With Enough Shovels
Bethell, Tom
"With Enough Shovels" With Enough Shovels Nuclear terrorism isn't funny. Neither are fallout shelters. BY TOM BETHELL 0nce in my life, I openly crossed the gulf that is supposed to separate the reporter and his...
...Even most left-leaning groups do not look fondly upon the ambitions of Islamic fanatics...
...Meaning: "There are no detection systems inWashington to let people know if there has been an attack...
...military establishment since the War of 1812...
...It advised us that some emergencies are "natural hazards," while others are "technological...
...In most locations two or three days would be enough...
...The principal one was Cresson Kearney, who had earlier worked for Herman Kahn...
...Civil defense would thus diminish our security, by making war more "thinkable...
...Most of her sources said that any postattack response would be "too late...
...they will surely proliferate further, and enemies abound...
...So FEMA hasn't been in the civil defense business since the early '90s...
...So far, she hasn't called back...
...One sign read:" Soviets Have Civil Defense.Why Not Americans?°Another pointed out that American soldiers need defense, too...
...He was then one of the few people in the United States who was still trying to promote civil defense...
...true enough...
...People were screaming that nuclear power plants were a hazard...
...A New York Times headline once used the phrase "civil defense," but it referred to nothing more interesting than President Bush's call for a new volunteer force, modeled on local fire departments...
...The Washington Post's Sally Quinn, wife of the famous editor Ben Bradlee, wrote a couple of interesting articles...
...You can't get gas masks in Washington," she said, but added that "lightweight masks" had been "offered" to Ihshington Post employees...
...short half life" means quickly half gone...
...Biscuits, stocked in shelters with the support of the agriculture program, were turned over to the foreign-aid programs.Twenty tons of wholewheat crackers were sent to Bangladesh...
...We must have stood there for an hour, about fifty yards apart at the two exits...
...He went on to say, in a mid-November article in the I-1'asliington Post: "We must now seriously contemplate that Bin Laden's final act could be a nuclear attack on America...
...the Coast Guard commandant has asked...
...78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 only because it is one of those subjects that no one pays attention to...
...bases, there will be a call to shelter their dependents...
...we have to be prepared for all eventualities, including a nuclear threat...
...BY TOM BETHELL 0 nce in my life, I openly crossed the gulf that is supposed to separate the reporter and his subject...
...It is said that, to a terrorist, "nuclear terror" is a dirty bomb's greatest attraction.Yes, but much of the groundwork for this "terror" was laid by the press, whose reporting on nuclear war, without apology or explanation, has invari ably taken the side of such groups as Physicians for Social Responsibility and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, driven by a barely disguised political agenda...
...No one believes that we face the threat of an all-out nuclear exchange...
...It's simple," he said...
...That was the bad news...
...If so, it was the rare disaster in which no one was hurt...
...I read over a thousand documents preparing for the book I wrote with Gary North, Fighting Chance...
...People used to say two weeks...
...The news that New Year's Eve crowds in New York would be monitored with radiation meters, broadcast repeatedly by National Public Radio, was buried the next day by the New York Tinies...
...For employment opportunities, press 3.") According to its Web site, the OHS is: preparing for, detecting, responding to, facilitating, prioritizing, disseminating, assessing, and mitigating the consequences of terrorist attacks...
...The Swiss are serious about it...
...I went with him to the training center of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in the Maryland suburbs, where he spoke at a conference.The next day he said he would picket the Pentagon.That sounded interesting, so I went along...
...The research was published in a book called Nuclear War Survival Skills...
...it was policy not to build any blast or fallout shelters on military bases inside the United States.At the 1988 convention, I asked General Daniel O. Graham why...
...11, in the first and only mainland attack on the U.S...
...Reagan tried to revive civil defense with a $4.2 billion buildup...
...Nationwide, about 800,000 homeowners were said to have built special shelters in the 1960s...
...Later, we updated and republished it, and eventually the Federal Emergency Management Agency sent thousands of copies around the countryThere has been a big demand for it lately-5,000 copies in the last two months, I've been told...
