Nationalism, Nuclear Policy and Children in Cold War America

Abstract

In the wake of the Cold War era, researchers have begun to theorize the US national security state. This article is a preliminary attempt to theorize the place of children and childhood in the American `Cold War Consensus' of the 1950s and early 1960s. Children were widely depicted in the Cold War era as innocent beings at the heart of the contained domestic world, as objects of strictly gender-divided parental care and protection, and as the vulnerable core of American society, whose protection from foreign enemies required the construction of a vast and powerful nuclear defense system. The article counterposes dominant Cold War images of abstract, generic children (invariably presented as white and middle class) to the actual children most vulnerable to risks associated with nuclear weapons production and testing, and with government-sponsored radiation experiments. In various ways, these were all seen as `deviant' children, whose lives could legitimately be put at risk in the interests of safeguarding `normal' children at the heart of Cold War visions of American society.