INTRODUCTION

Acting is an emergency, and in an emergency you do whatever works. What

you do in a fire drill may bear no resemblance to what you do in an actual
fire, but your odds of survival are greatly improved by a past enactment of
the drills.

—Deb Margolin

I n mass media coverage of the domestic War on Terror, some

things ‘‘look staged.’’ No wonder, for throughout modern history
civil defense has been deeply implicated with performance, pre-
tense, and scripted pretexts. During the Cold War, citizens’ per-
ception that the effects of nuclear bombing could be mitigated led
to judicious preparation and coordinated campaigns of rehearsal.
We now execute our part in the new protocols of civil defense
—presenting laptop computers for scanning at airport security
checkpoints, passing through metal detectors in federal build-
ings, and scrutinizing our neighbors’ behavior in response to the
latest warnings of terrorism—and thus provide continuity with
Cold War practices.1 No longer merely an arcane by-product of
the Cold War characterized by kitsch artifacts and memories of
ducking under school desks or dispensing id tags to children, civil
defense is resurrected as homeland security.2 Our small gestures—
globalized through compliance at foreign airports and corporate
offices, on public transport, and in gatherings of all kinds—occur
on a massive scale and are habituated into routines. They are pre-
cautions whose status as quotidian or fateful may be revealed only

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 when the next moment transpires and either the status quo is breached or peace-
able normalcy is maintained. The mantra of ‘‘what if ’’ keeps the gestures fresh.
When the public and governments cease to ask ‘‘what if ’’—assuming that this
comes to pass—security behaviors will once again become comprehensible as ves-
tigial legacies of arcane beliefs, bygone fears, and vigilance without a clear refer-
ence point. Until then, it is prudent to understand the antecedents of our rou-
tines.
When the sociologist Guy Oakes called the United States’ Operation Alert
(‘‘opal’’) series of nationwide civil defense drills that transpired from 1954
through 1961 ‘‘full-scale annual rehearsals for World War III based on this mana-
gerial conception of nuclear crisis,’’ he echoed a wide selection of the documen-
tation of this Cold War phenomenon. ‘‘These yearly rituals,’’ he went on, ‘‘en-
acted simulations of nuclear attack in an elaborate national socio-drama that
combined elements of disaster relief, the church social, summer camp, and the
county fair.’’ 3 Oakes invoked performative language—rehearsal, ritual, socio-
drama, play, drama, and theater—as organizing metaphors for the preparations
that constituted applied policy on civil defense in the event of nuclear war. But
like many casual invocations of performance in academic or popular writing, the
deeper implications of these ascriptions were left unexplored. Stages of Emergency
insists on going beyond the superficial resemblance between civil defense and
theater and reveals that civil defense draws directly upon the traditions and tech-
niques of the stage: Cold War nuclear civil defense is not like something that is
theatrical but is an embodied mimetic methodology that is inherently and cru-
cially theatrical. Documentation of civil defense exercises repeatedly invokes re-
hearsal, acting, and theater as operating terminology; this book explains why it
is important to take this seriously.
What are the implications of ‘‘playing’’ at biological, cultural, and economic
survival on the scale necessary for surviving nuclear war? ‘‘Acting’’ involves pre-
tense, but it has a different burden of continuity and completeness in rehearsal
than performance. If events such as opal exercises were ‘‘rehearsals,’’ how did
people take part, who was on the sidelines, and how did they anticipate an even-
tual—though perhaps perpetually deferred—performance? What forms did civil
defense rehearsals take, for what purposes, under whose auspices, and with what
results? Just as acting accounts for the narrative ‘‘what if ’’ pretense adopted by par-
ticipants, rehearsal accounts for continuities between otherwise disparate kinds
of exercises, uniting empirical experiments, rote behaviors, and systems analysis
under a common methodology of embodied practice.
This from
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multinational comparativist study. Since members of the nato alli-
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2 Introduction
 ance recognized the same threat and shared an interlocking military defense, how
do the civil defense practices of three close allies—the United States, Canada,
and the United Kingdom—compare in their implementation of rehearsal tech-
niques? How did these nations—whose history intertwined for centuries as they
articulated their distinct ethos, acquired complications from immigration and
their multicultural ethnos, and coped differently with post-1945 economic chal-
lenges and opportunities—seek to involve the populace in their own defense and
plan for the preservation of governance against the overwhelming odds of surviv-
ing massive nuclear attack? Studying the United States, Canada, and the United
Kingdom in concert produces certain efficiencies: each nation created and pre-
served different kinds of evidence about similar exercises, and conducted some
exercises in common, so one nation’s archives can yield information that assists
the interpretation of another’s practices. The reluctance of each nation to de-
classify certain kinds of documents can significantly cloud understanding of civil
defense preparedness, but fortunately the three do not agree about what should
be kept out of the public domain, and so the openness of one nation’s records can
significantly illuminate areas that remain classified elsewhere. Just as important,
however, the differences between the three nations’ strategies can be revealed by
contrasts between their tactics. These allies were resolute in even spelling civil de-
fense differently: to Canadians and Britons it is ‘‘defence’’ (n.) and ‘‘defense’’ (v.).
This matters, for in essence civil defense policies were nouns in theory but verbs
in practice; only in the United States was the concept of the subject (defence)
and its execution (defense) elided into a single word. If adopting the American
spelling convention (defense) sacrifices this denotative subtlety, the comparativist
approach opens up insights that are both subtle and salient.
Since 11 September 2001, increased surveillance and the public’s vigilant acts
are predicated on risk abatement. Cold War civil defense took many forms, but
it comes down to one thing: risk management. In the Cold War, nuclear attack
was assumed to be a nationwide or multinational catastrophe, literally not sym-
bolically, tangibly and factually, jeopardizing not just liberty and the pursuit of
happiness but life itself for millions or even billions of people simultaneously, as
well as all who might come after them. Scenarios envisioned various risks, depend-
ing on population distribution, geography, resource allocation, or assumptions
about the enemy’s targets, and endless variations were possible. Civil defense ex-
ercises focused on making this plethora imaginable, manageable, and most of all,
capable of being acted upon, at least in part. Chapter 1 sketches in the historical
background for this planning and some of the basic techniques of testing contin-
gencies. Unlike earlier analyses, this study is not about the rhetoric of civil defense

