Description: Imagine a summer day in New York City in 1955. An air raid sirens wails, signaling a simulated nuclear attack and Time Square empties as New Yorkers file into subway tunnels and identifiable fallout shelters. Not a person or a moving vehicle remains in the street. It's nearly impossible to imagine now, but this and other Operation Alert drills were repeated through the fifties in cities and towns all across the United States.

From Bomb shelters and air raid drills to the Cold War rhetoric that justified everything from the interstate highway system to CIA wiretaps, Neither Dead Nor Read provides a fascinating glimpse at life in Cold War America.

Beginning in the late forties, national security planners worked to prepare the civilian population to tolerate and support the Cold War, despite the profoundly disturbing implications of preparing to fight and survive an atomic war. The government educated the public about nuclear weapons and their effects, penetrating local communities with sophisticated wartime propaganda techniques. The executive branch of the government took on tremendous new powers, and the relationship between foreign policy and domestic policy changed dramatically. Neither Dead Nor Read takes on this strange time in American history, arguing that this early Cold War home front mobilization laid the foundation for a civic garrison state that produced long-term effects on American Society and postwar American Political Development.

Please Wait