...They worked out effective shelters for fallout and blast: fallout being the most important, because blast only affects people near the explosion...
...And that was because the Russians did not distribute potassium iodide...
...Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around," he was quoted as saying...
...And half of the remainder would have dissipated by the end of the second hour...
...There were meters to tell you the level of radiation at a particular point, and dosimeters to tell you the cumulative exposure of a rescue worker...
...On November 15, a reporter asked Governor Ridge about reports that Bin Laden had a "dirty" nuke:" What kind of reassurance can you give citizens of this city [Washington, D.C.] and of New York and perhaps other places that they are safe from a nuclear attack...
...How many Americans, do you think, could have told you that...
...The main thing that people need to know about radiation and do not know is this: Radioactive material with a long half-life (e.g...
...Graham Allison, who was an assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton and is now director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School, said recently that "the question is sud JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 79 denly urgent: Could the inconceivable happen...
...The answer is that public shelters don't exist any more...
...Russell Baker wrote columns that were meant to be funny ("I had a tailor make me a suit of lead...
...Quinn's articles were intended to raise alarms that officials have deliberately tiptoed around, but apart from the BBC reporter's question, she skirted the N word herself...
...Congress gives them the money and they go out into the private sector and buy what's needed and ship it to the victims...
...It would be terrible for those living within the blast radius-many would be killed immediately...
...The White House has cited this as a key reason why Vice President Cheney has not been available for faceto-face meetings, but has remained at an undisclosed "secure location...
...A fourth argument was directed against the urban evacuation proposals that were part of both early (1950s) and late (1980s) civil defense planning...
...They took busloads of reporters out there, took them back to a bunker and detonated a real nuclear weapon right over the town.The next day they took the reporters back and let them walk through the wreckage to see what happened and how the shelters had worked.They could see the protection they gave...
...Nuclear bombs intended for war are usually air burst, because you get much greater blast destruction...
...And so the program came to an end, not with a bang but a guffaw A summary of the arguments against civil defense shows how irrelevant they now are...
...He said that after the Cold War, all civil defense responsibilities were turned over to state governments, "and it was up to them to decide whether or not they wanted a system of public fallout shelters...
...It's a question of how much fallout there is...
...Oak Ridge did the work that underlies the world's civil defense systems, tested it with real nuclear weapons, and preserved the research...
...Well, maybe I just will," Quinn said...
...There are people in this country who would try to destroy it if they knew...
...Some said: "We don't need that any more," or "Forget it...
...Hiroshima was an air burst-you could walk the streets the next day...
...Then came September 11.A month later, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge was put in charge of something called the Office of Homeland Security, under the umbrella of the White House...
...Why has the FDA recommended that potassium iodide pills be distributed...
...And so MADmutually assured destruction-was born...
...How are you going to get out in time...
...First, the threat we were to defend against was always an "all-out nuclear attack...
...Then a deputy under secretary of defense, T. K. Jones, caused problems...
...And if the public wants shelters, it would cost a lot of money and the military wants to spend that money in other ways...
...But it decays so slowly and it gives off so little radiation that it probably improves your health...
...Yes, that would be for radioactive fallout...
...or NewYork City...
...Histor ically, what these groups really disliked was the idea that the U.S...
...I would be surprised if more than 50,000 Americans have a shelter space...
...Half life" means "half gone...
...The fallout will be intense, you can't get over the bridge, all the boats are gone, and perhaps in three or four hours you will have a lethal dose.You've got to have a place to hide...
...If Osama bin Laden had a nuclear device, he wouldn't hesitate to use it...
...That's the total civilian casualties from Chernobyl...
...In the early 1980s, I started to think that everything the generations before us had built-everything my father had built, the American technological miracle-could be destroyed in a nuclear war...
...So, civil defense is back with the Feds, then...
...One of them died...
...Radiation sickness isn't an instant effect...
...is testing new anti-missile technologies and has finally abandoned the 1972 ABM Treaty...
...He invited me to go there...
...How do we deal with the potential of a rogue ship...
...I scoured the major newspapers and newsmagazines for advice about what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion...
