Fascinating & dated book from the Reagan Era about the US Government’s and (to a lesser extent) corporate America’s plans for nuclear war. The bibliography & lists of interviewees for each chapter speak to the incredible amount of research that must have gone into this tome. None of the sources interviewed used the term "mineshaft gap" but a great many of them were talking about it! While much of the material about the development of the A-bomb & the military’s planning for World War III is covered in many other sources, I have not come by many similar accounts of Government & Corporate Cold War era Civil Defense planning. Part of what makes this book special is Zuckerman’s use of materials such as the pre-prepared forms for post-nuclear war Postal or Federal Reserve officials, or official FEMA manuals for fallout shelter leaders to characterize the body of (emergency) Law, Regulation, and Civil Defense literature that make up the USA’s Civil Defense program.
I first encountered this book probably 20 years ago, in my High School library, of all places. The question that this book has always made me ask is how real & serious the overall program of preparations for Civil Defense, continuity of government, economic recovery, etc. was (even accepting FEMA’s rosy survivability assumptions). In the aftermath of 9/11, the national security establishment instituted as much of the emergency procedures as they could, sending the president & vice-president aloft in the airborne command posts, & conducting a limited dispersal of the federal government pretty much as described in the Day After World War III. At the time I remember thinking that in the circumstances that such measures were ridiculous. Why should I or my fellow Americans take comfort from the entire national security establishment treating a scary series of terrorist attacks the same way it would a nuclear attack? I see now that the military probably wanted to send a message to the world that all of our cold-war preparations were still in place, and they wanted to send a message to the population that the military was the tool to respond to these attacks.
Re-reading this book after the US’s disastrous responses to disasters like hurricanes Katrina & Maria, & especially to the Covid-19 Pandemic, during which the administration eschewed any sort of emergency preparations in favor of free-market “disaster capitalism”, makes me question if even in the middle of a nuclear holocaust, the quest for free-market solutions would overtake any pre-war preparations (if they weren't already overtaken by blast, heat, or radiation). In the year 2021, the answer is quite clearly “yes”. But was the answer different back in 1983, when there was a theoretical military enemy, with a theoretical alternative to capitalism?