This is only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War

by David Krugler

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This book tells the history of nuclear age urban planning, civil defence and continuity of government programs in one of the nation's most critical Cold War Washington, D.C.

Genres: History

260 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2006

About the author

David F. Krugler grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He left his home state to attend Creighton University, in Omaha, Nebraska, in the late 1980s. After graduating with degrees in English and history, he earned a M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He moved back to Wisconsin in 1997 to teach at the University of Wisconsin—Platteville, where he’s now Professor of History. A historian of the modern United States, he has published books on several different topics: Cold War propaganda, nuclear warfare, and racial conflict in the United States. Krugler is the author of The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945-1953 (University of Missouri Press, 2000) and This Is Only a Test: How Washington, D.C., Prepared for Nuclear War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). In December 2014, Cambridge University Press released his third book, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back. Krugler frequently serves as a faculty leader for teacher education programs at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Master of American History and Government program at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio. He is the past recipient of research grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Organization of American Historians, the White House Historical Association, and the University of Wisconsin System Institute on Race and Ethnicity. He appeared in the National Geographic Channel documentary American Doomsday in 2010. In Spring 2011, he was a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. When he’s not teaching and writing, Krugler enjoys overseas travel (most recent trip: Copenhagen, Denmark), going to art museums, and reading mysteries (latest favorite author: Charles Willeford).

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid read about civil defense efforts in the DC area from World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I learned about this book from reading Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die, which builds on this book's work and provides a lot more detail about the continuity of government efforts at Site R, the Greenbriar, and other sites.

There's a lot of interesting tidbits for people who live in the DC area, including the challenges of building and maintaining the volunteer civil defense warden and Ground Observer Corps programs (especially given the racial dynamics of the segregated city); the politics around the funding of civil defense and the failed attempts to decentralize and disperse the federal government's operations; the development of areas like Reston, Langley, Greenbelt, Columbia; and the location of DC city government's emergency relocation site and command center at the Youth Detention Center in Lorton, VA.

[Jason Dotson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways, this was an enlightening read to me. In several other ways, it was exactly what I expected it to be....the story of attempting to tackle the impossible.

[Brantley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. A bit dry: this book details seemingly every underground bunker within 100 miles of Washington. Despite this, it's fascinating to read of the evolution of civil defense from evacuation to dispersal to shelter and back again. Also, the book doesn't make one feel terribly confident of our chances had a nuke struck the capital during the Cold War or today.

[Benjamin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't finish this book. It seems to be something a professor put out so he could make tenure. Well-sourced, but shamelessly dry, repetitive, and not compelling, which is sad, as the book is about an interesting subject.