...Just about everyone who opposed civil defense in the Cold War period accepts this...
...But I found no such article, between Sept...
...If one side had shelters, it might be encouraged to think that it could "win" a nuclear war...
...We are intentionally, for security reasons, trying to be as nonspecific as we can about all this," said an HHS spokesman...
...Steuart Pittman, the assistant secretary of defense for civil defense-the only official to ever hold that position-reported at the time of the Cuban missile crisis that NewYork City had shelters for 8 million people...
...11 of renewed government interest in civil defense...
...Ever since, I have taken an interest in civil defense, if Duck and cover, gals...
...One online seller of the pills received an emergency call from a federal agency in midDecember, seeking immediate delivery...
...it plans to purchase six million more this year...
...What did you do at Oak Ridge...
...After Kennedy, the funding declined...
...People were hired, and they went around showing films about what you could do to protect yourself The message was that nuclear war isn't the end of the world-and it's not...
...The II'aslnngton Post recently referred to it as a "disaster...
...It was in the fall of 1988...
...I spoke before the Defense platform committee at the Republican convention in 1988, and they let me write a strong civildefense plank...
...Is there anything reassuring you can tell us about fallout...
...I wonder how many of those who saw us as they rode up those escalators were still working in the building thirteen years later...
...LBJ became preoccupied with Vietnam...
...I managed to get a spokesman on the phone...
...The Scandinavians have communal shelters.The Soviets also built an extensive system-the Moscow subway system has blast doors...
...True, there has been a great deal written about anthrax, and defenses and vaccinations against it...
...Let's say you are in NewYork City, and there are no shelters...
...The library at Oak Ridge had everything, from the strategic-bombing surveys in World War II to the nuclear tests involving civil defense...
...Store water...
...Because it served the purposes of both the left and of those who wanted to defend the country...
...Civil defense arouses so much hostility...
...As far as the rest of the country is concerned, such a disaster would be eminently survivable...
...That's how vicious the hostility became...
...Possibly I missed something important...
...Their principal argument was that shelters "prepare the people for the acceptance of thermonuclear war as an instrument of national policy," and thereby encourage it...
...A nuclear blast will kill a lot of people, and those deaths cannot be prevented by civil defense...
...A terrorist bomb is not likely to arrive on an ICBM...
...How quickly could potassium iodide pills be made available to the public...
...What about urban evacuation...
...80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 "Point of contact" was Susan Neely.A young man who identified himself as "press" answered the phone and wondered, specifically, what I wanted to ask her...
...The threat is that Islamic terrorists will obtain a nuclear weapon, and explode it in some dramatic location-Manhattan or Boston or Washington...
...The ridicule never stopped...
...They will go on doing so for a long time...
...How long would you have to be in the shelter...
...But half the danger would be gone by the end of that hour...
...With Khrushchev and the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy revived civil defense strongly...
...Others said, "I agree," or "Keep up the good work...
...In a detour, he then observed that bin Laden's possession of documents "relative to a nuclear threat is certainly consistent with his statements that he would like to acquire that capacity...
...Was there no civilian defense at all...
...Hence, an uneasy silence surrounds the whole topic...
...In Washington, if such a vehicle [an SUV containing a nuclear device] exploded near the White House, an area reaching as far as the Jefferson Memorial would be immediately and completely destroyed, and a larger area, extending from the Pentagon to beyond the Capitol, would suffer damage equal to that caused to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995...
...The uncomfortable reality is that prolonged monopoly of nuclear weapons by a handful of countries has now ended...
...Robinson's messages called for a return to real military defense (not just in name, as in "Department of Defense") and in particular to civil defense, which had been a Defense Department function until the late 1970s...
...I called again, and then we went through the same routine...
...GIMME SHELTER rich has been written lately about missile defense, because the U.S...
...Have some emergency food...
...In what follows, I shall focus on the least "thinkable" terrorist possibility-a nuclear explosion in an American city...
...What remained was the radiological monitoring program, and an urban evacuation program...
...But the consensus is that chemical attacks are much harder to pull off than is generally supposed...
...But Bush [senior] ignored it...
