Civil Defense: Billion Dollar Boondoggle

...In Buffalo, New York, the program, paradoxically, is to seek shelter—to hide...

...This air strip was intended to handle civil defense air traffic when the university was named last year as the emergency seat of Ohio state government...

...Coupled with these efforts, we should initiate a vigorous and continuing campaign of education on realistic self-protection in a nuclear war using all the media of communication at our command—television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and our schools...

...Does any responsible government official wish to embark on a $20 to $100 billion questionable gamble under these conditions...

...Significantly, in my own state of Ohio, I know of no civil defense official who himself has taken the trouble to build a shelter...

...Assuming further that some Americans did have shelters that saved their lives in a nuclear war, what sort of world would they come up to...

...Some of the plush private offices of even regional Civil Defense directors are enough to make a member of the Congress feel deeply impressed...

...The only hitch is the University doesn't own an airplane...

...clear attack they should run, or hide —or do both...

...The fact remains that the most optimistic estimate of the devastation of nuclear attack, despite a network of shelters, places probable death at fifty million Americans with some twenty million others sustaining serious injuries...

...of policemen loafing on civil defense duties, waiting for a bomb to drop, while many of our city streets are unsafe after dark...

...It may indeed be possible to fool people for a while, but they can not be fooled for long...

...Americans are tired of schemes to provide identification bracelets for teenagers to exchange...

...Even assuming ample warning time, which is not likely, the chaos would be unbelievable...

...and inability to overcome public apathy which is rapidly burgeoning into widespread public resentment...

...In any case, in the event of a missile attack, a national emergency would be declared and the armed forces would take over...

...It is interesting to note that many of those who talk the loudest about civil defense talk the least about peace...

...Of the appropriated funds, more than sixty per cent is siphoned off for salaries and expenses, much of it to the hacks and defeated office-holders for whom the OCDM has become a convenient and comfortable haven in the political storm...

...This is not a pretty picture to paint, but it is the truth—the cold, hard facts of survival in a nuclear war...

...of millions of contradictory pamphlets...

...At Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University, there is a new 3,200-foot concrete air strip, built by civil defense at a cost of $195,000...

...It is absurd even to consider the possibilities of evacuation under these circumstances...

...Through diligent and relentless application of poor planning, confused thinking, and colossal ineptitude, the men charged with the defense of civilians in event of war have managed to squander more than one billion dollars of taxpayers' money since 1951, exclusive of one hundred million dollars worth of surplus government property turned over to civil defense agencies...

...There is no better place to begin than the wasteful, fantastically muddled Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, with its satellites in state and local governments...

...Generators, typewriters, adding machines, aluminum pitchers, and sundry other items somehow wound up in the homes of local civil defense directors, county commissioners, or other state and local employes...

...These fine men and women can and will render equally needful service as auxiliary firemen, special policemen, and deputy sheriffs...

...The thermonuclear weapon, with its tremendous destructive power, and the missile, with its great speed, have now made evacuation not only impractical but impossible...

...The friendship we shall earn will contribute far more to our safety than shelters to jump into after it is too late...

...Yet, in Washington, D.C., and other major American cities last spring, mystified residents received in the mail a map for use in evacuation...

...Only recently the auditor of the state of Ohio began an audit of the nearly two million dollars in surplus property donated to civil defense organizations in Ohio during the last few years...

...Residents are told to flee on highways toward a neighboring city—whose residents are told to flee toward Cleveland...

...Or, a volunteer national disaster corps could be created to utilize their services — an organization devoted solely to enabling Americans to help their neighbors without the doubtful leadership of the present OCDM...

...f If any shelter program is practical at a cost within attainment, considering our national needs and objectives, how should it be implemented...

...In the nuclear age, there can be no realistic civil defense program...

...Now, if a state wants to suggest that citizens build shelters, that is something no one could object to, though one might quarrel with the reasoning...

...Enemy submarines off our coasts could hurl rockets with nuclear warheads as much as 1,500 miles inland with accuracy...

...The defense of our civilians is a vital part of our national defense—it is too important to be entrusted to civilians wearing arm bands...

...In times of disaster in America neighbors have always come forward as do the Red Cross and other agencies...

...State and local funds are spent at approximately the same rate...

...Hundreds of square miles would be covered with deadly contamination, and the lethal effects would last not for hours or weeks, but for months, or even for years...

...The truth is the theory of evacuation in this missile age is not only silly but dangerous...

...of silly, short-sighted planning — they are tired of the whole confused mess...

...New York's legislators wisely refused to adopt Rockefeller's proposal...

