Cold War Ruralism: civil defence planning, country ways and the founding of the UK’s Royal Observer Corps' fallout monitoring posts network

1954 saw the first public detonation of an H-bomb, a weapon whose radioactive fallout challenged existing spatialised notions of targeting and post-attack recovery by making a whole country vulnerable to the vagaries of drifting toxic clouds that drew no distinction between urban centres and rural periphery. In response, the UK government established a network of 1,518 underground nuclear fallout monitoring posts spread uniformly across the country. This article considers how planning for this new reality brought a diffusion of cold war urban anxieties and ways of doing into the UK countryside, but in a way that was awkward and approximate.