ABSTRACT
Civil defense has long been a vague and obscure issue in the continuing deliberation of how to protect the American people from the effects of nuclear war. The extremely modest amount of money appropriated for civil defense is testimony to the continued disinterest in it. Groups in communities such as Boulder, Colorado, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have pressured their local governments into refusing to participate in civil defense planning with state and federal officials. Most important of all in generating contemporary antipathy to civil defense has been the advent of strategic nuclear weapon systems. The course of civil defense history in the United States has largely been dictated by the rapidly changing technology of war. The actual choices made from among the alternatives have been, as with all other areas of public policy, the products of politics. The civil defense story is thus concerned both with technology and with the changing configurations of influence and authority.
