Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Jessica Douthwaite, recently published her article titled, “Covering the ‘Scottish position adequately’: Planning Civil Defence in Post-war Scotland, 1948–59” in the Journal of Modern British History.

The article considers Cold War civil defence policy and planning through a regional lens, arguing that the specificities of Scotland’s governing structures, Second World War experiences and postwar expectations framed the way in which civil defence in the nuclear age was organised. Taking the early period of the Cold War, 1948-1959, as its context, the article periodises attitudes towards nuclear weapons development, highlighting how burgeoning notions of survivability impacted the implementation of policy in Scotland.

One source discussed in the article, a letter from a Home Office official who ridicules the use of motorbikes by civil defence volunteers in rural Scotland, 1961, is reminiscent of the popular mockery the force experienced as nuclear weapons became more powerful and information about its aftereffects more widely available. Equipment from the Second World War Home Guard was repurposed for postwar Civil Defence Corps training, but items like boiled wool uniforms garnered significant derision from various groups aghast at the notion of voluntary forces inadequately prepared for nuclear attack.

While this kind of equipment was commissioned across the UK, in Scotland it was perceived in Scottish terms and acquired new meanings in the topography of Scottish landscapes. This article explores how Scottish policymakers understood such differences and worked within national and regional administrations, to address them. As Douthwaite contends, in Scotland civil defence policy was “conditioned by two priorities: the immediate social policy concerns facing the Scottish Office and the amenability of Scottish policy-making networks to collaborate with each other, and with Whitehall.”