin town, however, the standard ruin would be supplemented with other ruined buildings.

The Danish ruin towns were emulating 'X-town' (*X-købing*), a fictive but generic and conventional market town that regularly suffered attack in civil defence war games, films and planning material. Built structures typical of Danish provincial towns and common street names made the townscapes familiar and recognisable, yet not specific enough to be identifiable as one particular town. The exercises in the ruin towns were meant

#### **Fig. 7.3 DCDD blueprint of the standard ruin, 1.3, structures A-E, main façade and section**

(The brick work was made with cracks to create an authentic look, but only on the surface as the buildings were of course not meant to actually break down. Live or mock victims would be placed in the basements and upper storeys beneath piles of debris, rubbles and crashed ceilings, from where they could be rescued, either lowered or hoisted on stretchers. Walls had to be penetrated, tunnels dug through debris, crashed floors removed and unstable walls braced to locate and rescue victims. In addition, the ruin could also serve as training ground for work in confined spaces, as well as practising the use of gas masks and cutting off gas, water and electricity. Zinc gutters were placed at windowsills in order to light fires or create smoke in the buildings (in a similar way to how it was done in Eastwood Park), but only specially designated houses, called fire houses, were actually set on fire. The standard ruin was even furnished in to make it more authentic. Chandeliers and wardrobes moreover also served as markers for orientation in dark or smoke-filled rooms. *Source* Aarhus Kommune Byggesagsarkiv Byggesag 65–79)

**Fig. 7.4 DCDD blueprint of the standard ruin details from structures C and D**

(Details from structures C and D. Detail drawings meticulously noted where and how debris, crashed ceilings and floors as well as furniture should be placed in order to ensure safety as well as facilitating different training tasks. *Source* Aarhus Kommune Byggesagsarkiv Byggesag 65–79)

to hit close to home for all civil defenders and encourage a sense of responsibility: this could be their hometown… in ruins. Leader of Hvims ruin town, J. C. Kristensen, told a local newspaper in 1966 that the ruin town had given his men a better understanding of the necessity of the training and made them more enthusiastic.21 It confirmed the value of their work, reinforced the credibility of civil defence and strengthened the personnel's collective identity as humanitarians. In this way, the ruin towns contributed to processes of embedding the civil defence sociotechnical imaginary in local communities.

The scale and extent of ruin towns varied across the country, which may reflect different local attitudes towards civil defence, as well as different financial situations. Some ruin towns were small and modest. In Odense on the island of Funen, the standard ruin remained solitary until supplemented during the 1970s by two other buildings.22 Other ruin towns quickly outgrew their humble origins. At Kirstinesminde, just north of Aarhus in Eastern Jutland, several streets and a dozen groups of buildings, including two fire houses and two fire ruins, were constructed. In 1976, a so-called 'corner building' was planned and built.23 It was based on blueprints from similar buildings in Esbjerg and Aalborg, which testifies to a translocal circulation of ideas and materialities.

The corner building was a modern type of multistorey housing block built in aerated concrete. In the 1970s, this kind of built structure had begun to replace the traditional Danish brick house as the preferred building type, and it collapsed in entirely different ways, hence creating a need for updated ruins. Though this development occasioned the inclusion of a new building design, the scenarios and the training changed little.

# Performing and Taming Nuclear Catastrophe

According to the instigator of Tinglev, K. M. Nielsen, the ruin town was 'a training ground where the personnel could receive education in basic rescue in as realistic conditions as possible so that no task in actual conditions would appear unfamiliar to them'.24 The quote reveals a utopian belief that all scenarios could be predicted, planned, prepared for and performed. War, whether nuclear or conventional, could be pre-enacted not re-enacted, as it had not yet occurred—and rehearsed in authentic environments.

The ruin town was not meant to simulate ground zero, zone A, of a bombed town, but rather zones B and C further out. Not a metropolis, nor a village, the ruin town represented an intersection between the doom of the urban ground zeros and rural safety. The building structures had suffered heavy damage, but they were not completely obliterated. There were casualties but also many survivors to be rescued. In short: catastrophic but not apocalyptic.

The tasks that were practised in the ruin towns were mainly basic rescue and first aid, firefighting and debris clearance: tasks that would be difficult—if not impossible—to carry out if an area had been contaminated by radioactivity.25 In 1966, Tinglev started to offer tactical courses on protection against weapons of mass destruction (in Denmark called ABC weapons: atomic, biological and chemical), and in the 1970s, simulated nuclear bombs were exploded as part of the course.26 Yet practical civil defence exercises in the ruin towns seem to have been mainly based on scenarios of conventional attacks.27 Horrifying as these may have been, the lack of explicitly nuclear conditions is remarkable, not least given the increasing public attention to the dangers of radioactivity, particularly after the US H-bomb tests on the Bikini Atoll in 1954.

During the 1980s, there was a renewed focus on nuclear and chemical weapons in both Danish public debate and the civil defence organisation. A special Atomic Chemical Officer course was established in 1983, and the practical courses at Tinglev included instruction in how to wear protective clothing, use dosimeters and other measuring equipment, and how to cleanse after exposure to radioactivity.28 The exercises also include scenarios of radioactive contamination.29 However, the main focus continued to be firefighting and rescue, and the textbooks from the 1960s were still in use. The pragmatic reasoning within the organisation was that close to an urban ground zero in a thermonuclear attack, there would be nothing they could do, and thus no point in training for it. Furthermore, such an attack would leave few survivors and thus, paradoxically, less work for the civil defence (mass burials of the dead were not a civil defence task). In contrast, the conventional scenarios would demand a huge effort on the part of the civil defenders.

Following this line of reasoning, the original core activities of putting out fires and rescuing people from buildings and shelters would be similar after either a nuclear or a conventional attack, even if the circumstances were not.30 Training for nuclear war simply added the extra dimension of being attentive to levels of radiation and getting out when these levels constituted a lethal danger to personnel, a challenge each individual civil defender was thought capable of dealing with. Whether a pragmatic and rational approach or a form of nuclear 'psychic numbing' (Lifton 1982), the attitude attuned the perception of personnel to the threat and how to live with it. Nuclear war was effectively normalised as just another war scenario that could be prepared for in the same way as non-nuclear war, and civil defence work was rationalised as functional, useful and important no matter the circumstances (see also Hogg this volume). By defining and explicating the threat, the materiality of the ruins rendered alternative scenarios invisible or insignificant, and the effect was the construction of a consensus about danger, preparedness and resilience.

