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| CU on the Weekend: Nuclear Families, Nuclear Towns: Los Alamos in the Cold War |
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| Start Date: | 9/22/2012 | |
| End Date: | 9/22/2012 | |
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Event Description
Led by Professor Lee Chambers
In the four decades that began in the winter of 1947-48 and ended with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989-90, the United States engaged in the longest war in its history. The so-called "Cold War," which included the two "hot" episodes of Korea and Vietnam that together cost 327,000 American casualties, reflected the ability of a succession of American presidential administrations to convince the American people that communism and its protagonists constituted an unprecedented menace. Haunted by the fear that "The Red Tide of Communism" might sweep all before it (never likely, as some knew then and most know now) and the suspicion that Stalin's regime had adopted strategies to subvert capitalist democracies by means overt or subversive (as indeed it had), post World War II Americans accepted as imperative peacetime policies that previous generations had consistently rejected. These included: formal defensive alliances with foreign governments; the publicized intention forcibly to defend "boundaries" drawn thousands of miles beyond the territorial limits of the United States; massive expenditures on the manpower and armaments required to sustain these commitments; and the abandonment of long-standing indifference to state-of-the-art weaponry in favor of aggressive development of ever-more-powerful nuclear arms and delivery systems.
The development of the nuclear weapons arsenal took place in an atmosphere of mission urgency and espionage paranoia that thickened as spy scandals surfaced. In weapons laboratories, scientists and engineers saw themselves as "Cold Warriors" on the virtual but terrifyingly real front lines of this superpower confrontation. The feeling of playing a crucial role in the nation's security projected beyond the secret spaces of the laboratories and their scientists and engineers (nearly all men) into nearby private and public spaces (homes, schools, churches), enlisting and disciplining the women and children, molding them, as one former resident remembers, into "Warrior Families that knew the rules." In this program, Professor Chambers will discuss her research on family and community life in this Cold War "atomic city." |
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This event is open to
Everyone |
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