COMMENTS: The Lie of "Crisis Relocation"

...And this despite the fact that a nuclear war would bring not only death, but meaninglessness...

...Even if evacuation could be accomplished without widespread confusion and panic, there is no reason to believe that "host areas" would be relatively free of radioactivity...

...They would be advised to relocate, with their families, to nearby, closer-in host areas—from which the key workers would commute [emphasis in original] to their jobs on a two-shift or similar basis...

...Postal Service plans to distribute Emergency Change of Address cards following a nuclear attack on the United States...

...Since all apocalyptic belief is a way of overcoming what Mircea Eliade calls the "terror of history," this strategy issues from a desperate need for order...

...THE IDEA OF "CRISIS RELOCATION PLANNING," dating back to the 1950s, was endorsed by the Carter administration in 1978...

...Here FEMA acknowledges that if the Soviet Union "were to mount an all-out attack on the United States with their present strategic forces . . . almost the whole population would be located less than 100 miles from at least one nuclear detonation...

...In the absence of normally functioning healthcare systems, people with chronic illnesses would be especially vulnerable, even assuming they were successfully evacuated, while fractures, burns, and lacerations would go untreated...

...Though attached to this world, such suggestions do not really belong here: there is something nonterrestrial about the Reagan people's formulations...

...In 1965 the Department of Defense sponsored a competition involving designs for fallout shelters in shopping centers.' Today, the U.S...

...Here the promise of CRP is even more limited than it is for the U.S., since the Soviet Union lacks a developed highway system to link outlying regions to the industrial hub...

...Such notions as crisis relocation are dangerous to the cause of peace not only because they are unforgivable lies, but because they convert the currency of nuclear warfighting into valid coin...

...Reagan's plans for fighting a nuclear war are similarly specific...

...One more flawed assumption of CRP is that relocated populations would survive...

...population would be involved in direct weapons effects...

...THE UNITED STATES has been thinking against itself...

...17 ble attack, FEMA claims that "95 percent of our land would escape untouched, except possibly by radioactive fallout...

...Nonetheless, as in all apocalyptic thinking, President Reagan's nuclear strategy holds out hope for the suffering righteous...

...reprisal...

...Reason is crushed by such a force...

...This plan calls for the "temporary relocation" of people from high-risk areas to "safer" ones in periods of intense international crisis—that is, periods when nuclear war seems imminent...

...Described in portions of a 125page document leaked to the New York Times in spring 1982, this five-year military program for the United States envisions precise cycles of moves and countermoves that might take place over an extended period of time...

...Yet our present concerns do not call for clinical specificity...

...What exactly does FEMA have in mind...

...It would decide on the basis of predicted damage to itself...

...What about the Soviet citizens who would be evacuated...

...Instead, it is only making thinking impossible...

...All government documents...

...A fourth answer is psychopathology...

...A second answer is thoughtlessness...

...For the DOD document on shopping-center fallout protection, see Department of Defense, Winning Designs for Fallout Shelters in Shopping Centers, Office of Civil Defense, H-13, October 1965, 20 pp...

...Their invitation to finality is merely a memory projected into the future, a nostalgia for distant imaginings of redemption converted into public policy...

...Although current American nuclear strategy has never consciously sought a nuclear Armageddon, several of its principal exponents have fantasized publicly about its near inevitability and even its long-term benefits...

...This means that virtually every American would be within range of serious radiation exposure, and about half the U.S...

...Since Soviet civil-defense measures, it alleges, might limit Soviet fatalities from a U.S...

...The study also points out that for the Soviets to protect the 12-24 percent of the total work force left behind after crisis relocation, the remaining space per person in each shelter would have to be limited to less than one square meter...

...Many have laughed at the idiocy of such plans for relocation...

...And even if the shelters were psychologically tolerable and capable of withstanding the effects of blast, their occupants would stand little chance of surviving suffocation, heat, fallout, and starvation...

...Coupled with greatly heightened incidence of both disease and psychological trauma, medical problems surely would be aggravated by the overwhelming number of rotting corpses...

...The fear generated by our look at the futility of relocation must lead us away from that bloodless 20 brand of "realism" that is so dear to the strategic mythmakers...

...Wherever one turns today in the Reagan administration, one encounters a marked incapacity to deal with a complex reality...

...Ignoring the fact that even the small Hiroshima bomb inflicted so enduring a level of destruction that survivors have experienced what Robert Jay Lifton calls "a permanent encounter with death,'" these leaders have opted to support the feasibility of civil-defense measures...

...Instead of sanitized think-tank analyses of the effects of nuclear conflict that reek mightily of unreality, we must begin to prevent the "unthinkable" by highlighting its overwhelming and irreversible human costs...