...But the "lessons" of the Cold War still buzz about in the heads of those who taught them...
...Change "years" to "days...
...We calculated in the mid-1980s that you could do the whole thing for $200 or $300 per person...
...Fallout shelters went down the tubes...
...In short, it offers employees some nice desk jobs...
...What can the average family do...
...But they bombard human cells only infre quently, and the rate is slow enough that the body's self-repair mechanisms can keep up...
...11 brought it back into the news-civil defense...
...Those who did react spoke out of the side of their mouths, so that no colleague would overhear them.They were utterly divided...
...But a terrorist bomb is going to be a ground burst, which is where the fallout is generated...
...It's called fallout because isotopes get onto the dirt of the explosion and are sucked up into the atmosphere, then "fall out" later.The dangerous isotopes are those that decay rapidly...
...But hundreds of thousands of meters were trashed and destroyed...
...A third argument was that civil defense would only distract us from detente and arms control, in favor of "ludicrous mopping up plans for the postattack era," as The New York Times (with a very different editorial policy than today's) put it in the 1980s...
...He used a small crane to get the jacket on...
...One final thought...
...Critics of missile defense say that that is not the threat we face...
...What does FEMA do today...
...In a few states, activist citizens stood between the government and the dumpsters and grabbed the meters...
...mainland could not be survived...
...All read the messages...
...in chemistry, he taught at the University of California at San Diego and later became president and research director at the Linus Pauling Institute...
...And that is precisely why fallout shelters are something we should be thinking about...
...What foreign countries have civil defense...
...Taking out insurance against the calamity of war" was "realistic," the paper said...
...How many working, fully equipped shelters remain...
...Delapidated shelter signs, three yellow triangles inside a black circle, may still be seen in older buildings...
...The defense of the country became a national concern, especially after the anthrax scares...
...A few state governments decided to fund it...
...Some...
...That was for bureaucrats in Washingtondeciding which roads to take out of the cities...
...The article used the phrase "running gag" to characterize all discussion of shelters...
...In Jimmy Carter's White House, Zbigniew Brzezinski ordered emergency evacuation alerts, but when civil defense was moved out of the Pentagon-and the chairman of the President's Inaugural Ball Committee put in charge of the program-the handwriting was on the wall...
...Eugene Wigner, who had won the Nobel Prize in physics, initiated the civil defense research program there...
...Eventually, Oak Ridge realized that we would never have a real civil defense system...
...Some said nothing...
...Are there any signs since Sept...
...He added that "we are certainly still in the disaster business" earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes-"but as far as citizen preparedness with regard to terrorist attacks that might involve a nuclear weapon or radiation exposure, Governor Ridge's office is working on material to get out to the public...
...On the other hand, material with a short half life-tritium, for instance-is immediately dangerous, because its atoms decay fast enough to overwhelm the body's defenses...
...No one thinks that Peoria or Biloxi or Lincoln, Nebraska, are at risk...
...Above all, it is coordinating...
...One wonders if they will have a change of heart...
...plutonium) does not emit radiation that is harmful in the short term...
...The good news took us right back to square one:"It does not confirm that he has that capacity-it just says that...
...We were, as it turns out, not too many yards from the place where the jet slammed into the Pentagon on the morning of Sept...
...Richard Nixon had other things on his mind...
...Nuclear power plants are just not dangerous...
...I know of hundreds, and my guess is that there might be several thousand...
...What happened to the metering program...
...A very primitive fallout shelter takes a few hours to build...
...Possibly there was one...
...It provides no protection against terrorism or war...
...If you build a fancy basement shelter ahead of time, it has the disadvantage that if the house burns down, you have carbon monoxide in the shelter...
...But fallout and fire kill more people than the blast...
...I can give you point of contact over there...
...But we need to learn something about radiation...
...She did finally get some gas masks, from a place in Salt Lake City where "they were stockpiling them for the Olympics...
...It's a question of how much mass there is between you and the fallout particles...
...They "manage" emergencies...
...If there's a big hurricane or earthquake, they go to Congress and say we need a big appropriation to help all these people...
...Congress voted much smaller sums...