...Reaction to the hopeless shenanigans of the OCDM has changed from an early tolerant amusement, willing to suffer the games of an amateur agency, to massive indifference, and finally to boiling indignation over an arrogant bureaucracy which has repeatedly proved itself inept, inefficient, and, as one letter-writer put it to me, "a damned nuisance...

...Shelter, building represents a psychology of fear...

...of waste and inefficiency...

...In many of the counties, a good percentage of the property could no longer be located...

...unrealistic, in fact schizophrenic, planning...

...In Canada and in England, the military control civil defense activities...

...The survival of 180 million Americans—indeed, of all mankind—depends not on civil defense but on peace...

...This amounted to six million dollars last year...

...Of the money spent for civil defense, approximately forty per cent is wrung from the taxpayers of states and municipalities, where tax dollars grow increasingly scarce, and where vital programs for schools, hospitals, and housing die for lack of funds...

...Perhaps the whole mess can be best summed up by the following statement in the report on one of the most populous counties in the state: "Opportunity to avail themselves of the various bargains in surplus property has served as an incentive to being in the Civil Defense set-up, we are told...

...OCDM has no answer to this question...

...inefficiency...

...In Columbus, the capital of my home state of Ohio, $700,000 of local funds was squandered on a traffic light control system designed to facilitate evacuation in event of a nuclear attack...

...The current daily outlay for civil defense activities by the Federal government alone is more than $120,000...

...In Cleveland, Ohio, evacuation is preached...

...Routes and directions were carefully explained, to the confusion of all...

...They do not seem to realize that the behavior of most people—-those who went along with the game—in a mock attack is not the behavior to expect in the presence of an actual attack...

...Can any reasonable person imagine all of the nearly half million people in Columbus—or the entire population of any other city—trying to evacuate at one time...

...This may explain the failure of the American public to take seriously the contradictory programs of this agency...

...It should be under the direction of those who know most about defense —the armed forces of the United States...

...Steadily, Americans have reacted against the hysteria, the alarms, and the practice alerts of the Cassandras in the top echelons of the civil defense agency and their toy-soldier paid underlings in American municipalities...

...Civil defense today is a myth...

...Local civil defense officials also issued a four and one-half pound, two-inch thick manual for evacuation...

...It included barber kits, garbage cans, outdoor lampshades, adding machines, shaving kits, and a thousand other gimcracks of absolutely no use in case of an emergency...

...Civil defense plans suffer from a bad case of schizophrenia...

...of high-salaried boondoggles...

...I honor those who have performed valuable service while paid civil defense officials directed them from behind desks...

...There is now no specific site, unless some civil defense official has selected another city within recent weeks...

...Senator Paul Douglas pointed out an even more absurd waste of funds in his home state of Illinois...

...It is based on theories as antiquated as mustache cups, tallow dips, and civil war cannon balls...

...Instead of wasting untold billions on a national network of bomb shelters, we should put just a portion of these dollars into forging links of friendship with other peoples...

...Hardly any of it was found where it would do any good in a nuclear attack...

...The time has come to abolish this billion dollar boondoggle and adopt a realistic approach to the entire problem of civil defense in this nuclear age...

...Or four and a half pounds of evacuation regulations...

...f As the defense of American civilians is a major factor in the defense of our country, should this responsibility be entrusted to our armed forces...

...However, Athens no longer is the official emergency civil defense capital...

...What would have happened to the buildings and to the atmosphere...

...It depends not on futile shelter programs inspired by a caveman complex, . but on solid, workable international agreements to disarm...

...Despite warning signs of growing wrath among Americans, OCDM officials proclaimed the nationwide practice drills last May a huge success...

...Hundreds of other stockpiled items which should not have been purchased in the first place are similarly going to waste...

...All of us can be proud of the hundreds of thousands of patriotic Americans who, as civil defense volunteers, give their time and efforts, often at great risk to themselves, in times of flood, fire, and other natural disasters...

...Government at all levels should apply this maxim in those agencies where expenditures have been demonstrably futile...

...It is our only permanent shelter...

...In Ohio alone more than $100,000 worth has been destroyed thus far with more to come...

...If Congress had not wisely slashed the OCDM's budgetary request, Federal spending on this useless agency would be doubled for the current year...

...Unbelievable as it may sound, at one and the same time OCDM advocates both evacuation and shelter programs...

...The civil defense program is a grand illusion...

...Next January a new President will take office without commitment to OCDM leaders or to their program...

...f If a shelter program is not practical in this frame of reference, what can we reasonably do beyond education to help our citizens in event of nuclear war...

...The result so far is a sad commentary on the entire civil defense program—one I feel sure has been repeated in all of the states receiving similar government property...

...If we cut off the head of the bureaucratic octopus in Washington, its wasteful satellites in states and cities will soon wither away...

