Critical Masses

"Seemingly Cold War fear was capable of a kind of ever-presence; haunting the back of one's mind in the shadows, occasionally jumping to the fore like the startling spring of a Jack-in-the-Box."This book focuses on the early period of the Cold War - and its inseparable twin, the development of nuclear weaponry - examining the public culture that existed in relationship to the culture of secrecy. It has three main thrusts: politics, places, and interpretations. Politics are represented to contextualize the decision making and events surrounding the shift beginning as World War II faded, when the world quickly refocused on the growing antagonism between the USSR and the nations of the West. It was an arrangement that utilized new mechanisms of power and control extending between the government and the citizenry: a massive apparatus of secrecy, the control of the release of targeted and essential information, and new levels of governmental authority to question the political ideologies of our own citizenry. Places, in turn, are revealed through analysis of locations where the Cold War was manifest and material traces were inscribed or collected - museums and military installations, laboratories, monuments, parade grounds, missile silos, bomb shelters, the Berlin Wall.... Finally interpretations arise as the grand issues of the Cold War become subject to reflection and scrutiny, which in turn leads to a wellspring of film, literature, songs, exhibits, artwork, academic analyses, reportage, events, and images. These three areas help define a critical understanding of the early phase of the Cold War as it existed within the public eye, wherein it became a type of total war, and a propaganda war, that no one was removed from.