...Over the Christmas break, the U.S...
...But those who live outside that radius (three miles is a good figure), could survive it-if they have a fallout shelter to go to...
...How much would a nationwide program cost...
...I tried to find out what the C ffice of Homeland Security thinks of fallout shelters, and what we should do in the event of a nuclear explosion in Washington, D.C...
...In a house basement you get some fallout protection, and you can quickly make it better...
...Fallout shelters were marked and stocked throughout the country...
...The FDA's call for potassium iodide pills to protect against thyroid cancer has been described...
...You wouldn't want to get close to radioactive material with a half-life of one hour, for example...
...At the words "nuclear" and "radiation," he said: "She's not available right now I'd have to have her call you back on that...
...In the event of the latter, we were told, "head up-wind of the incident...
...Possibly, it could spread fallout across a few city blocks, but as with all radioactive isotopes, the contamination would cease to be dangerous to humans after a week or two...
...An optimistic estimate of the number of people they would hold would be thirty people each...
...11, there have been occasional news stories tangentially related to nuclear terrorism...
...Protecting the country from terrorism moved to the top of everybody's list of priorities after September 11," The New York Times editorialized in December...
...President Kennedy supported civil defense...
...If you eat potassium iodide pills, the iodine in those pills saturates your thyroid, so no more can get in...
...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 83...
...In the article, headlined "We Must Act As If He Has the Bomb,"Allison wrote: "Even a crude device could create an explosive force of 10,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT, demolishing an area of about three square miles...
...There has also been concern about socalled "dirty" bombs, which combine radioactive material with conventional explosives to deliberately create fallout...
...There was no military defense either...
...Iodine is scarce in the diet, but the thyroid gland requires it, so it grabs iodine from anywhere in your body.That means that if there's radioactive iodine from fallout, it will grab that, too...
...Just at that time, 900 faculty members at universities in the Boston and New York areas signed a dissenting "open letter to President Kennedy...
...was preparing to defend itself in a war with a socialist country-the Soviet Union.Today, however, the ideological picture is very different...
...A sleepy spokesman at the American Civil Defense Association said he hadn't seen anything either...
...Department of Health and Human Services bought 1.6 million doses of potassium iodide from private sources...
...Engineers and scientists worked on it...
...So Chester took the money left over and asked, "What could a family do for itself...
...One of the biggest problems in shelters is that people don't provide adequate ventilation...
...Or Sadddam Hussein or the North Koreans will lob a missile at Central Park or downtown Los Angeles...
...Of course, it would have been built anyway...
...The government is fearful of causing panic," she learned...
...the cliche was that "the living would envy the dead...
...Not only the World Trade Center, but all ofWall Street and the financial district and the lower tip of Manhattan up to Gramercy Park would have disappeared...
...Twenty years ago he founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which conducts basic and applied research in biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, the molecular biology of aging and other subjects related to the improvement of human life...
...I volunteered...
...Just before Christmas, the Washington Post published a big "Style" section article, with a headline: "Whatever happened to all those bomb shelters we built the last time we felt full of fear...
...I had spent a couple of days in the Washington area with Art Robinson of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine...
...Chernobyl didn't even have a containment building, or potassium iodide to distribute, and yet later deaths from radiation exposure were impossible to document...
...It was pointed out, no doubt correctly, that in the mass panic of imminent nuclear attack, escaping by highway, or any other way, from crowded cities like New York was simply not feasible...
...urban evacuation plans were abandoned...
...But if they do so, they aren't dangerous for long-that's the reason you don't have to stay in a shelter for long.They talk about the long half-life of plutonium...
...I went to a meeting of the American Civil Defense Association, where I met Conrad Chester...
...It was nonsense, but it was popular because it could be done sitting at their desks...
...Ridge replied that "our responsibility" is to be prepared for different kinds of attacks"biological, chemical, radiological and nuclear...
...Here's a paradox: Civil defense was undermined by describing the horrors of nuclear war...
...In 1955, they built a town on theYucca Flats, 80 miles north of Las Vegas-the Nevada test site.They built power lines and infrastructure, houses and shelters with mannequins...
