How could you and your family survive a nuclear war? From 1945 onwards, the Canadian government developed civil defence plans and encouraged citizens to join local survival corps. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil defence program was widely mocked, and the public was still vastly unprepared for nuclear war. An exposé of the challenges of educating the public on the threat of nuclear annihilation, Give Me Shelter provides a well-grounded explanation of why Canada’s civil defence strategy ultimately failed. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Canada’s Cold War home front.

Andrew Burtch is the Post-1945 Historian at the Canadian War Museum, and an adjunct research professor in Carleton University’s history department.

Andrew Burtch's profile page

• Winner, C.P. Stacey Award for scholarly work in Canadian Military History
• Commended, The Hill Times List of Top 100 Best Books

Luckily, the Soviets never did bomb us or we would not be around to read Give Me Shelter, an extremely detailed and shocking analysis of how a government and its people failed to connect and collaborate on one of the most important issues facing the world during the Cold War … the book is scarier than science fiction because it shows how unprepared we were to save our own skin had the Russians ever decided to attack.

The Ottawa Citizen