The maddening absurdity of Cold War civil defense – which unforgettably advised children to protect themselves from atomic attack by ducking under their school desks – has attracted scholarly attention from all manner of academic disciplines. Recent work has incorporated sociology (Guy Oakes), political science (Andrew Grossman), and social history (Laura McEnaney, Dee Garrison, and Kenneth Rose).

Tracey C. Davis, a professor of performing arts, English, and theater at Northwestern University, adds yet another dimension to this interdisciplinary trend. Whereas previous scholarship on civil defense has tended to focus on culture and propaganda, Davis examines civil defense as performance. She explains that the planning and enactment of civil defense exercises were shaped at all levels by concepts taken from the stage (hence the title, “stages of emergency”). As she writes, “Cold War nuclear civil defense is not like something that is theatrical but is … inherently and crucially theatrical” (2, added emphasis). She examines the ways in which citizens and government leaders “rehearsed” for nuclear war through such activities as building bomb shelters, evacuating cities, broadcasting emergency messages, and treating the wounded (actors posing as casualties).

Based on an impressive array of declassified documents from archives in the United States, Canada, Britain, Belgium, and Ireland – Stages of Emergency is exhaustively researched and international in scope. Wonderfully illustrated with dozens of fantastic photographs and rich with detail, the book illuminates the full complexity and futility of planning for a cataclysmic nuclear war. The result is a fascinating and disturbing story that is – as with all things civil defense – occasionally laughable. (The cover photo of a civil defense worker flying in an open-cockpit airplane shouting “soothing” messages through a bullhorn to practice calming the population after an atomic attack epitomizes the nonsensical manifestations of civil defense.)

Highlights of the book include its discussion of the role played by such private groups as the Boy Scouts, who were involved in a wide array of preparedness exercises, and the Casualties Union, a group of volunteers who had the job of “acting” as wounded casualties of a nuclear attack. The book also excels at discussing the many psychological issues surrounding nuclear civil defense preparations – how, for example, even a short-term stay in a public shelter in peacetime conditions would fray the nerves of the shelter's inhabitants.

Regrettably, however, the book does not live up to its full potential. The analytical promise of a study that examines civil defense as theater falls victim to unclear writing. For example, Davis writes that civil defense radio scripts “provoke questions about the circumstances under which the domains of reflexive performance and the natural world collapse in order to eliminate the domain of a dramatic text” (195). Such phrasing tends to obscure more than it reveals, as in passages like this: “the explorative experimental basis of a nuclear civil defense exercise is rehearsal's epitome” (90). Repeatedly, as the text shifts from historical narrative to performance analysis, the prose becomes bogged down in similarly jargonistic and impenetrable phraseology.

The result is a mixed bag. Any scholar writing on the atomic age or the culture of the Cold War, particularly in the 1950s and early 1960s, would benefit tremendously from the wealth of detail amassed here. Yet the exceptional research is undermined by dense prose and a lack of conceptual clarity that makes much of the analysis more confusing than helpful.