ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the protective logic of security shared by the welfare state and civil defence. It traces the origins of resilience to critiques of the protective logic of security enacted by post-war social liberal security initiatives. This critique is traced to concerns surrounding the potentially demoralizing effects of social insurance in debates leading up to the constitution of the British welfare state. The chapter shows how this critique of protection mobilized in the wake of the Strath report, which demonstrated to policy-makers the genocidal potential of a thermonuclear attack on Britain, to redirect investment from protectionist policies of civil defence, to active defence policies rooted in the idea of deterrence. The protective logics which had continued to animate civil defence in the years following the Second World War would be criticized not only for being insufficient, but producing dangerous levels of dependence.