The ruin town can be seen as a stage for 'performative occasions' (Jasanoff 2015a:11): training and exercises were carefully planned and orchestrated actions resulting—ideally—in familiarisation with the danger, as expressed by Nielsen. After the Cold War, international historical research often used theatre metaphors to describe civil defence (Davies 2007). This comparison was not unfamiliar to the historical actors themselves, however. Architect Grut remarked in his report following the study trip to Eastwood Park that the ruin town 'to some degree resembles a stage setting that must be constructed with a thorough sense of realism'.31 By pre-enacting the future war in highly detailed and often publicised spectacles of theatrically rehearsed destruction in the ruin towns, the personnel were trained bodily, emotionally and mentally to instil in them experiences and habits that could be mobilised in times of crisis. Enacting the routines in the ruin town again and again can be interpreted as transforming or 'taming' (Clark 1999) an unknown, incomprehensible and incalculable catastrophe, nuclear war, into a familiar and manageable urban calamity, collapsed buildings and fires.

The ruin town offered a possibility of confronting the unknown and unfathomable catastrophe, naming it, articulating it and thus disarming it. Though scary and disturbing, the ruin towns were manageable places of destruction. They were not spaces of despair or hopelessness. Rather, they promised victory, hope and a new beginning in the postwar future. Training and exercises among the ruins demonstrated that knowledge, experience, strength and willpower (and the right technical equipment) were all that was needed to sort out chaos and re-establish the prewar social order. Far from being a radical utopian desire for a tabula rasa and an urban renewal following a nuclear apocalypse (Monteyne 2011), the ruin town can be seen as the (willed) triumph of everyday life in the provincial town, and the desire to extend existing norms and ways of life into the postwar situation.

The technoscientific imagineering of disaster potentially had social effects beyond civil defence circles. The ruin towns were used as the setting for civil defence propaganda films for a broader audience, and they featured frequently in local and national newspapers. Through these mediations, the ruin town subjected the war to public admiration (rather than scrutiny).32 Without fail, the newspapers stressed the realism and authenticity of ruin towns and took pride in how these environments were (allegedly) capable of imitating the abysmal reality of nuclear war.33 The notion that local civil defence forces always managed to combat the danger and rescue the (fictive) inhabitants was celebrated, for instance by the local paper *Vestkysten*, which in 1962 ran the headline: 'The efficiency of Esbjerg Civil Defence proven by realistic exercise in Tinglev'.34 Even when a civil defence exercises actually demonstrated weaknesses or flaws, the papers often managed to turn the narrative around to something positive. In 1975, the national paper *Jyllands-Posten* reported on an exercise conducted by the national Civil Defence Corps. The paper stressed that despite severe budget cuts for years, civil defence was still capable of carrying out their tasks. There had been challenges for the exercise, however, the paper lamented, specifically the conscripts' lack of enthusiasm, which was caused by their disapproval of the war scenario. The conservative paper gave a thinly veiled critique of the indolence of the youth and their lack of understanding the seriousness of the Communist threat, which caused them to rebel. Still, the paper reassured the readers; in the end, the exercise was successful due to the untiring efforts of the officers.35 The population could rest assured that rescue was indeed possible, even likely—if, of course, they acted rationally and behaved according to the instructions of the authorities.

The ruin town was 'politics in matter' (Weizman 2007); it staged public rituals and technoscientific practices, repetitive performances of statehood and democratic participation that formed an act of governance. The average Danish main street was cast as the target of the enemy's assault, but through rehearsing and pre-enacting, the state demonstrated, embodied and manifested its promise to take care of its citizens and re-establish social order. That particular social order was the modernistic, functional welfare state. Welfare and civil defence ideologies were alike in promoting the ideal of the rational, well-prepared citizen of modern society (in this case, the educated civil defence personnel) who contributed to the common good and survival of society by fighting and controlling the threat posed by global and total war. Performing the work in the ruin towns depended on everyone fulfilling their specific and vital task in solidarity with and for the benefit of the larger whole, which reflected a general understanding of society in Danish civil defence in stressing the social norms of conscientiousness and community spirit (Bjørnsson, Farbøl and Sylvest 2020). Acquainting civil defenders and civilians alike with the mass death that loomed in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, the ruin towns educated them in the right behaviour to avoid panic (see also Bjørnsson 2020; Sylvest 2018).

# Conclusions

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate how a study of ruin towns can develop existing civil defence history by bringing an appreciation of the textured and spatialised, experiential and embodied nature of sociotechnical imaginaries. The framework of sociotechnical imaginaries attunes us to both the central role of technology in civil defence and the coproduction of ideas and materialities, which is clearly exemplified by the imagineering of the ruin town. However, this chapter also demonstrates, first, an embedding-extension fuzziness and, second, that a deeper understanding of materiality is necessary to understand the multiple and complex ways that matter matters. Economic restraints impeded the realisation of the British-inspired grand design for a ruin town, yet the idea and inspiration extended easily across borders. Danish civil defence authorities were eager to import and replicate the British imaginary and the technical know-how to materialise it. Whereas extension in Jasanoff's version seems to be a result of an assertion of power by the hegemonic actor over the less powerful, whether this is desirable or not, here we are clearly dealing with what we can call 'extension by invitation' (with a rephrasing of Geir Lundestad's famous title 'Empire by invitation' [1986]).

