Give Me Shelter

The historian for the post-1945 period at the Canadian War Museum, Burtch describes the program to protect Canadian civilians against nuclear attack during the 1950s, and the overwhelming rejection of the effort by the citizens. There were three stages of civil defense policy, he says. The first, from 1948 to 1954, identified targeted cities and expected them to protect themselves with central government aid--a policy based on British and German approaches during World War II. When officials realized that an atomic bomb was not just a bigger bomb, the strategy turned to evacuating target cities. That lasted until 1959, when a policy involving early warning and fallout shelters was adopted. By 1962, it was all evaporating. He attributes the failure to the nature of the relationship between the state and its citizenry, the government's inadequate plans, and the balance of civil-military relations. Distributed in the US by the University of Washington Press, and in Canada by the University of Toronto Press. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Andrew Burtch is the historian for the post-1945period at the Canadian War Museum.