Citizenship In Cold War

way the government advanced the propaganda around nuclear war. The Air Force Association convention served as a grand publicity stunt to show the “common man,” how prepared the United States was for defense of a nuclear war. Air Force Magazine said, “A trip through the panorama provided a broad education in defense.” The primary goal of both the name and the convention was to normalize the idea of nuclear war to the American people. Universities across the country were targets of this propaganda because it was essential to win the minds of the young generation. The process was known as modernization theory, and it was touted by Henry Kissinger.
Beyond the evidence presented above, one only needs to look to the conflicting messages
The negative response from the public forced him to shut the program down for fear of its negative effects on his diplomatic efforts abroad. A second aspect of propaganda the American people were being led to believe was that their enemy was terrifying enough to justify nuclear war. Andrea Friedman discusses this in her book, Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibility of Dissent. Friedman focuses on the anti-communist propaganda produced by the United States during the Cold War. Friedman argues this propaganda played a vital role in the defense of the home front, and thus, a vital role in civil defense. Specifically, the propaganda focused on the areas of race and employment. The United States attacked the communist ideology for taking away the right of a person to get a job, and the desire to create free nations in Africa and Asia, This threatened both the economic and social hierarchy the country was founded on. Many scholars agree this was the second purpose of civil defense. The question that remains is whether or
North Dakota, at its peak, was home to hundreds of Minuteman III Missiles, in addition to many other potential targets of a potential Soviet nuclear attack. The fact that a state with so much at risk in the case of nuclear war did not participate in the nation's biggest civil defense preparation, Operation Alert, appears to be the final nail in the coffin of success of civil defense. If a State like North Dakota did not participate in Operation Alert, it appears as though the government propaganda had not convinced the American people civil defense was the way to prepare for and protect themselves from nuclear war. A closer examination of the history suggests this is an inaccurate conclusion for two reasons. The first reason is there is evidence of civil defense participation in the newspapers of North Dakota. The participation, if limited, could be explained away, but with the addition of a second factor, it cannot be. The second factor was the lack of protest when the missiles were being built in the mid to late 1960s. The issue becomes even more complicate when it is learned that the building of the Anti-Ballistic Missile System in 1970 brought tremendous protests in North Dakota, despite the fact that development of an Anti-Ballistic Missile System was favored by a majority of Americans as late as