Hey, who knows anything about nuclear warfare and urban planning? @NuclearAnthro @CherylRofer
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At a thing and a claim was made about how urban planners don’t think about war anymore.
The real question is "did they actually ever even do anything more than think about it" — it's harder to establish than you might think, other than a few very obvious examples (e.g. Abo Elementary School).
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(In my experience the only people in the US gov't who think about the effects of nuclear war on American cities anymore are emergency management people and some public health people.)
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And even they probably prefer not to think about it too much.
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They're more interested in thinking about it these days than they have been in awhile. I've had a lot of interesting conversations. The question again is whether you move beyond talking/thinking and towards "doing" anything, which becomes trickier.
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FYI, the entire September 1951 issue of
@BulletinAtomic was devoted to a symposium on "Defense Through Decentralization." https://books.google.com/books?id=nA0AAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1&lr=#v=onepage&q&f=false …pic.twitter.com/Rq3SnIJsdV
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A significant portion of R.E. Lapp's "Must We Hide?" (1949) is devoted to decentralization as civil defense.https://www.amazon.com/Must-hide-Ralph-Eugene-Lapp/dp/B0007DP0ZU …
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Also, that bit in Errol Morris's "Fog of War" where bombed Japanese cities are superimposed with equivalent-sized U.S. cities is taken from that bookpic.twitter.com/scK99BkqEo
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And Lapp's version was (apparently) adapted from this annotated map in the 1945 “Third Report of the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces to the Secretary of War,” aka the Arnold Report after General "Hap" Arnold, head of Army Air Forces during WWII. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005496537;view=1up;seq=3 …pic.twitter.com/9nAy7qiBVW
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It also included basically the transposed-to-the-USA map as well. See here:http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/03/13/map_interactive_visualizing_firebomb_damage_done_to_japan_during_wwii_through.html …
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Only one project, but googling inspired by thread found Los Angeles started another road through the San Gabriels purportedly on the grounds of adding more nuclear evac options, but gave up after a few miles builthttps://www.latimes.com/visuals/photography/la-me-fw-archives-highway-nowhere-20170316-story.html …
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I've seen a canard that beltway freeways were meant to keep spoke freeway connections intact even if the central city interchanges were bombed out, but ring roads were both obvious and not new, so I doubt that was a real motivator.
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Here we go! This appears to be from Life magazine, 1950. I can't imagine anyone would have thought of this urban form without The Bomb
pic.twitter.com/9WQ6dTYVUs
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For the truly committed, googling the title of that article, which pulled up this doc that appears to be footnotes in German for a book/dissertation on exactly this subject, research even extending to prof's private papers in MIT and other archives. https://docplayer.org/amp/75325631-Gesellschaft-fuer-medienwissenschaft-hg-schwerpunktredaktion-petra-loeffler-und-florian-sprenger.html …
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It appears that MIT political scientist Karl Deutsch and mathemetician Norbert Wiener (inventor of the term 'cybernetics') gave some real thought to this in the 50s https://www.jstor.org/stable/40060685?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents …
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FWIW it was much the same in the bomber era, a fair amount of sometimes radical thinking (decentralisation, hardened buildings, deep shelters, even cities underground) but much less actual doing. See my book, alsohttps://airminded.org/2008/07/29/architects-of-preservation/ …
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