New Book Highlights Kansas’s Cold War Role

According to Oklahoma history professor Landry Brewer, Kansas played an outsized role in the Cold War, when civilization’s survival hung in the balance. In his book Cold War

In his book Cold War Kansas, published August 24 by Arcadia Publishing/The History Press, Brewer tells the fascinating story of highest-level national strategy and how everyday Kansans lived with threats to their way of life.

“I began researching the Atlas missile program four years ago, and I’ve been amazed to learn of Kansas’s vital role in the nation’s Cold War nuclear deterrent and how much the state contributed to winning that decades-long conflict that could have ended civilization,” Brewer said.

Forbes Air Force Base operated nine Atlas E intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites. Schilling Air Force Base was the hub for twelve Atlas F ICBMs. McConnell Air Force Base operated eighteen Titan II ICBMs.

“Had these 39 intercontinental ballistic missiles been fired, they would have reached their Soviet targets in less than an hour, delivering nuclear bombs hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II,” Brewer said.

A Kansas State University engineering professor converted a discarded Union Pacific Railroad water tank into his family’s backyard fallout shelter.

A United States president from Kansas faced several nuclear war scares as the Cold War moved into the thermonuclear age.

The 1983 made-for-TV movie The Day After—which was filmed in Kansas, set in Kansas, and featured Kansans among its cast members—influenced President Ronald Reagan to sign a treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Jerry Boettcher was a 23-year-old nuclear engineer hired by Kansas State University to travel the state and teach Kansans how to survive a nuclear attack. Memorably, his largest class was in Dodge City on November 22, 1963—the day that President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

From the foreword by Mark Parillo, Kansas State University history professor and author of Pearl Harbor: The Attack That Launched the Pacific War.

"Kansas and its people are more rich and complex, as well as more beautiful and authentic, than all the popular culture stereotypes.

"It is this Kansas... that Professor Brewer explores in a well-researched and fluidly written volume. The book is satisfying in its coverage of the many national political and cultural events, federal government policies, and citizen programs to endure the Cold War’s existential threat to American society....

"Professor Brewer also relates the remarkable story of The Day After, a movie made in Kansas about Kansas in a nuclear holocaust—and a movie that shook the nation’s psyche and directly influenced national policy. Yes, this is the story of the friends, colleagues, and neighbors I have come to know in what is now my home, my Kansas, and how they weathered the dangers, the opportunities and the fortunes of the Cold War. But most of all, it is a story of Americans, and one that all Americans should know."

Praise for Cold War Kansas

"Far from being a remote event, the Cold War transformed the lives of Kansans and their institutions from Abilene to Wichita. Landry Brewer has written a briskly-paced and accessible account of how Kansans lived through this pivotal period at home and at work, on college campuses and military installations, not to mention city halls and courthouses. Landry even discusses the role of Lawrence in the filming of ABC's apocalyptic made-for-TV movie The Day After in 1983. This book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the experiences of Kansans during the Cold War."

-J.L. Anderson, author of Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America

"Cold War Kansas takes us back the days when The Day After was Local not just another movie!"

-John Daley, Military History professor, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas

“Cold War Kansas skillfully adds factual meat to the bones of my youthful impressions as it tells the real story of the dangers we Kansans faced during the first four decades of my personal Kansas experience. It contextualizes my Cold War memories as it details the construction, activation, decommissioning, and subsequent use of Kansas missile sites; discusses the Sunflower State’s program of civil defense, including public and private fallout shelters and evacuation plans; and highlights the apocalyptic film The Day After and our Cold War legacy. Brewer’s fine book has much to offer all readers but especially Kansans, who should want to know about and better understand their state’s central location, in the nation geographically and in the Cold War.”

-Virgil W. Dean, historian, retired editor of Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains and author of John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History

Landry Brewer is Bernhardt Assistant Professor of History for Southwestern Oklahoma State University and teaches at the Sayre campus. Brewer is also the author of Cold War Oklahoma. He and his wife, Erin, have five children and live in Elk City, Okla.