Instead of a British village, the ruin town took the shape of a Danish provincial town; it was extended into a new national context and a new architectural tradition. Here, however, the linearity of the phases is broken, because this extension cannot be understood separately from the simultaneous embedding of a particular civil defence sociotechnical imaginary that emphasised resilience, survival and regeneration, where welfare triumphed over warfare. Through the trans-spatial structure of the standard ruin, the imaginary was then re-extended across the Danish civil defence landscape as more than 20 provincial towns all over Denmark built their own ruins of resilience during the 1960s and 1970s. Centralised state planning and design resulted in nearly identical sites and built structures with only minor variations created by local landscape, finances and devotion to the cause of civil defence. Because of the recognisability of the standard ruin and X-town, the re-extension was at the same time a re-embedding of the imaginary in local contexts, settings, minds and emotions. It was, then, no straightforward or linear process; rather, the chapter shows embedding-extension to be a two-way process that might be analysed separately but, in reality, was complex, messy and impossible to disentangle.

To substantiate Jasanoff's notions of materiality, I have sought inspiration in ruinology and New Materialism, as well as employing methods of architectural analysis in addition to traditional historical methods. Architecture for civil defence was a medium for the imagination, design and construction of spaces in preparation for a moment of ultimate crisis: nuclear war (Monteyne 2011: xv), and the ruin town telescoped the anticipated global nuclear war into the local environment, entwining materiality and imaginaries. The standard ruin in particular and the ruin town in general expose the threat perceptions of the imaginary war that shaped the organisation of Danish civil defence. While the ruins reflected civil defence's preparation for what they were capable of acting on, the material structures themselves also became agents of continuity. The wartorn town in brick and concrete fostered a form of path dependency that contributed to an inertia and sturdiness in the perception of the future war and how it could be mitigated.

The ruin town's main raison d'être was the (imitation of) realism and authenticity, which made it possible to rehearse and pre-enact the imagined future war. The civil defence exercises that took place among the ruins attempted to foster a special—and spatial—idea of a Third World War balancing between utopian salvation and dystopian obliteration. Unlike real ruins in war-torn cities, the ruin towns were predictable, predesigned and predetermined, and they standardised an unknowable future. They made it possible to assert control over the thought and behaviour of the users and spectators by conforming to coercive programmes of use and preestablished ideologies to enforce a unity of meaning and materiality (Wood 1993), but they also structured and set the limits of imagination, which testifies to the solidity as well as agency of things.

In effect, the ruin town contributed to a taming of the unknown and unknowable catastrophe. It demonstrates the 'blurred the lines between real and imagined realities' (Jasanoff 2015a: 5); the 'real' reality of insurmountable destruction by thermonuclear warfare was tamed through a collective desire for logic and order to produce an imagined reality of a manageable urban calamity and an authoritative but normative representation of how the war ought to and would play out—and namely, how it was eventually managed and overcome.

The ruin town gave shape, mass and solidity to the imagined nuclear catastrophe, to the horror, danger, darkness, agony and fatalities associated with it. Yet it did not present the end of the world as it was known. Far from an 'architecture of disillusion' (Vidler 2010), the ruins, rather, suggested the resilience and eventual triumph of the welfare state and existing social order and norms in a postwar world. It thus reflected and reinforced a specific, historically situated sociotechnical imaginary in which the 'good society' was protected from the ultimate social, political and environmental chaos, the nuclear war.

**Acknowledgements** The author wishes to extend her sincere gratitude to the personnel at the Danish Emergency Management Agency and the municipal Emergency Management organisations who have provided invaluable assistance and gratuitously taken her on tours through the ruin towns of Denmark. In particular, she would like to thank Eva-Marie Nielsen (Tinglev), Thorbjørn Jørgensen (Kirstinesminde), Daniel Birkebæk (Odense), Basse Vængtoft (Hedehusene) and Jan Nedza and Søren Korsgaard (Rørdal).

### Notes

(henceforth BS), Landsarkivet for Sønderjylland (henceforth LS) ME/-879 Teknisk skole, Skolebefalinger, April 1961.

seven in region II (mid-Jutland), incl. Holstebro, Randers, Århus, Viborg, Herning; four in region III (Southern Jutland), incl. Gudsø (cooperation between Vejle, Fredericia, Kolding and Middelfart), Horsens, Esbjerg; three in region IV (Funen and islands), Assens, Odense, Svendborg; four in region V (South-Western Sealand), incl. Næstved and Nykøbing F.; three in region VI (Northern Sealand and Copenhagen), Helsingør, Køge and Birkerød, later Hedehusene; and finally one in region VII (Bornholm), Rønne. In addition, there were a number of 'mini training facilities'. RA, Årsrapport 1972 and 1977.

selected for field studies; hence, the primary descriptions of these exercises still in existence are brief newspaper reports.

# References

#### Unpublished Sources

BRS Tinglev: Beredskabsstyrelsen Tinglev [the Danish Emergency Management's Technical School Tinglev].

1. BRS Tinglev, files 'Ruinanlæg'.

2. BRS Tinglev, files 'Standard øvelsesanlæg'.

3. BRS Tinglev, files 'Diverse'.

RA: Rigsarkivet [the National Archives] Beredskabsstyrelsen.

4. RA, ES Erik Schultz Embedsarkiv, 62 Breve 1957–58.

5. RA, ES 132 Diverse rapporterog betænkninger.

6. RA ES 231 Årsrapporter.

RA, LS: Landsarkivet for Sønderjylland [Regional archives of Southern Jutland] Beredskabsstyrelsens tekniske skole [Danish Emergency Management Agency's technical school], ME/-879, skolebefalinger [school orders].

AS: Aarhus Stadsarkiv [Aarhus City Archives],

7. AS ÅrhusKommune Byrådet Journalsager 1985, 1692 'Projekt 1976'.

#### Online Sources

https://minejendom.aarhus.dk/Byggesag/Liste?adresseId=58345 [10/2/2020] Aarhus Municipality's online archive of construction projects https://www.weblager.dk/ [10/2/2020] Online archive of municipal construction projects in Denmark.

