This sounds interesting, do you have any links about it?
Unfortunately, most of what I've found is in books or academic databases.
This is a contemporary news article on Ogburn's push. If you have access to JSTOR, the big source is apparently Ogburn, "Sociology and the Atom",
American Journal of Sociology Vol. 51 January 1946. Haven't read it yet myself, but it's next on my to-do list. I got this out of Boyer,
By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age.
I'm not sure if the idea was a US-only thing but in the UK at least it may lead to the idea of green belts being overturned, turning most of the home counties around London into the massive surburbs you mention.
I haven't seen it discussed in the context of other countries, but it only came to my attention recently.
Of course you also have to consider that this will mean dispersing industry and military bases too, to make them too spread out to be worthwhile targetting, but without big advances in transportation these spread out industry and military bases will be very tough to coordinate. Perhaps the invention of some kind of revolutionary transport system (I dunno, atomic-powered monorails?!) would make crossing the large distances this scheme demands more feasible.
Some of the proposals suggested, in addition to dispersal, burial of key industries and military facilities. Although this was mostly in the context of "this is what we'll have to do if we can't reach an international agreement on control of the bomb, so we'd damn well better reach an international agreement!"
I'll see if I can dig up any more public-domain links on this...