Armageddon in triplicate
Morrison, David C.
LIFE AFTER DOOMSDAY Armageddon in triplicate DAVID C. MORRISON Having ONCE again sown the anti-nuclear wind with a seven-year, $4.2 billion proposal for evacuating 319 urban target areas in the...
...Four dozen families were given rough diagrams and paid several hundred dollars, plus a bonus for rapid completion, to build "expedient shelters...
...I just hope we have an operational plan in place before the Soviets attack," she says...
...Meeting quarterly in Albany, representatives from the state government, academia, the trucking industry and such food chains as Grand Union and Price Chopper are studying the transportation, storage and nutrition components of a plan to reallocate groceries from their warehouses directly to the host areas...
...Voting 35 to 5, the New York body derided the Reagan get-out-of-town scheme as "voodoo preparedness" and declined any federal funding for civil defense...
...You people have been barking up the wrong tree for a long time...
...The California think-tankers decided the job could be done in a mere 3.5 days by packing privately-owned cars and cramming everyone else onto buses, commuter trains, commandeered airliners and river boats...
...unlikely that any one observer will be able to report all of the above elements of information...
...As a model project, Plattsburgh's phone book contains four pages of detailed evacuation instructions, as does a supplemental eight-page, tabloid-format flyer...
...This subterranean government will have run of the latest amenities of the nuclear age, from a walk-in freezer that doubles as a temporary morgue to toilets fitted with special rubber gaskets to keep nearby NUDETS from rocking them off their bases...
...The fly in the ointment, as always, is New York City...
...Tempting as it is to lampoon Captain Wadsworth and his colleagues in New York and other states as demented Strangeloves, their nuclear survival fantasies are shared by too many policymakers at the highest levels to be dismissed out of hand...
...Having checked into their "Congregate Care Facilities" upstate, New York refugees - ever mindful of the civil defense slogan: "Radiation protection is as cheap as dirt" - will then set about digging their way to survival...
...State planners, reassured by a 1977 Federal test run, have every confidence that "average Americans" are up to moving the tons of earth needed for even the most hastily thrown-together shelter...
...Wadsworth's 96-page exercise scenario begins with the entire Minuteman missile force being vaporized in its silos and ends with Soviet fifth columnists emptying vials of Dioxin and mycotoxins into the Ririe Dam...
...If all this sounds familiar, those who caught Jack Smight's 1977 post-attack turkey, Damnation Alley, may recall that the only signal George Peppard and his band of California survivors could raise came from Albany...
...Local civil defense planners may be rehearsing a dance of death, but Washington pays the piper...
...While our attention is focused on the budget battle in Washington, the states, charged with formulating the nuts-and-bolts civil defense programs, continue to quietly spend FEMA funds - $ 128 million this year - planning for life after Doomsday...
...As a resident of the Host Area you can help save the lives of your neighbors from Plattsburgh and nearby towns who have left their homes to seek safety here...
...Wadsworth, a retired naval reserve officer with a keen appreciation of the Soviet threat...
...AFTER FALLOUT PROTECTION, an assured food supply is the first imperative for a region so agriculturally isolated that the threat of even a truckers' strike-much less a nuclear strike-is enough to send shivers of apprehension down the spines of planners...
...The Grand Union delegate to the food committee, for instance, is confident of the plan's eventual workability, though she does fret about the logistic complexities involved...
...All dialogue in the scenario was scripted by Wadsworth, as when a"hippie" -played by a local Eagle Scout-walked into the civil defense office and announced, "I saw a reactor blow up west of here at 6:50...
...This is the most serious crisis our country has ever faced," the section addressed to host area readers gravely announced...
...This is his first appearance in Commonweal...
...Even now, the National Weather Service projects "downwind fallout forecasts" from high altitude wind velocities, feeding them twice daily to all state civil defense headquarters...
...Striking a rare note of realism, the plan does concede that "it is DAVID C. MORRISON is a New York-based writer specializing in many aspects of the civil defense issue...
...Yet, despite the storm of scathing editorials, city council resolutions and Congressional hearings that have accompanied this latest eruption of the decades-old civil defense debate, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the elaborate programs already developed for protecting the American citizenry from the awesome destructive force of "NUDETS," Federal Emergency Management Agency jargon for nuclear detonations...
...Much to the officials' surprise and gratification, not one family dropped out of the program and, in fact, all earned their bonuses...
...As Soviet warheads rain down on New York's ten "High Risk Areas," agents of the radiological Intelligence Section are to file "Weapons Effects Reports," or WERS, describing "date and time of detonation, flash-to-bang time, illumination time, true asimuth to cloud stem," and so on...