#### Newspapers

*Aalborg Stiftstidende. Berlingske Tidende. Bornholms Tidende. Ekstra-Bladet. Fredericia Dagblad. Fynsk Aktuelt. Herning Folkeblad (HF). Horsens Social-Demokrat. Jyllands-Posten (JP). Jydske Tidende (JT). Middelfart Venstreblad. Roskilde Dagblad. Vejle Amts Folkeblad. Vendsyssel Tidende.*

*Vestjyden Esbjerg. Vestkysten. Skagen Avis. Sønderjyden.*

#### Literature

*Civilforsvarsbladet* 1963:10. Seks øvelsesanlæg sættes i gang, 15

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# Framing Civil Defence Critique: Swiss Physicians' Resistance to the Coordinated Medical Services in the 1980s

# *Sibylle Marti*

The threat of a future nuclear war bothered Switzerland's national defence planners from the time of the early Cold War. Military, civil defence and administrative officials alike reckoned that the use of nuclear weapons would cause far more civilian than military casualties, and the results of a large national defence exercise in 1963 confirmed that the existing measures to protect and rescue the civilian population from weapons of mass destruction were not sufficient at all (Marti 2015: 252–254). That is why from the mid-1960s, Swiss federal authorities not only worked on an ambitious and world-leading shelter programme (Berger Ziauddin 2017), but also set about establishing various alarm organisations and protective services as essential pillars of Switzerland's national defence. Among these evolving national defence organisations were the so-called

S. Marti (B)

© The Author(s) 2022

183

*Present Address:*

Historical Institute, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. Cronqvist et al. (eds.), *Cold War Civil Defence in Western Europe*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84281-9\_8

Coordinated Medical Services as a joint venture of military, civil defence and private organisations. Based on an all-encompassing system of underground hospitals and first-aid stations, the Coordinated Medical Services were intended to 'improve the chances of survival of the entire Swiss people (*Schweizervolk*)' in a future nuclear war (see also Chapter 3 on disaster medicine in West Germany by Jochen Molitor in this volume).1

It took almost two decades to complete the basic conceptual, organisational and legal work in order to establish the Coordinated Medical Services (Marti 2020: 399–408). Hence, the process of finally embedding the Coordinated Medical Services into Switzerland's national defence system coincided with renewed Cold War tensions and nuclear rearmament on both sides of the 'Iron Curtain' at the beginning of the 1980s. On the one hand, this era of the Cold War, often referred to as the 'Second Cold War', was dominated by re-emerging nuclear threats and nuclear fear (Conze et al. 2017; Becker-Schaum et al. 2016). On the other hand, a transnational peace movement (Zieman 2009; Wittner 2003) and global organisations of concerned scientists like the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) (Kemper 2016) voiced disarmament and peace demands resonating more than ever in the public sphere. Furthermore, both international and national aftermath studies showed that no healthcare system would be able to cope with all the injured and burned people after a nuclear war (Berger Ziauddin and Marti 2020).

In Switzerland, as well as in many other countries, manifold forms of protest against the danger of nuclear war took place. In the early 1980s, tens of thousands protested for peace and against nuclear armament (Bein and Epple 1986; Epple 1986). Besides transnationally voiced calls for nuclear disarmament and peace, the Swiss people, as part of the protest, also raised their voices against the dominance and ubiquity of the militia army and the system of civil defence, with its countless protective bunkers. Above all, criticism was directed against the national defence officials' optimistic assumption that a nuclear war was survivable, despite its absolutely devastating short- and long-term effects (Meier and Meier 2010: 224–226). Moreover, during the course of the 1980s, a number of popular referendums directed against the armed forces and national defence, respectively, took place. This opposition culminated in a national referendum on the abolishment of Switzerland's militia army in 1989 (Degen 2017). Due to these protests in the realm of civil society, in the last decade of the Cold War, the belief in a strong national defence showed clear signs of erosion.

With regard to growing civil defence criticism, the Swiss branch of the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and the IPPNW— PSR/IPPNW Switzerland, founded in 1981—played a major role. PSR/IPPNW Switzerland also became a key actor in protest against the Coordinated Medical Services. The cases of physicians and members of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland who acted as conscientious objectors by refusing to serve in the Coordinated Medical Services as part of their mandatory civil defence service gained broad public attention. In fact, conscientious objection of service in both the armed and the civil defence forces formed a vital part of Swiss Cold War history of the 1970s and 1980s that so far has only received little attention (Schweizer 2017; Koller 2008; Möcklin 1998; Winet 1991). Another form of protest by PSR/IPPNW Switzerland was a public campaign against the newly introduced and highly contested conscription of, in particular, female health workers into the Coordinated Medical Services. PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's resistance bothered the authorities and brought Swiss state security, among others, onto the scene.

The Coordinated Medical Services were an essential organisation in Cold War Switzerland's national defence system, usually referred to as total national defence. Its main pillars were the military and the civil national defence, the latter including civil defence, state security, wartime economy and foreign policy (Degen 2009). The ideological base rested on the so-called *Geistige Landesverteidigung*, roughly translatable as spiritual or intellectual defence. It was meant to serve as an integrative and identity-forming belief system which summoned national symbols and myths like Switzerland's militia-style army and the centuries-long determination to defend home ground (Tanner 1999).

In this chapter, I will argue that Swiss authorities propagated a sociotechnical imaginary (see Chapter 1, this volume) through the Coordinated Medical Services and other total national defence organisations. The core of this total national defence imaginary was that Switzerland would be able to survive a nuclear war through a huge collective effort. In Cold War Switzerland, this vision of total national defence was quite strong, and it could exert normative authority, as it was borne and institutionalised by various state and private organisations on all federal levels. What measures and institutions were the Coordinated Medical Services built on, and which material and social resources did they try to mobilise? How should the Swiss total national defence imaginary wield its power? By contrast, under these circumstances, how was PSR/IPPNW Switzerland able to carry out protest actions against the Coordinated Medical Services? Which discursive strategies and practices did PSR/IPPNW Switzerland use to articulate resistive behaviour, and which alternative vision was thereby disseminated?

