Medicine in "World War III". Physicians and civil defense in West Germany (1960-1990)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ralph Jessen
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 249107226

The history of the Cold War is also the history of a nuclear war that did not occur. For decades politicians, military leaders, civil experts, as well as many citizens on both sides of the iron curtain did anticipate the possibility of a global war, fought out with weapons of mass destruction. The history of this war which did not take place remained a history of expectations and fantasies, of war games and strategic planning, of fallout shelter building campaigns and duck-and-cover exercises. And it was the history of civil defense administrations and worst case schemes, which anticipated the suffering and dying of millions of people. In Central Europe one of the main battlefields of this future war would have been the territory of both German states. This research project will investigate how the West German medical profession did prepare for the eventuality of a nuclear war on German soil between 1960 and 1990. It is based on a vast amount of published and unpublished sources from different branches of the civil administration, from the military medical service corps, from professional organizations of physicians, from civil defense agencies and also from peace activists as the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The project will describe and analyze the professional discourse of physicians about their own role in the case of a nuclear war, the premises and scenarios they anticipated, the rules of action, which had been codified in handbooks and field manuals as well as public debates about civil defense and the reliability of the promised medical care under the threat of nuclear mass destruction. Methodologically it will combine perspectives from political and cultural history as well as from the history of the medical profession and the history of science. The study is likewise interested in the history of professional organizations, the self-image of physicians and of the public discourse about the legitimacy of experts who literally would have to decide about death or survival of millions of people. A broader and more systematic context of interpretation can be derived from the Foucauldian notion of bio-politics, Didier Fassin s considerations about politics of life, and the 20th Century vision of social engineering.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants