ABSTRACT
The national security state as it emerged legislatively and practically in the late 1940s was a new way of governing the United States in peacetime. By invoking national security, the president could claim wartime powers during peacetime. The National Security Act of 1947 and a series of other measures established the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and related agencies. To wage a cold war and construct a national security state required that US leaders establish domestic consensus at home among elites and the mass public. For more than a decade, the Atomic Energy Commission supervised atmospheric testing at the Nevada and Pacific test sites. The Soviet Union's successful explosion of a nuclear weapon in 1949 only made more urgent the national security apparatus' desire for its own destructive superiority. The open government of law had turned into a secret government that disregarded the law behind the vague rubric of "national security.