In what follows, in the first part of my chapter, I will elucidate the system of the Coordinated Medical Services as an emblematic manifestation of the sociotechnical imaginary of Swiss total national defence. By focusing on PSR/IPPNW Switzerland, the second part of my chapter will examine the resistance against the Coordinated Medical Services. In the broader context of a newly evolving, transnational civil defence criticism in the last decade of the Cold War, PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's protest actions brought up novel, subjectivised forms of resistance to Swiss total national defence that played a vital role in contributing to the dissolution of the respective imaginary. In the third part of my chapter, I will show how Swiss authorities addressed and handled the criticism of nuclear civil defence spread by PSR/IPPNW Switzerland. I will also point out how the latter's protest actions, as well as its counter-vision to the total national defence imaginary, resonated with the Swiss public. The conclusion will highlight that PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's subjectivised forms of resistance were a strategic reaction to the contested vision of Swiss total national defence in the 1980s.

# Mobilising the Nation to Save the 'Swiss People'

The Coordinated Medical Services relied on an extensive infrastructure, most of it built underground. In its final expansion, the system would be equipped with almost 2,000 first-aid stations and 30 emergency hospitals maintained by civil defence staff. Another 150 protected operating rooms would be operated by public health organisations. Finally, there would be 40 military hospitals run by army personnel. In sum, these facilities were to provide protected patient spaces for two per cent of the population spread all over Switzerland.2 At the beginning of the 1980s, about half of these facilities were ready to work. Until all of them were built, the Coordinated Medical Services also had to use above-ground first-aid and hospital rooms (Senn 1983: 84–85).

For this ambitious system to be implemented, the Coordinated Medical Services needed the support of state and private actors from all federal levels. On the national level among others, the Federal Military Department, the Federal Office for Civil Protection and the Federal Office of Public Health were involved. Furthermore, representatives of the Swiss cantons and of several private organisations like the Swiss Red Cross, the Swiss Samaritan Foundation, the Swiss Medical Association and the Swiss Hospital Association formed part of the establishment of the Coordinated Medical Services.3 In order to guarantee the smooth cooperation of these different actors, coordination bodies on both the national and cantonal levels were installed (Senn 1983: 85).

The leading threat for the creation of the Coordinated Medical Services was the danger of a nuclear war. Right from the beginning, however, the authorities planned the Coordinated Medical Services to also be deployed in the case of a civil (nuclear) catastrophe.4 Within the Coordinated Medical Services, the civil authorities, the civil defence organisation and the armed forces were responsible for running and maintaining their own sanitary facilities (Senn 1983: 85). Thus, the Coordinated Medical Services were an emblematic Swiss total national defence organisation for which it was characteristic that neither military nor civil institutions took the lead. Prevailing military and civil tasks and structures were kept, and the organisation was to be used in mass catastrophes taking place in war as well as in peacetime. That is why one cannot speak of a centralisation of the Coordinated Medical Services nor, as some critics have argued, of a militarisation of Switzerland's public health system (Lauterburg 1988: 215). Rather, the Coordinated Medical Services should be understood as a hybrid organisation which blurred the boundaries between the states of war and peace. Exactly because of this hybrid structure, Switzerland's total national defence organisations were able to permeate all parts of society (Marti 2020: 417–418).

The Coordinated Medical Services' all-encompassing system required not only considerable infrastructural equipment and material supply but also a huge number of human resources. Besides the members of the army and civil defence medical services, the Coordinated Medical Services needed a great number of voluntary staff. Because this voluntary recruitment could not fill the ranks, Swiss authorities also started to conscript health workers (such as physicians, nurses, physiotherapists). With these efforts to introduce conscription for the Coordinated Medical Services, the authorities tried to install mandatory service for women in particular. Unlike Swiss men, Swiss women were not obligated under the Swiss federal constitution to serve (Bondolfi 2012; Schindler 1997), but they represented the majority of employees in Switzerland's health system (Brändli 2012). With the general conscription for men, it was fairly easy to involve male medical and nursing staff in the Coordinated Medical Services, whereas women had to volunteer for the Swiss Red Cross or the civil defence medical services.

Thus, on the federal level, there was no legal basis to make women serve in Switzerland's total national defence system. Furthermore, in the realm of public health, the cantons and not the federal government had the legal power. That is why the concept of the Coordinated Medical Services envisaged the cantons as issuing legal regulations in order to conscript women (Lauterburg 1988: 208–211). To that end, the concept of the Coordinated Medical Services provided a template for the cantons to use.5 At the end of the 1980s, most cantons had implemented such regulations or were just about to do so. With this approach, the cantons operated in a legal grey zone. That is why a contemporary critic called it a 'women's compulsory service in a roundabout way' (Lauterburg 1988: 208). But the Federal Office of Justice also acknowledged that this legal opinion must be sanctioned by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland (Lauterburg 1988: 208–211). In the decision in a leading case, the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland in May 1989 sustained the cantonal authorities' legal measures. In their grounds for the judgement, it specifically pointed out that the civil defence organisation, the Red Cross service and the women's military service suffered from staffing shortages of tens of thousands of women (Bundesgerichtsentscheid 1989). Thus, the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland ruled that the questionable conscription of female nursing and medical staff for the Coordinated Medical Services which the cantons had installed was constitutional. It is telling that this legal practice was sanctioned with reference to the requirements of Switzerland's total national defence.

Apart from these legal options, the authorities undertook a variety of information, training and advertising efforts to recruit more staff. These efforts aimed at reaching retired health workers and, first and foremost again, women. At the very beginning, when the Coordinated Medical Services were yet to be established, the surgeon general of the Swiss armed forces, who was the coordinating leader of the Coordinated Medical Services at the federal level, did much of the public relations work. He held lectures for civil defence units and officers' societies, as well as at congresses and training courses, in which he pointed out the necessity and urgency of creating the Coordinated Medical Services. In addition, he wrote a great number of articles for military and other journals.6 Later on, standardised lectures and an official information concept were formulated.7 The information concept was intended help to promote a 'common line of thought, a *Unité de doctrine*' between the different actors involved in the Coordinated Medical Services, and, through image advertising and the fostering of community spirit, 'enhance the "Good Will"' for this total national defence organisation.8