...The Grand Union planner and her colleagues may be in for a cruel disappointment...
...Nor are planners worried about miscalculating the unpredictable intensity of the radiation that will waft on prevailing winds from the shattered cities and silos to the west to blanket upstate New York...
...New York State's survival program is widely considered among the most advanced in the country, though it is typical of those that will be pursued with a renewed vigor in other states if Reagan wins approval of his $4.2 billion get-out-of-town scheme...
...Soviet, thermonuclear weapons do...
...This resolute insistence on a tidy Armageddon surfaces again later in the plan with the admonition that, during enemy attack, cars "be parked in an orderly manner" in the lots near the New York State Alternate Seat of Government...
...This fat document, complete with 15 annexes, illustrates touch-ingly the age-old bureaucratic yen to contain even the most unimaginable chaos within a sturdy thicket of red tape...
...Along with fallout, the apocalypse will generate a blizzard of paper work...
...Designed to withstand a five-megaton burst one-and-a-half miles off, the ASG will house up to 700 state officials and their immediate families for the first two weeks of World War III...
...If nuclear attack occurs," reads the text on its cover, "all persons living in this high risk area must evacuate when ordered...
...On June 9 the New York City Council joined scores of other city councils around the country in saying, "Hell, no, we...
...Reading his own lines, Wadsworth shot back, "Reactors don't blow up...
...On the back are alphabetical ID tags which, clipped and pasted to windshields, allow state troopers to channel evacuees into their designated escape routes...
...Once at least two WERS have been compiled on a single explosion, a "NUDET Report" must then be assembled and logged on "Form Rad-5B...
...Last October, the Bonneville County Civil Defense office staged a three-hour trial exercise, code named Vulcan's Forge, involving fifty agencies and more than 1,000 people who simulated blast and radiation victims...
...As throughout the New York civil defense establishment, these planners take their work dead seriously...
...This two-story underground bunker - sited, appropriately enough, beneath the Public Security Building - was built in 1963 by former Governor and civil defense buff Nelson Rockefeller...
...In 1980, Plattsburgh, a northern city near a SAC base, became the first target in New York with a finalized Crisis Relocation Plan...
...won't go...
...A list of telephone numbers follows, to be called if you want "to share your basement...
...The broad scope of the state's planned response to nuclear attack, as developed by the Office of Disaster Preparedness in Albany, is outlined in its "Emergency Operations Plan...
...The city's civil defenders got a long leg up, however, from the Stanford Research Institute, hired by the federal government in 1978 to work up a model evacuation scenario...
...The resolute Captain Wadsworth could be speaking from the Oval Office when he writes, as he does in the letter of transmittal accompanying the Vulcan's Forge transcript, "Our position is that the United States must perceive and address nuclear war as 'thinkable' and structure our strategic force levels and Civil Defense accordingly...
...Fallout Arrival Reports" will be filed by monitoring stations as the outside exposure rate approaches .5 rems per hour...
...WHILE THE CIVIL SERVICE shuffles its Rad-5B forms beneath Albany, their constituents will be streaming out of the imperiled cities into rural "Host Areas...
...The operation room's antennae are fine-tuned to pick up reports from regional outposts and keep in touch with what's left of the federal government hunkered in its own bunker under Mount Weather in Virginia...
...They also had 300,000 Manhattanites jumping freight trains in Hoboken, an idea with unpleasant historical associations that was abandoned only after Conrail noted that, since modern box cars are airtight, such an evacuation solution would unavoidably be a final one...
...The Utica/Rome planning district, surrounding Griffiss SAC base where the cruise missiles rolling off Boeing's assembly line are being stockpiled, also has an operationa CRP, as will Buffalo and Albany by the end of this year...
...Local requests for aerial radiological survey missions are to be issued on "the multiple copy version of Form Rad-2B and CAP NWY Form 20...
...LIFE AFTER DOOMSDAY Armageddon in triplicate DAVID C. MORRISON Having ONCE again sown the anti-nuclear wind with a seven-year, $4.2 billion proposal for evacuating 319 urban target areas in the event of threatened nuclear attack, the Reagan administration is now reaping an outraged whirlwind...
...A tough nut, to be sure, but one the New York State Crisis Relocation Food Emergency Planning Committee is working to crack...
...Vulcan's Forge was the brain child of Idaho Falls' CD chief, Captain T.J...
...Other localities, however, are less inclined to go gently into that good, nuclear night...
...At current funding levels, planners despair of devising a workable scheme within this decade for moving close to ten million New Yorkers up to their Catskills refuge...
...Inside, pet owners are asked to "leave them at home, preferably in the basement with a two-week supply of water and food...
Vol. 109 • July 1982 • No. 13
