In 1961, reacting to U.S. government plans to survey, design, and build fallout shelters, the president of the American Institute of Architects, Philip Will, told the organization’s members that “all practicing architects should prepare themselves to render this vital service to the nation and to their clients.” In an era of nuclear weapons, he argued, architectural expertise could “preserve us from decimation.” In Fallout Shelter, David Monteyne traces the partnership that developed between architects and civil defense authorities during the 1950s and 1960s. Officials in the federal government tasked with protecting American citizens and communities in the event of a nuclear attack relied on architects and urban planners to demonstrate the importance and efficacy of both purpose-built and ad hoc fallout shelters. For architects who participated in this federal effort, their involvement in the national security apparatus granted them expert status in the Cold War. Neither the civil defense bureaucracy nor the architectural profession was monolithic, however, and Monteyne shows that architecture for civil defense was a contested and often inconsistent project, reflecting specific assumptions about race, gender, class, and power. Despite official rhetoric, civil defense planning in the United States was, ultimately, a failure due to a lack of federal funding, contradictions and ambiguities in fallout shelter design, and growing resistance to its political and cultural implications. Yet the partnership between architecture and civil defense, Monteyne argues, helped guide professional design practice and influenced the perception and use of urban and suburban spaces. One result was a much-maligned bunker architecture, which was not so much a particular style as a philosophy of building and urbanism that shifted focus from nuclear annihilation to urban unrest.

The articles collected here are foundational contributions to integrating behavioural research and risk analysis. They include seminal articles on three essential challenges. One is ensuring effective two-way communication between technical experts and the lay public, so that risk analyses address lay concerns and provide useful information to people who need it. The second is ensuring that analyses make realistic assumptions about human behaviours that affect risk levels (e.g., how people use pharmaceuticals, operate equipment, or respond to evacuation orders). The third is ensuring that analyses recognize the strengths and weaknesses of experts’ understanding, using experts’ knowledge, while understanding its limits. The articles include overviews of the science, essays on the role of risk in society, and applications to domains as diverse as environment, medicine, terrorism, human rights, chemicals, pandemics, vaccination, HIV/AIDS, xenotransplantation, sexual assault, energy, and climate change. The work involves collaborations among scientists from many disciplines, working with practitioners to produce and convey the knowledge needed help people make better risk decisions.

The study focuses on organized activities within communities experiencing disaster. It is initiated by a description of the nature of disaster involvement on the part of various community organizations. A discussion follows of the different meanings of the term 'disaster' and of the social implications created by differential characteristics of disaster agents. It is suggested that the primary disruption of the social structure is revealed in unplanned changes in interorganizational relationships. Four types of organized behavior are isolated, derived from a cross-classification of the nature of the disaster tasks and the post-impact structure. Using these four types, problems of mobilization and recruitment are discussed as well as the specific operational problems these groups experience functioning under disaster conditions. A final chapter deals with the implications of disaster research in dealing with the organizational consequences of a nuclear catastrophe.