With regard to training efforts, the Coordinated Medical Services worked together with several state and private organisations such as medical schools and organisations engaged in the education of healthcare personnel. Upon an initiative of the surgeon general of the Swiss armed forces, the medical schools integrated the discipline of disaster medicine into their curricula.9 The healthcare personnel also received training in the field of disaster and war medicine. The students at the Swiss Red Cross nursing schools, for example, had to take lessons about 'nursing in disaster situations'.10 Other Red Cross courses designed for lay people likewise included teaching units to serve in the Coordinated Medical Services (Lauterburg 1988: 209). The link between training and public relations efforts that was pushed with these courses was deliberately planned. Training and promotion for the Coordinated Medical Services were to go hand in hand and be designed, in particular, to recruit women. The surgeon general of the Swiss armed forces, for example, urged members of the Swiss Federation for Civil Protection and the Swiss Officers Society to 'win over our women *for service for the community* everywhere where you have influence'.11 At the same time, advertising campaigns promoted 'the woman in service of society as a whole'.12 Accordingly, as a counterpart to the mandatory military or civil defence service of Swiss men, Swiss women were called upon to carry out their patriotic duty for the nation by serving in the Coordinated Medical Services. Playing on a socially embedded association between women and social care, it was thought they would take on nursing and auxiliary tasks, which were construed as being female in nature. Thus, Swiss total national defence measures and institutions were deeply shaped by traditional gender roles.

All in all, the Coordinated Medical Services' massive infrastructure reflected the vision and the social order of Switzerland's total national defence system, which both, in turn, were expected to facilitate the Coordinated Medical Services' required material supply and human resources. In fact, many different societal groups and institutions, such as members of the armed and the civil defence forces, cantonal and communal authorities, organisations like the Swiss Red Cross or the Swiss Medical Association and public and private hospitals, worked together in order to establish the Coordinated Medical Services. In doing this, they all helped to promote the sociotechnical imaginary of total national defence and its core conviction that Switzerland as a collective was capable of surviving nuclear war. This imaginary materialised in the Coordinated Medical Services' all-encompassing infrastructure and was institutionalised in the organisation's hybrid structure. At the same time, state and private, military and civil actors of all federal levels alike were called to contribute to and participate in the organisation. An identical call was directed towards Swiss women. Thus, the Swiss total national defence imaginary that was propagated through the Coordinated Medical Services relied constitutively on the mobilisation of society as a whole.

But the numerous efforts to mobilise the nation in order to save the nation were only partly successful. Above all, the number of the muchneeded women could not close the estimated staffing gaps. That is why the chief of general staff of the Swiss armed forces was still complaining about a staffing shortage of 75,000 female volunteers in 1983 (Senn 1983: 85). The reason for this, on the one hand, was that it proved to be fairly complicated to record all the (female) medical and nursing staff and trained lay people that could have been forced to serve by law (Lauterburg 1988: 210). On the other hand, as the next section of my paper will outline, the growing criticism directed against the Swiss armed and civil defence forces in the 1980s further hindered the recruitment of (female) volunteers.

# Practices of Resistance: Claiming That Individual Action Matters

In the course of the 1980s, despite being prosecuted, more and more Swiss men refused to serve in the civil defence forces. Although the actual number was officially unknown, politicians and civil defence officials alike stated in the media that the number of conscientious objectors seemed to be increasing steadily. Sometimes, a group of people collectively exhibited their refusal to serve. In August 1984, in Bern, for example, 17 men jointly returned their documents to the city's civil defence office. Likewise, in November 1984, in Zurich, 38 men collectively embedded their service books (*Dienstbüchlein*) for the civil defence service in concrete and dumped them all in a river.13 Against this backdrop, the cases of members of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland who did not want to serve in the Coordinated Medical Services as trained physicians gained widespread public attention. This all the more so as their refusal led to official charges and, as a result, to media-effective trials (Albrecht et al. 1988: 12).

A textbook case, in this respect, was Thomas Schnyder, a child psychiatrist and board member of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland, who during the 1980s faced several official charges due to his refusal to serve in the civil defence forces. Before 1979, Schnyder had served in the Swiss armed forces and from March 1979 to February 1983 in the civil defence forces.14 From November 1983 onwards, however, he no longer attended mandatory civil defence courses and exercises. In May 1984, he asked the civil defence office of the canton of Zurich to only assign him to services related to natural or civil disasters, like providing surgical assistance in a hospital, and to release him from any services related to nuclear war and nuclear civil defence.15 The civil defence office of the canton of Zurich denied this demand.16 In April 1985, Schnyder sent the same request to the municipal civil defence office in his residential community.17 This request remained without reply.18 Two months later, he denounced himself to the cantonal police of Zurich because in 1985 he had yet again failed to enrol himself in a number of civil defence exercises and courses.19 In January 1986, the district attorney of Zurich filed charges against Schnyder, calling for seven days of imprisonment.20 After that, in February 1986, Schnyder once more demanded of the civil defence office of the canton of Zurich that it not assign him to tasks related to what he called 'war civil defence (*Kriegszivilschutz*)' and emphasised again his willingness to serve in disaster relief.21 In its written reply, the civil defence office of the canton of Zurich denied the request once again but still 'did not want to give up the hope' that Schnyder 'as a physician would find the way to realise that the categorical rejection of Swiss civil defence was based on knee-jerk thinking (*Kurzschlussdenken*) arising from an all-encompassing fear'.22

The prosecution, however, ran its course. On 11 March 1986, the trial against Schnyder at the district court of Zurich took place. Schnyder invited friends, sympathisers and reporters to the trial. He also organised a press conference and a lunch they could attend and sent them documentation about his case when requested.23 The editor of the newsletter of the West German section of the IPPNW regretted that he was not able to attend the trial in Zurich but wished Schnyder 'big media attention'. Moreover, he planned on using Schnyder's documentation about conscientious objection in Switzerland for an article.24 This shows that the national sections of the IPPNW could rely on a transnational network in order to exchange ideas and experiences. At the trial, Schnyder was morally supported by well-known Swiss intellectual Max Frisch.25 Swiss newspapers published various articles about the trial.26 They provoked controversial reactions, as several letters to the editor illustrate.27 Schnyder himself pleaded either for a verdict of acquittal or for a prison sentence of 30 days, the latter leading automatically to his exclusion from civil defence service.28 In sentencing, however, the court imposed a financial penalty on Schnyder, as in an earlier conviction.29 But this was not the end of Schnyder's attempt to escape nuclear civil defence. Another refusal to serve in 1987 was finally sanctioned with 30 days of imprisonment and, with this, the exclusion criterion was achieved.30 Schnyder could serve his time in quasi-detention.31 Finally, in June 1987, the local council of his residential community excluded Schnyder officially from civil defence service.32