...Suggesting such improvised shelters as an "outside trench," "outside lean-to," and "boats," FEMA assumes that citizens will have followed prior instructions concerning transport of tools to host areas...

...In its picture of Last Things, Jewish tradition, concerning the final conflict, identifies the adversaries of God primarily with the unrighteous elements among humankind, the heathen who serve Belial (the Prince of Darkness...

...To survive into the future, it will require leaders who can open their minds to ways of understanding not yet their own...

...THERE ARE SEVERAL ANSWERS that come to mind, none of them particularly heartening: • One answer is opportunism...

...4) it were directed against populations as such...

...RATHER THAN BUILD upon the understanding that a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union would totally shatter the fabric of American society, our leaders have decided to spread the news that nuclear war can be tolerated...

...Although it is true that the fear of death must be tempered in both individuals and nations lest it create paralysis, to deny the effect of such fear altogether is to make the threat of extinction more imminent...

...According to the Scrolls, salvation was to come only after victory in the struggle against the iniquitous Sons of Darkness...

...This conclusion is based on a scenario involving an attack against exclusively high-value military and economic targets...

...Unwilling to be confused by an array of facts, the Reagan people turn to the apocalypse as an alternate form of "understanding...

...Understanding this deficiency, Administration civil-defense planner T. K. Jones claims that Soviet evacuation plans call for 17 million urban residents to walk 30 miles and then build their own shelters!' The CIA study Soviet Civil Defense concludes that "Under the most favorable conditions for the USSR, including a week or more to complete urban evacuation . . . , Soviet civil defense could reduce casualties to the low tens of millions...

...The widely cited CIA 1978 study on the subject, Soviet Civil Defense,' notes that Soviet blast-resistant shelter space is designed to protect only 110,000 government and party leaders, and that these shelters are vulnerable to direct attack...

...It is, of course, only a small matter that survival is not possible in a nuclear war...

...With such tools, evacuees can exploit the principal element of personal defense after a nuclear war—dirt: "One fallout-protected space can be developed by moving (on the average) about one cubic yard of earth (about 70 to 100 buckets full of earth...

...19 able fears of collective disintegration...

...In this sense, America's current nuclear strategy has a strange affinity to certain ancient Hebrew writings that were found in caves near the Dead Sea...

...Curiously, in another of its own assessments FEMA arrives at significantly less optimistic (and more realistic) expectations...

...The fifth answer explains the contradictions in current nuclear strategy in terms of the Reagan administration's infatuation with apocalyptic symbolization...

...survival by insulating itself from reason• See Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: The Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Vintage, 1967), and Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson, Living and Dying (New York: Praeger, 1974...

...An obviously flawed assumption of evacuation plans is the idea that the United States would have several days to evacuate its "high-risk" areas during a period of rising tensions...

...Just as an individual's repression of the fear of death can impair the prospects for self-preservation, so has the Administration impaired prospects for U.S...

...retaliatory strike (immediately following a Soviet first strike) is assumed...

...It follows, as the report itself proceeds to indicate, that casualty levels would be far greater if (1) the U.S...

...Needless to say, this sort of answer is fraught with difficulties, but it ought not to be dismissed out of hand...

...By its preparations for an apocalyptic war, it resembles the Qumran text called The War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness...

...With its plans to "prevail" in a "protracted" nuclear war against an "evil empire," the Reagan administration's nuclear strategy now resembles a scheme for the final eschatological battle...

...To prepare for this conflict, The War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness offers a precise plan, and it conforms to that time's standard Roman patterns of military organization, procedure, and strategy...

...How can this be...

...God is on our side...

...There is no reason to believe that the Soviet Union could entertain such an expectation...

...American plans for CRP are based more on "monkey-see-monkey-do" logic than on a well-reasoned assessment of risks and benefits...

...attack were to take place during evacuation...

...3) it were protracted and sustained...

...Where the use of force could only be injurious to that object, it would have to be dismissed as a rational option...

...This postage-free card," says the Service's Emergency Planning Manual, "would be used by displaced survivors of an attack to notify the Postal Service of their emergency mailing addresses...

...population were perceived as substantially more vulnerable, a Soviet first strike—in order to be cost-effective—would always have to rest on the expectation that it would prevent any significant U.S...

...Until we begin to stand within the arena of mortality, picturing ourselves as victims of total annihilation, we will be unable to ensure our survival...

...To make such continuity possible, key workers would not be asked to remain in risk areas...

...This assumption contradicts another premise of current nuclear strategy— that we need to improve our nuclear strategy so that it can provide protection from a Soviet surprise attack...

