Order on Their Home Fronts: Imagining War and Social Control in 1950s NATO

Abstract

This chapter looks at deliberations about control of the population in NATO’s Civil Defence Committee and the Senior Committee for Civil Emergency Planning, and their roots in modern culture and science. Treating fear emerged as an important part of the modern psychological sciences in the twentieth century. Applied to military medicine with the World Wars, it became its own scientific field. The results were transported to civil defence research, where the question of panic became a feature of the nuclear reality. As maintenance of government control and control of the population became top priorities in the aforementioned committees, visions of the panicked mob came to be its own dystopic image. Underpinned by psychological sciences, a sociotechnical imaginary of preparedness emerged.