AHC: Urban Dispersal in the Atomic Age

Urban dispersal is one of the more bizarre proposals for restructuring society to cope with the threat of nuclear war that circulated in the late 40s and early 50s. Sociologists and urban planners, mostly notably William Ogburn, seriously proposed breaking up our large cities and turning the country into one gigantic suburb, so as to eliminate potential targets of nuclear attack. Your challenge is to have this actually happen with a PoD after the 1945 Trinity test. Bonus points for achieving this without the use of WMDs beyond what happened IOTL.
 
You could somehow encourage urban sprawl more. Maybe more race riots, block busting, etc to encourage more people to leave the inner city. Maybe you could have the focus that the white community builds there own cities that are different than suburbs, ie. how Naperville is to Chicago.
 
This sounds interesting, do you have any links about it?

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.

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.
 
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...
 
Atomurbia: Responding to Atomic Threat by Moving Everyone Everywhere. 1946

is an interesting article about urban dispersal as a way to cope with the new nuclear threat. It also has some interesting links for example another, earlier issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Maybe I have overlooked this reference in your list of links but if not it might be worth checking out.
http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesc...47it-is-probably-not-worth-putting-all-r.html
 
Atomurbia: Responding to Atomic Threat by Moving Everyone Everywhere. 1946

is an interesting article about urban dispersal as a way to cope with the new nuclear threat. It also has some interesting links for example another, earlier issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Maybe I have overlooked this reference in your list of links but if not it might be worth checking out.
http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesc...47it-is-probably-not-worth-putting-all-r.html

Thank you for finding that!

I think he's a bit unfair to the people involved, though. For two reasons: one, most everyone assumed there was going to be a war sooner or later. In a war with atomic bombs, it makes sense to take Herculean efforts to protect the population. Second, a lot of the people proposing this - I suspect the majority - were doing it to try to scare the public into arms control.
 
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