Introduction 3

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 so much as the actions invested in it, and not as politics but as policy testing.
Chapter 1 draws upon the rich literature in social history, sociology, and political
science about American civil defense and adds to it a distinct disciplinary orien-
tation and the compound perspective that results from comparing three allied
nations, the exercises in two of which are entirely new contributions to the his-
toriography. While the United States gave scientific and military leadership, each
nation often meant something different when civil defense was organized, cor-
poreally demonstrated, physically enacted, and environmentally embodied.
Stages of Emergency is not a history of civil defense but a historical treatment
of how problems were investigated through theatrical techniques and rehearsal
methodologies. A vast range of primary documents and commissioned research
reports are consulted beyond civil defense historians’ usual purview of the popu-
lar press and the undeniably important Project East River and Gaither Commis-
sion reports.4 The argument is not that everything was ‘‘performance’’ but a more
sophisticated (and limited) claim that theater (and not merely spectacle) had a
utility in twentieth-century governance, education, and social life, central not
only to how anxiety was expressed but more importantly to how people envi-
sioned ways to identify and resolve anxious problems. For reasons explained in
detail in chapter 2, it is not ‘‘performance’’ that matters here but the preparation
for it: namely, rehearsal and what was accomplished through it.
Rehearsal is invoked neither as a metaphoric motif nor an aestheticized prod-
uct, but rather a technique and mode of doing: not an omnipresent saturation
resulting from modernity but something called up selectively, strategically, and
purposefully. This was not the art and entertainment known as ‘‘the theater’’ yet
it was staged; this was not ‘‘performance’’ yet it was performative, both in the
sense of display and something that was done subject to evaluation. It could be
spectacular, or not; well coordinated, or not; involve extensive predetermined ac-
tivity, or not; depend upon fakery, deceit, and illusion, or not. Rehearsal was a
methodology for exploration, inculcation, and discovery, referential of real-world
problems, like games; dependent upon real-world skills, like work; and address-
ing real-world fears, like ritual. Chapters 3–7 examine the implications of this for
rehearsals involving private citizens. Chapters 8–12 detail what was done in the
name of the public by civil servants but behind closed—and sometimes bolted,
obscured, and buried—doors.
While military personnel are accustomed to thinking of their profession’s de-
pendence upon staged games, it may be more surprising for civilians to discover
the pervasiveness of such practices executed on their behalf. War, after all, is seri-
ous and from
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4 Introduction
 new profession dedicated to planning for the aftermath of their use. These profes-
sionals, and the public at large, acknowledged the hazards of living in the nuclear
world by anticipating and rehearsing their responses. Nuclear bombs shifted the
theater of war to the home front; the rehearsals that anticipated their detonation
may have faded in the collective memory but they were pageants of angst and its
antidotes, exhibitions of knowledge and laboratories for further discovery, and
potent demonstrations of Cold War realities in the midst of uncertainty. Recover-
ing the fullest possible range of these exercises reveals their dependence upon
theater. Indeed, it shows the instrumental centrality of theater to this critical en-
gagement with unprecedented peril. The identified perils have changed since the
end of the Cold War, and there are more technologically sophisticated tools for
monitoring them, but has our recourse for practicing risk management or abate-
ment fundamentally altered?

Introduction 5

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