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The thing about CD is, it is about focusing on what happens to the survivors. That is something that the "everyone will die/everything collapses" misses out on — people form an almost literal "white wall" in their mind about the eventuality. It is a paralyzing approach.
Whereas getting people to engage with it personally, esp. in an embodied way, even if it is just imagining themselves taking shelter, etc., changes things dramatically. Suddenly they're part of a really terrible story.
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Are we doing CD to save lives in a hypothetical nuclear attack or CD to make people experience nuclear fear? How many kids thought they were going to die in a nuclear attack in HI and what benefit is worth traumatizing folk like that?
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On Q2 — Cold War kids who felt the threat was real became the marchers of the 1960s-1980s. Post-Cold War kids who thought nuke threats went away are the ones who are now saying they don't know what to do and they know nothing about nukes.
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Follow up- did those Cold War kids get active because they felt CD offered them a sense of “control over mortality outcomes” or b/c participation in CD pointed to the vast uncertainty & artificiality of assumptions, esp when moving beyond 1 or two weapons?
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I don't think any honest CD would make it sound like a minor event. I always emphasize that we're talking about casualties many times that of 9/11, and we would expect political repercussions to be many times that, as well.
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But I think there's real power in the engagement that comes with it — it hooks people into it as a reality, not just an abstract idea (like the inevitability of their own deaths!). That's also the power of The Day After and other such media.
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The trick is to get people to take it seriously and not just shut down. I think sensible, honest CD helps with that — more so than even saying "you can't have nuclear war without nuclear weapons." True enough, but doesn't answer the question most people are asking.
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Sensible, honest CD is not what official CD has ever been about. It has always been articulated to state projects of nuclear nationalism & policy support. One thing I’m looking forward to coming out of your current project is an exam of whether it can move beyond that.
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US Civil Defense stuff in the 1970s was a lot closer to honesty about this than the stuff before or after. Much more honest about possibilities. But I agree that national gov'ts in particular may be compromised on this (or inevitably perceived as such).pic.twitter.com/5tDipBJpf6
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“Honesty” would require moving beyond sterile technostrat discussion of well-being and an inevitable happy national recovery and triumph after a big nuclear exchange.
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I can’t help but feel we are recapitulating with a twist the original balancing act of US CD: enough of the “right” type of info to mobilize people, not enough to paralyze them.pic.twitter.com/kP6XdeNYFf
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Civil Defense, at least in the US, has always been more about utilitarian shaping of imaginaries of nuclear war than about the impossible task of securing individual or national survival in the event of a large scale nuclear exchange.pic.twitter.com/gxqHBWUD2O
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