Cold War Ruralism

The year 1954 saw the first public detonation of an H-bomb, a weapon whose radioactive fallout challenged the existing spatialized notions of targeting and post attack recovery by making a whole country vulnerable to the vagaries of drifting toxic clouds that drew no distinction between urban center...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of planning history 2018-08, Vol.17 (3), p.205-225
Main Author: Bennett, Luke
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Center and periphery
Cold War
Networks
Planning
Rural areas
Urban areas
Urban warfare
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The year 1954 saw the first public detonation of an H-bomb, a weapon whose radioactive fallout challenged the existing spatialized notions of targeting and post attack recovery by making a whole country vulnerable to the vagaries of drifting toxic clouds that drew no distinction between urban centers and rural periphery. In response, the UK government established a network of 1,518 underground nuclear fallout monitoring posts spread uniformly across the country. This article considers how planning for this new reality brought a diffusion of cold war urban anxieties and practices into the UK countryside, but in a way that was awkward and approximate.
ISSN:1538-5132
1552-6585
DOI:10.1177/1538513217707083