...Throughout the corridors of selected think tanks, Babbitt caricatures turned scholars have discovered that there is both fame and fortune in the encouragement of strategic machismo...

...FEMA, A New Impetus: Emergency Management for Attack Preparedness, FEMA-1, June 1980...

...But the plans are offered without comic intent...

...Instead of advancing arguments that are nothing more than the pure product of artifice, mumbled again and again, these leaders will have to establish a lucid perspective on our current policy failures...

...FEMA, Attack Environmental Manual, chap...

...By dealing only with abstractions of flesh-and-blood reality, the Administration has lost sight of the concrete character of a nuclear war...

...Spurred on by the awareness that the Soviet Union is apparently spending $2 billion annually on civil defense and planning to protect 110,000 key government officials in hardened blast shelters, FEMA now seeks to do its part to close a different sort of "window of vulnerability...

...The development of strategic myths in the Reagan era is a growth industry...

...retaliation to the "low tens of millions," these measures could undermine deterrence by upsetting the balance of mutual population vulnerability...

...FEMA, Materials for Presentation on Nuclear Civil Protection, P and P-2, September 1980...

...In offering this explanation, I am aware, of course, that the definition of "schizophrenia" has varied greatly throughout the course of modern psychiatric history and that today's community of psychiatrists shares no greater unity of view about this syndrome than its forebears...

...Clausewitz always cautioned that any use of force be considered with a view to the overriding "political object...

...A third answer lies in the anesthetized nature of strategic thinking...

...House of Representatives, April 22, 1982, Hearing Record, pp...

...But it is their fate, even as they aspire to happiness, to encourage only necropolis...

...And I am not using the term in the ordinary sense, that is, a lack of caring, but rather the meaning ascribed to it by Hannah Arendt—the literal inability to think...

...While the Scrolls declare that God, with his human and celestial partisans, will do battle against the forces of Belial, the Administration envisions a conflagration between secular superpowers that are the embodiment of good and evil...

...Although the reasonableness of relocation has been dismissed by virtually the entire scientific and medical community, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will spend $4.2 billion on Crisis Relocation Planning (CRP) over the next seven years.' The avowed purpose is to double the number of citizens who could survive a nuclear war...

...1, "Introduction to Nuclear Emergency Operations," CPG 2-1A 1 , May 1982...

...Substituting gibberish for what is known, the Administration seeks—by vast rhythmic repetition—to make relocation palatable...

...Congress (Seattle: Boeing Aerospace Co., November 1976...

...For assesments by T. K. Jones, see Industrial Survival and Recovery After a Nuclear Attack: A Report to the Joint Committee on Defense Production, U.S...

...What sorts of structures are envisioned by FEMA for installation of such kits...

...18 tions for the secure transport of currency, credit cards, and sanitary napkins (and its prohibition of firearms, narcotics, and alcohol in relocation areas), our government can hardly expect that a mass exodus from the cities could take place calmly and expeditiously...

...Another flawed assumption underlying CRP is that a government-directed civilian evacuation in the face of nuclear war would not degenerate into chaos...

...5) the evacuation were chaotic...

...Even Clausewitz, hailed by current Realpolitiker as a fountainhead of their thought, surely would find any identification of nuclear war with rational policy abhorrent...

...q Richard Appelbaum, Peter Dreier, Michael Harrington 21...

...47, September 1978...

...They sell...

...A nuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means...

...But surely, a rational Soviet adversary, in deciding whether or not to launch a first strike, would not base its decision on the prospect of relative advantage...

...It seems a small matter that their recommendations are unassailably erroneous...

...Notwithstanding its highly detailed instruc2 CIA study Soviet Civil Defense, released July 1978 by the CIA director, is available as a "Special Report of the Department of State," no...

...Even under the conditions of the heaviest possi' Information about FEMA is drawn from: FEMA film on nuclear preparedness, screened before a Hearing of a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, U.S...

...Even if the U.S...

...It is altogether possible that the advancement of falsehoods in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence is a function of schizophrenia...

...And while no one in the Administration has suggested that a postapocalyptic world order would be anything but catastrophic, they have suggested, to repeat, that "survival is possible...

...Consider FEMA's plans for a continuity of critical services in the risk areas...

...Until recently, however, the Federal Emergency Management Agency received only small budget increases for the evacuation program...

...As to FEMA plans for dealing with such radioactivity, it has embarked upon a program to construct and distribute "ventilation kits"—manually operated ventilation devices "to improve both total survival and the ratio of uninjured to injured survivors...

...2) the attack were larger...

...Hence the Soviet population is assumed not to be deliberately targeted, and only a single U.S...