...Assuming for the sake of argument that shelters would save lives, there is no assurance that they would not be outmoded by more advanced weapons or that they would offer any protection against an attack even more deadly than a nuclear attack— biological warfare...

...If one took the trouble to read it— and I doubt that one in 5,000 residents has—he would learn that he is to hop in his car and leave by the shortest route immediately upon hearing the attack warning...

...Let us hope that this new Administration will move swiftly to disband the OCDM before it becomes a permanent drain on taxpayers...

...At the same time OCDM was distributing its evacuation map, it was beating the drums vigorously, almost hysterically, for a bomb shelter in every backyard...

...of highly-publicized bomb shelter honeymoons...

...There the Civil Defense Corps of the city of Carpentersville (population 12,000) was given almost $350,000 of Federal surplus property, or more than the Chicago Board of Education received during the entire school year...

...The indictment of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization reads like a roster of malpractice: waste...

...We should be considering ways to feed the two-thirds of humanity who go to bed hungry every night rather than telling Americans to store away a two-weeks supply of food in useless holes in the ground...

...In my view, no civil defense program will adequately protect our citizenry should war strike...

...Intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from within the Soviet Union would take fifteen to eighteen minutes to strike air fields, missile bases, or other targets...

...Directions and orders of civil defense officials, heeded automatically in rehearsal, would be ignored in the horror of nuclear war...

...Do we run, or hide, or both...

...Political has-beens, rejected by their fellow citizens, enjoy top salaries in the Office of Defense Mobilization, and do little except talk vaguely about survival, distribute literature, plan alerts to annoy their neighbors, and distribute countless reams of literature...

...Were we to be attacked with intercontinental ballistic missiles with hydrogen warheads, the total destruction and remaining radioactive elements would be such that underground shelters in basements and backyards would offer little, if any, protection...

...Interestingly enough, more than forty per cent of the personnel of this agency draw salaries of $10,000 a year or more...

...In terms of money it is ludicrous...

...We must devote our efforts to the utmost toward finding a peaceful solution to the world's problems...

...It is the program on the national level that spawns the growth of city and state organizations and multiplies the waste...

...We ought to be talking about building homes for our people rather than hoodwinking them with foolish prattle about underground shelter...

...We would be lucky to have three minutes warning...

...Estimates of various plans range from New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller's modest $20 billion proposal to other authoritative estimates of $100 billion from those experts who, it is to be assumed, would dig deeper and permit greater luxury for a generation of underground Americans...

...Other Federal agencies also spend money and devote staff time to civil defense projects...

...Governor Rockefeller, probably the most enthusiastic advocate of the shelter theory, actually proposed that the legislature of the state of New York enact laws making it compulsory that every home or building be equipped with a bomb shelter...

...What is the basis of civil defense planning...

...Only recently, hundreds of thousands of dollars of stockpiled penicillin had to be detroyed because it was found to be useless by the Food and Drug Administration...

...Are not trained military officers better qualified to save the lives of civilians in time of war rather than bureaucrats enjoying fat salaries as civil defense officials...

...For too long now, our citizens have been confused and confounded with the periodic multi-million dollar doses of psychological pablum administered by the OCDM...

...What would they do for food once their two-week bomb shelter supply was exhausted...

...Shelters in basements and back yards, even if there were sufficient warning to enable persons to enter them, might prove huge fire traps in urban centers in the colossal conflagration which experts say would certainly follow an atomic attack...

...Civil Defense: Billion Dollar Boondoggle by SENATOR STEPHEN M. YOUNG Businessmen, American taxpayers, and seasoned poker players agree on one axiom: "Never throw good money after bad...

...In place of a desperately needed school, many communities may receive a screeching siren, a few stretchers, some two-way radio equipment for civil defense officials to play with, and an occasional alert to confuse the citizenry whether in event of a nuSTEPHEN M. YOUNG, United States Senator from Ohio, is a much-decorated veteran of World Wars I and II...

...of screeching sirens...

...The conditions of modern warfare make shelters of little or no use in saving American lives...

...The blunt answer is there is none...

...But for government, either state or Federal, to assume the power to force people to build shelters is a sizable intrusion on individual rights...

...No thought was given to the fact that even if the map were deciphered, the monumental traffic jam which would result would practically insure that scarcely a citizen would ever reach the highway outside the city...

...How many persons fleeing in panic would heed Columbus' $700,-000 traffic signals...

...Its performance in the past makes it clear that the entire problem should be wrested from its hands and should be reappraised with these questions in mind: f Since evacuation is impossible in the event of nuclear attack, would any mass shelter program be adequate to protect our civilian population...

...Shelter enthusiasts have pictured their subterranean suburbia as the sure-fire antidote for nuclear destruction...