Schnyder was not the only person who tried to use his trial to get public attention for his political cause. In 1988, for example, 'Crazy is normal' was published, which was the complete documentation of a trial at the cantonal court of Schaffhausen of seven men who refused to serve in the civil defence forces. The publication contained the defence arguments that had been submitted during the trail, including statements by Thomas Schnyder; the social democratic politician and co-founder of the 'Group Switzerland without Army (*Gruppe Schweiz ohne Armee*)' Andreas Gross; the renowned psychoanalyst Paul Parin; and the filmmaker and publicist Alexander J. Seiler, who himself also refused to do civil defence service.33 Another case that gained widespread attention was that of the journalist Daniel Glass, who himself had also demanded a harsher penalty at a police court in order to be excluded from civil defence service more quickly. While in other cases, the judges had denied these demands or the state attorneys had appealed similar convictions, Glass's case in March 1986 was the first one in which a judge had ruled in favour of such a request. In order to gain publicity for this precedent, Glass sent the opinion of the court to fellow journalists and other conscientious objectors.34

Thus, members of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland as well as other conscientious objectors of civil defence used their trials to win the public and the media for their political cause. By promoting and publicising their trials and inviting the press, sympathisers and well-known public figures, they wanted to create sympathy for the idea of conscientious objection in the public sphere. In order to gain media attention, they staged their resistance in court as well as in happenings, showcase events and publications in new ways. These unconventional forms of protest took inspiration from forms of political action developed by new social movements (Albrecht et al. 1988: 12) emerging since the mid-1960s and especially in the wake of '1968' (Schaufelbuehl 2009; Skenderovic and Späti 2012).

Another form of resistance to the Coordinated Medical Services initiated by members of PSR Switzerland was the launching of a public campaign entitled 'Health services call for peace'. Apart from physicians, also nurses, physiotherapists and other health workers supported the call, which was popularised at a press conference in May 1984 in Bern. At that moment in time, 800 people had already signed the call, 500 of them people working in health services.35 People signing the call did not want to be part of any preparations for nuclear war in health care and did not want to attend any training in war medicine, and they demanded that the courses and exercises in disaster medicine were limited to civil accidents and catastrophes. Furthermore, the signatories of the call stated their solidarity and support for everyone who refused to attend such events. They also refused to accept the newly introduced mandatory registration and conscription of health workers into the Coordinated Medical Services.36 As already mentioned, this conscription was the authorities' attempt to install a mandatory service for women in particular, who were not obligated to serve under the Swiss federal constitution. The protest call was supported by the Swiss Society for Social Healthcare, the Zurich branch of the Association of Independent Physicians and the Swiss Syndicate of Public Services, a trade union.37 The protest call reached and mobilised a great number of working medical and nursing staff who themselves were not members of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland. Therefore, it provided a good opportunity for the organisation to reach out to the broader public and gave it a chance to demonstrate how Swiss total national defence directly affected people's everyday lives.

It is noteworthy that, in their argumentation, members of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland always made recourse to their individual morals and ethics. An example of this is the fundamental criticism of the disaster and war medicine approach that was to be employed in the Coordinated Medical Services in the event of a nuclear war.38 The physician and board member of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland Wolfgang Lauterburg, co-initiator of the abovementioned protest call, prominently criticised the Coordinated Medical Services' inherent militarist logic and its undifferentiated equation of civil emergency with war medicine, and, to that end, the constant conflation of civil and military structures and of the states of peace and war (Lauterburg 1988). He held that the principles of disaster or war medicine were incompatible with his ethics as a physician, as these principles relied on the concept of triage, that is, the sorting of injured people according to the severity of their injuries. Whereas medical ethics would usually require the provision of help to those people who are most injured first, the concept of triage necessitated that so-called hopeless cases be sorted out in order to concentrate resources on those people who had good chances of survival. Thus, triage decisions required a problematic reversal of common medical ethics, as the principles of individual medicine would not apply. Lauterburg and other critics of the Coordinated Medical Services felt that it was against their individual conscience as physicians to work in nuclear civil defence and make such decisions.

The recourse to individual morals and ethics was also at the heart of the new physician's oath that well-known international members of IPPNW signed and that started with the phrase: 'As a matter of individual conscience, […]'.39 Likewise, the so-called Frankfurt Declaration (*Frankfurter Erklärung*) of the West German section of the IPPNW, issued in May 1982, referred to conscientious reasons as physicians (Kemper 2014: 327–328). The Frankfurt Declaration functioned as a transnational element, as physicians from Switzerland like Thomas Schnyder also signed it and used it as an argument to explain why they refused to serve.40 By claiming that they were undergoing a 'crisis of conscience (*Gewissensnotstand*)', members of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland and other conscientious objectors on trial were invoking the conscience of the individual as a legal argument.41 In these cases, as well as in cases where men refused to serve in the militia army, the crisis of conscience served as grounds for justification beyond the law to explain why someone refused to serve (Schweizer 2017: 24–28).

In sum, in both their plea statements and their public statements, the members of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland often referred to their individual conscience and their ethics as physicians in order to explain why they refused to serve in nuclear civil defence and why they rejected the methods and principles of disaster and war medicine. Their personal commitment and dedication, as well as their willingness to accept severe personal consequences such as imprisonment, gave the physicians' protest a high credibility. By invoking their social authority as physicians, the members of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland made recourse to the traditional subject of the conscientious physician who acts to the best of his knowledge and belief. This form of subjectivisation was an effective discursive strategy, the aim of which was twofold: to gain the normative clout and moral authority needed to bolster resistance within the population on the one hand, and to circumvent being branded as a communist or subversive on the other hand.

