scholarly journals Operation “Lifesaver”: Canadian Atomic Culture and Cold War Civil Defence

2008 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Canadian History ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Rich ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
Ma Thesis ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

On September 28th 1955, the city of Calgary executed one of the only major civil defence evacuation operations in Canadian history. The exercise, Operation “Lifesaver,” was a product of careful planning over a series of months but failed to attract the interest of most Calgary citizens. The operation exhibited both the Canadian government’s concern for civil defence during the 1950s and the desire for civic pride in a decade that favoured a homogenous and functional society. Operation “Lifesaver” was not an accurate representation of a nuclear attack; instead it was a controlled exercise devised to calm the fears of civilians in the face of possible war. Despite the rich primary sources available, Canada’s civil defence experiences during the Cold War remain an allusive topic in Canadian historiography. Operation “Lifesaver” holds a prominent position in Alberta history in an era that defined much of Canada’s nationality and society. This article is the third chapter of my History MA thesis which examines the place of Atomic Culture in Canadian history and the Canadian Cold War experience.

scholarly journals Conclusion: Civil Defence Futures (Re)imagined

2021 ◽  
pp. 233-245
Author(s):  
Marie Cronqvist ◽  
Rosanna Farbøl ◽  
Casper Sylvest
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽  
The Face ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractReflecting on the individual studies of civil defence during the Cold War provided in this volume, this brief, concluding chapter performs three tasks. First, against the backdrop of the empirical analyses and the collective exploration of the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, we reflect on the potential and limitations of this concept in historical scholarship. Second, we sum up the findings of the book by drawing attention to some of the most striking similarities and differences that emerge from the empirical chapters. Finally, we briefly make a case for the value and relevance of civil defence history for current imaginaries of security for civil society in Europe in the face of a highly diverse range of potential threats.

Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Asif Siddiqi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
General Public ◽  
Early History ◽  
Physical Isolation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Camp System ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

Abstract This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

Die harte Schule der neuen Gewalt

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Rinke
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Violent Conflicts ◽  
East West

This study examines the fundamental new direction in German theological peace ethics since the end of the East–West conflict. It guides the reader through the thought processes and discoveries of leading Catholic and Protestant peace ethicists and, in doing so, through the significant developments in theological peace ethics in Germany amid the tough new realities that have emerged since the end of the Cold War. In addition, the book discusses the normative premises for conduct conducive to peace which German theological peace ethics has devised in order to fulfil its responsibility to the world in the face of today’s new, violent conflicts.

Daily Life of the American Embassy in Czechoslovakia in 1945—1948

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6 (104)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Valery Yungblyud
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Economic Recovery ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Leadership Interactions

The article is devoted to the study of various aspects of daily life of the US Embassy in Czechoslovakia in 1945—1948. The author considers the main areas of its work, major problems and difficulties that American diplomats had to overcome being in difficult conditions of the post-war economic recovery and international tension growth. Special attention is paid to the role of Ambassador L. A. Steinhardt, his methods of leadership, interactions with subordinates, with the Czechoslovak authorities and the State Department. This allows to reveal some new aspects of American diplomacy functioning, as well as to identify poorly explored factors that influenced American politics in Central Europe during the years when the Cold War was brewing and tensions between Moscow and Washington were rising. The article is based on unpublished primary sources from the American archives.

Protest and survive

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacquelyn Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Public ◽  
Defence Policy ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Groups

This chapter offers a critical investigation into the ways in which the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) sought to undermine the official narrative of nuclear weapons and civil defence policy of successive British governments during the last two decades of the Cold War.  The first part of the chapter explores the ways in which CND used the tools of propaganda and parody to turn government advice and publicity surrounding policies of public protection against itself. The second part of the chapter investigates to what extent CND’s activism presented a threat to the process of policy making and to what effect the co-ordinated anti-nuclear campaign by CND and related groups was a cause of anxiety for civil defence planners and policy makers. It asks whether, by offering both the public and political groups of the left alternative politics which sought to challenge the official version of Cold War defence, CND could be said to have contributed to either non-compliance with, or early termination of, civil defence policy.

Urban civil defence: imagining, constructing and performing nuclear war in Aarhus

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Rosanna Farbøl
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Catastrophe

Abstract During the Cold War, cities were seen as likely targets of modern total warfare and systems of civil defence were created to protect cities and their inhabitants. Yet existing civil defence histories have focused little on the specifically urban aspect, and urban historians likewise have paid civil defence little attention. Using Aarhus, Denmark, as a case-study, this article examines civil defence through planning, practices and materiality in a specific urban landscape. By analysing how civil defence was organized, performed and built in Denmark, the article sheds light on the mutual imbrication of urban planning, geography and materiality and local civil defence. I argue that through biopolitics, local civil defence authorities imagineered an idealized survivalist community of city dwellers who would pull together to protect and save their city and that this contributed to taming an incomprehensible, global, nuclear catastrophe into a manageable, localized, urban calamity.

Deterrence Then and Now.

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
James A. Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
International System ◽  
Initial Attack ◽  
Extended Deterrence ◽  
The Us ◽  
Nuclear Attack ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract: Against the backdrop of an international system becoming more confrontational in nature, the subject of deterrence is back again. This article provides an overview of the nature of the deterrence problem during the Cold War period and today. While the broader circumstances have changed markedly, today, the central issue of deterrence remains the same as in the Cold War: how to maintain the credibility of the American threat to employ nuclear weapons in the defense of allies in the face of adversaries that can retaliate with devastating nuclear attacks against the US itself. There is little doubt about the threat of the US or other nuclear powers to retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack against their own homelands, so long as those retaliatory forces can survive the initial attack. The problem is the credibility of US extended deterrence.

The Europeanization of Swedish Foreign Policy and Beyond

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Brommesson
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Role Theory ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Role Change ◽  
Role Conception ◽  
Role Conceptions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter analyzes the role conceptions of Swedish foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The chapter’s point of departure is a theoretical framework based on role theory, including the scope conditions for role change and the possibility of the Europeanization of foreign policy roles. Based on a reading of previous studies of Swedish foreign policy and primary sources, the chapter first analyzes how Swedish foreign policy role conception was Europeanized during the 1990s and early 2000s. Secondly, it examines how this Europeanized role was subsequently complemented by a reemerging Nordic one. The conclusion of the chapter is that Sweden’s foreign policy role conception today is characterized by multiple roles.

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