...The air and 82 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 meters were ordered destroyed, the personnel that maintained them were fired, FEMA funding was withdrawn...
...11 and the end of the year...
...But the "24-hour information line" did not include the option of waiting until someone answers...
...Edward Teller helped persuade John F. Kennedy that shelters were still desirable...
...Civilian defense against nuclear attack, centered around fallout shelters, was strongly supported by three presidents, Harry Truman, John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan...
...A year ago, Art was profiled in The American Spectator (February 2001,"A Scientist Finds Independence...
...The explosive force of such a bomb might be that of a truck-bomb, as in Oklahoma City, or something less...
...If they exploded one in the harbor, probably anywhere in Manhattan would be lethal if you didn't have a shelter...
...In Chernobyl, aside from a handful of people killed fighting the fires, the only credible claim of casualties is that 200 children got thyroid cancer...
...So far, however, almost nothing has been written about civil defense or fallout shelters...
...Excerpts: How d d you get involved in civil defense...
...The District of Columbia's Emergency Management Agency sent an eight-page "Family Preparedness Guide" to all postal patrons...
...Virtually all the emergency centers in the country had radiation meters: police stations, sheriffs' offices, fire stations...
...I'll give you an idea how bad it became...
...It's about the same as President Bush's economic stimulus package...
...If we build them on U.S...
...A Lear jet was sent to Texas that day to pic up the sizeable order...
...And in fact what FEMA talked about in those years was nuclear accidents, not war...
...I am certain today that you could build a superb civil defense system for the United States for about $500 per person.That is probably an overestimate...
...And so on.Yet we find IN eti su'eek saying that fallout from a "dirty" bomb "could render an American city unin habitable for years...
...It is cumulative...
...I don't even want to say where the material is now...
...Its half-life is long because its atoms "decay" only slowly...
...Art Robinson may be reached at the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, Box 1250, Cave Junction, Oregon, 97523 (w ww.oisni.org...
...It follows from this that the hazards of radioactivity dissipate quickly...
...A second argument, much touted, was that civil defense would "destabilize" the strategy of deterrence...
...I can see an explosion killing a million people...
...Tom Wicker did likewise (don't ask).Whenever the detail of any proposal leaked out, it seemed fit only for further derision...
...The Cold war was still on...
...What's the difference between ground bursts...
...BACK TO THE FUTURE Here's a short history of civil defense in America: After the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb in 1949, the Truman administration sought large appropriations for civil defense-$400 million in 1950...
...Could the New York and Washington subway systems be used as fallout shelters...
...And if we build them for people living off the bases, then the general public will want shelters...
...It depends on where you are in relation to the blast...
...A Caltech Ph.D...
...I don't see Tom Ridge commenting on anything to do with civil defense.All I hear is about security-making sure everything is guarded...
...Information about his Access to Energy newsletter is available at wwwaccesstoenergycorn...
...But in the 1980s the whole subject was ridiculed to death, with The NevYorkTimes and writers such as Robert Scheer (I'Vith Enough Shovels) helping to bury it...
...The other driving force was Edward Teller...
...For decades, every building has been required to have a blast shelter complete with chemical, biological and fallout protection...
...In 1979, civil-defense responsibilities were shifted from the Department of Defense to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA...
...Why did that survive...
...When you hear power plants brought into this discussion, you know it is opportunistic propaganda from people who have been trying to get rid of nuclear energy all along...
...With the later development of Soviet ICBMs, warning times were cut from hours to minutes...
...Yes, but we can save two million others.Then they say: "A million dying is so horrible that we can't even talk about such a program-it is unthinkable.We must instead go abroad and kill all the terrorists...
...Phenobarbital sedatives stocked in fallout shelters were stolen by junkies...
...Its cargo was not mentioned...
...That was a lie, but that was what they said...
...It is precisely those who do not who are "stuck in a Cold War mentality...
...Having read this, a BBC reporter called Quinn, ridiculed her, "and asked sarcastically if I was also building a bunker in my backyard" against a nuclear attack...
