Arms and the Man: Going Underground in Massachusetts
Thernstrom, Stephan
To "preserve free government" through war and peace alike, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decided to go underground. Its legislators have determined to become pioneers of the nuclear...
...A few dozen helicopters would be kept on hand at the State House (perhaps the flock might hover over the gold dome to amuse the tourists), ready to whisk those fortunate "working delegations" away to safety...
...Since our schizophrenic civil defense program alternates between shelter and evacuation plans, between telling us to run and telling us to hide, we may be certain that millions will run when the sirens scream, and that the resulting traffic jam will make twenty miles seem two hundred...
...Framingham is a full half hour's drive from Beacon Hill in light traffic...
...In private conversation, however, the bureaucrats are more candid...
...However tidy and ingenious the plans for the shelter, only 300 people can be crammed into it...
...HERMAN KAHN of the Rand Corporation believes that democracy can survive a thermonuclear war (if it follows his advice), and this is the official theory of the civil defense establishment...
...The people in the shelter, for that matter, may be dead as well...
...Its legislators have determined to become pioneers of the nuclear age by approving construction of America's first emergency underground shelter for state government...
...A second demonstration brought out 135 marchers, again mostly students...
...The formal title of the shelter is to be the "State Control Center and Alternate Site of State Government...
...Had the Founding Fathers been clairvoyant, they might have propounded the self-evident truth that all men have an equal right to protection from incineration...
...Consider the helicopter incident...
...1,069,000, to be matched with federal funds, was appropriated then, as part of the annual state construction boondoggle...
...Three hundred persons can be given an umbrella of six feet of dirt and four feet of reinforced concrete for a mere two million-odd dollars...
...The wheels of Massachusetts government, however, grind exceedingly slow...
...MR...
...Jr MAY BE too late...
...If anything will strengthen the "widespread public resentment" against the "grand illusion" of civil defense which U. S. Senator Stephen Young sees rapidly growing in the country today, it will be effective publicity of the ideas of the civil defense establishment...
...And what about their crews...
...If any of the Commonwealth's elected officials brooded darkly on these difficulties, they resisted all temptation to let the electorate in on the secret...
...What has been encouraging is the marked lack of coolness under fire displayed by civil defense officials in recent weeks...
...It seems never to have worried about the threat of massive firestorms described vividly in Harrison Brown's Community of Fear...
...A score or two of the politicians, it seemed, would have to give up their places in the shelter for them, else the pilots might take off for the northern woods at the first alarm...
...An Associate Justice of the State Supreme Court more than the State Highway Commissioner...
...Press, radio, and television coverage was good, and a sharp detailed critique of the shelter plans was dispatched by SANE to every member of the legislature...
...Helicopters, it appeared on investigation, were not so cheap...
...The chosen spot is in Framingham, some twenty miles from the State House on Beacon Hill...
...The fact that the shelter will be located next to the State Police Barracks in Framingham calls to mind a vision of 80 cops with revolvers politely requesting admission and unwilling to entertain a sweetly reasonable "no vacancies" in reply...
...Even if legislators, judges, administrators and helicopter pilots can work out an acceptable order of priority, other difficulties remain...
...The proposed shelter is equipped with neither a built-in oxygen supply nor a cooling system...
...And the select three hundred...
...But again, who cares...
...These are to be "working delegations of the three branches of state government," and the entire state civil defense staff...
...Liberal Democrats, and a few Republicans with a keen eye for a wasted dollar, have sponsored a repeal bill...
...IF SENATORS and Representatives actually read the bills they vote for, we might expect some querulous voices to be raised...
...An even less subtle cause for alarm exists...
...The Framingham location was chosen in the technologically primitive early fifties, when warning time was measured in hours rather than minutes...
...What this label gracefully obscures is the fact that the state government to occupy the alternate site will be a new government—a military government by civil defense officials...
...Herman Kahn's answer is wrong, but he asks the right question: Will the survivors envy the dead...
...So again the problem of numbers intruded itself...
...This should come as a shock to trusting state legislators...
...The Massachusetts CDA, at last report, had a dangerously foggy notion of what twenty megatons could do to Boston...
...Thirty-four members of the CDA staff will spend their working days in the shelter—anyone else who happens to get in will have no influence on decision-making...
...Hardly anyone had even heard of the Framingham project when, on February 8, ninety people from Boston SANE appeared at the State House for an anti-shelter demonstration...
...Shortly behind them would follow hundreds of panic-stricken local citizens, who could only be persuaded away from the shelter entrance with machine guns...
...perhaps the last democratic demand to be made in the land of liberty will be the cry "WE WANT IN...
...Soon, however, a "solution" was proposed: a kind of Boston Airlift was to be devised...
...Some iron law of democratic inertia may be in operation— if it takes six years to get a ludicrous project underway, it may take another six to stop it...
...Legislators have been observed to demonstrate normal human concern about saving their own skin, and the problem of the composition of the "working delegations" eligible for salvation should have given the politicos pause...
...A long picket line formed along Beacon Street, and curious passersby were given a protest leaflet...
...When it was first pointed out that legislators would never be able to reach the hole in the ground at Framingham under conditions of nuclear attack, the CDA was somewhat taken aback...
...Are Senators worth more than Representatives...
...Bids for shelter construction didn't open until February 15, 1961...
...Who will choose the elect from the damned...
...Shall the two parties be equally represented, or in proportion to their strength at the last election...
...One Massachusetts CDA official has reportedly conceded that there won't be any helicopters at all, and that in the event of attack no one cares what happens to the Governor, much less the representative from the 23rd district...
...For the rest of us it hardly matters, since we'll be dead anyway...
...Shelter plans, which date back to 1955, were conceived with maximum haste, minimum debate, and little thought...
...In the ICBM age, working legislators will likely have only the gilt on the Capitol dome to interpose between themselves and a twenty megaton warhead, not an assuring ten feet of earth and concrete...
...Such a storm would rage for a minimum of 25 miles from the point of explosion, making the whole area a vast sea of flame...
...Digging is to begin in the Spring, and the impregnable shelter supposedly will be ready "in a few months...
Vol. 8 • April 1961 • No. 2