Hence, on a discursive level, PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's criticism of the Coordinated Medical Services was based on what the historian Susanne Schregel (2009) with regard to the West German Peace Movement has called 'politics of subjectivity', which enabled the peace activists to express their individual emotions of fear. PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's resistance to the Coordinated Medical Services, however, was less emotionally grounded. Rather, with its 'politics of subjectivity', it propagated a moral stance that claimed that individual moral action mattered and might change politics. To state that the actions of each and every person could make a difference was an extremely empowering vision in an era of the Cold War, which seemed to be dominated by feelings of helplessness and hopelessness (Kemper 2012; Marti 2017). In short, the alternative vision publicly promoted by PSR/IPPNW Switzerland was that a world without nuclear war was possible if people took individual moral decisions to listen to their own conscience.

In contrast to the sociotechnical imaginary of total national defence, which referred to the collective of the 'Swiss people', the collective in PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's counter-vision was the sum of acting individuals with a strong moral compass. And whereas individuals had to bow to the norms and requirements of the Cold War within the sociotechnical imaginary of total national defence, individuals in PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's alternative vision were right to oppose these norms and to take ethical decisions based on individual moral grounds. In the subject of the conscientious physician, this vision found its leading figure.

# Civil Defence Critics: Between Public Enemies and Public Support

PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's resistance to the Coordinated Medical Services was effective as publicity, and therefore, was a thorn in the authorities' eye. They responded with hard accusations and legally dubious measures. In the autumn of 1983, the surgeon general of the Swiss armed forces and coordinating leader of the Coordinated Medical Services at the federal level, for example, deliberately dispatched military surgeons to attend a meeting organised by PSR/IPPNW Switzerland and fight their views. In the official minutes, the surgeon general's opinion of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland is recorded as follows: 'This organisation basically calls for an abolition of civil defence, the Coordinated Medical Services, and total national defence. This would be […] the destruction of the nation'.42 Thus, members of the armed forces were instructed to infiltrate PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's events because its view was officially regarded as being dangerous and subversive. Likewise, a military surgeon and member of the Federal Commission for Radiation Protection wrote an article 'against defeatism in disaster medicine' in the influential liberal newspaper *Neue Zürcher Zeitung* in September 1982, rejecting the criticism that the maxims of disaster medicine as envisioned in the event of a nuclear war contradicted the Hippocratic oath.43

With that said, it is not surprising that PSR/IPPNW Switzerland was under surveillance by Switzerland's state security. In their files, state security declared PSR/IPPNW Switzerland to be a pro-Soviet 'front organisation'.44 Swiss state security's secret observations of tens of thousands of innocent people and organisations only came to light in November 1989 and resulted in one of the biggest scandals in Switzerland's recent history (Liehr 2014). But in the first half of the 1980s, Swiss authorities still stubbornly kept to their Cold War enemy stereotypes and total national defence feasibility fantasies. Anyone who like the members of PSR/IPPNW Switzerland publicly questioned Swiss total national defence organisations was basically seen and treated as an enemy of the state. Thus, PSR/IPPNW Switzerland is an example of how, in Cold War Switzerland, state security targeted groups and organisations from civil society that operated democratically but were opposed to the total national defence imaginary.

Besides the authorities' suspicion and surveillance, PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's protest actions against nuclear civil defence and the Coordinated Medical Services, respectively, also provoked reactions from the public. Apart from the already mentioned letters to the editor, people occasionally wrote personal letters to public figures who represented PSR/IPPNW Switzerland. Some of these correspondents uttered mixed or critical feelings about PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's resistance. A physician and colleague of Thomas Schnyder, for example, responded to an article Schnyder had published in the journal *Social Medicine* with regard to his decision to refuse to serve in the Coordinated Medical Services.45 This correspondent held that the 'head-in-the-sand politics' of physicians was not productive. In his opinion, it was better to have civil defence than no prevention measures at all. For him, civil defence did not downplay the danger of war. Rather, confrontation with it, for instance, through the civil defence leaflet in the phone book, might make people think about how such a war could be prevented.46

In most of these letters, however, people expressed their support and described how PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's actions had strengthened their own political commitment to stand up and fight for peace. Several men wrote that, after they had read articles about PSR/IPPNW Switzerland's protest actions, they now felt ready to act themselves and would refuse to serve or refuse to attend special training in civil defence.47 Another man thanked them for their help, as he planned to refuse to accept a managerial post in the civil defence service.48 One man wrote that he would like to act in a similar way but lacked the courage because he worked as an official for a cantonal authority.49 Yet another man wrote that he now felt encouraged to publish a leaflet criticising a nearby planned civil defence building.50 Not only men but also women wrote to tell how similar their own mindset was, and congratulated the courage and the responsible, consistent and brave attitude they demonstrated.51 Even people from abroad wrote letters. A man from the West German city of Nuremberg, for example, expressed his sympathy and support for Thomas Schnyder's decision not to serve.52 This once again illustrates that civil defence criticism in the last decade of the Cold War was a transnational phenomenon, and that there was an active exchange of information and ideas.

To be sure, these letters are far from being a representative sample of what Swiss men and women thought about civil defence in the 1980s, and it is likely that many letters came from people that stood close to the peace movement and thus shared the rather negative attitude towards Switzerland's total national defence system. Still, they are rare and insightful sources for studying how the total national defence imaginary and alternative visions articulated by civil defence critics like PSR/IPPNW Switzerland resonated in Cold War Switzerland of the 1980s.

In general, in the course of the 1980s, criticism against the armed and the civil defence forces enjoyed more and more popularity. At the end of the decade, a referendum demanding the abolishment of the Swiss army launched by the 'Group Switzerland without Army' unexpectedly received a third of all the votes, clearly showing that identification with the key symbol of Switzerland's ability to defend its home ground was eroding (Degen 2017). Likewise, in a population survey in 1989, less than twenty per cent of the respondents thought that Swiss civil defence would be able to safeguard the population in the event of a nuclear war.53 But the authorities' optimistic belief in the feasibility of survival underlying Switzerland's total national defence also began to crumble slightly after a scientific study commissioned by the Central Office for Defence had clearly shown how extremely disastrous a nuclear war really would be (Berger Ziauddin and Marti 2020).