...Are terrorists a threat to nuclear power plants...
...You don't have to be a defense strategist to see that only the last argument is still true...
...Clinton killed all vestiges of civil defense...
...He was the last director of Civil Defense at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee...
...At the time, the total federal budget was only $66 billion, so John Foster Dulles proposed massive retaliation as a less-expensive alternative...
...Industrial dispersal was encouraged, and the interstate highway system was given a civildefense rationale...
...They tested it with real nukes...
...what is not perceived-or only dimly-is their irrelevance...
...By the way, do you have to be in a shelter at the time a bomb goes oft...
...Caspar Weinberger reminded us that the Soviets had an extensive civil defense system, especially for their leaders...
...Notice they were there the next day...
...It turned out that there were two such escalators, so it would double his effectiveness if someone helped him...
...Art met with the same mixed reaction...
...This referred to biological agents, but it also applies to radiological sources-see the interview with Art Robinson, page 84...
...He has called this a "religious duty...
...In 1956, civil defense officials proposed a national system of shelters costing $21 billion...
...There is more than one shelter space for every citizen...
...Civil defense" is usually taken to refer to chemical and biological attacks, as well as nuclear...
...Public fears of all things nuclear have been magnified by what can only be called a disinfor mation campaign, which has continued without interruption since the Three Mile Island accident of 1979...
...Even more than we need shelters, we need to learn some basic facts about nuclear weapons.Yes, a blast would be horrific, and those who were too close would die innnedi ately...
...No.You just have to get into one before you are exposed to a lot of radiation...
...They live not much more than a mile from the White House...
...How much political interest was there in civil defense in the 1980s...
...Quinn had been quoted by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times as saying that she "was trying to find gas masks" for her family...
...Therefore, political pressure to provide civil defense, if it is to come at all, will have to come from those who live in or near the plausible targets, such as NewYork City.That is, it is going to have to come from the places that most vocally opposed civil defense in the first place...
...Yes.They would provide a lot of protection...
...Fallout shelters then came into their own...
...In December 1961, The NetvYork Times agreed with a proposal from President Kennedy to spend $700 million for shelters...
...It was an air burst, so there was no fallout...
...His plan was to stand at the top of the "up" escalator, at the Washington Metro stop right outside the Pentagon, holding Styrofoam boards with short messages...
...But Chester personally had it all boxed up and shipped to a place where it would be safe...
...With or without shelters, a war with retaliatory exchanges and a blizzard of missiles descending on the U.S...
...The threat is no longer nationwide...
...If the survivors could go into shelters, far fewer would die.The critics say,"A million people would die in the blast...
...1* JANUARYIFEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 81 Thinking About the in a e Art Robinson's specialty is being at least ten miles ahead of any curve worth thinking about: energy, public health, global warming andlong before Sept...
...It was the lunch hour, and the Pentagon employees rode up almost continuously, elderly and youthful, black and white, male and female, civilian and uniformed...
...In NewYork City, Ed Koch ate some aged biscuits still stored at Federal Plaza and bequeathed them to the city's poor...
...Since Sept...
...In December, he talked with senior editor Tom Bethell about the realities of nuclear destructionand how to survive it...
...Which will never be possible...
...In contrast to defense, which people seem too embarrassed to discuss, quite a lot has been written about Osama bin Laden's repeated attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon...
...It's garbage-they're promising something that cannot be provided, nationwide, for long...
...nothing could save them...
...Much has also been written about nuclear proliferation, about Pakistan's nuclear program, and about contacts between Pakistani nuclear scientists and Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network...
...And we have already read a great deal about bioterrorism...
...The difficulty of evacuation makes shelters more important...
...As to preserving the peace by a balance of terror, everyone knows that that is ludicrous with Islamic fanatics...
...Radiological monitoring...
...Federal spending on civil defense peaked in 1962, at $294 million...
...But I can see the rest of the people in NewYork surviving if they had shelters...
...That brief life would also be a dangerous one...
...Under Clinton, they pulled the funding for the civil defense library at Oak Ridge.They were going to destroy everything...
Vol. 35 • January 2002 • No. 1
