THE CASE AGAINST CIVIL DEFENSE

...There is still no place to hide...

...He has traveled in sixty-seven countries during the past decade and lias lectured in many of them...

...Lens spent many weeks in the preparation of this study...

...It will be tragic if the American mind is conditioned by this terrible, calamitous stuff to accept nuclear war as tolerable...

...Three hundred and fifty of the scientists held a special conference at the AASC convention...

...Like the French who felt secure behind their Maginot line, we refuse to recognize that we are now* living in a radically new age...

...In the blunt words of Representative diet Holifield, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy which has amassed volumes of data on the effects of nuclear war, "Today we do not have the military capability to protect our nation against nuclear attack...

...The nation has been bombarded with a bewildering assortment of clashing concepts, with scientist arrayed against scientist on every significant phase of the problem...

...In this new nuclear age, there is no defense for civilians...

...Thk Editors...

...We respond to a qualitatively new militarism as if it were nothing but bigger blockbusters...

...He interviewed a host of scientists, public officials, military experts, and publicists...

...But even here, in its forty-eight page booklet describing the new approach, the Administration concedes that this brand new "civil defense program may change with changes in the kinds of missiles that might be used against us...

...We continue the hopeless search for a non-existent defense...

...Such advice from the British Defense Minister and many others has failed, however, to end our search for a defense panacea...

...Civil defense has been mired in a swamp of confusion and contradictions for a decade...

...Among them are some who are opposed to militarism as a principal ingredient of foreign policy but feel that there ought to be some "defense"—just in case...

...Surely, we feel, there must be some way to protect against the blast, heat, fire, and radiation of nuclear bombs, if we can build bombs that can kill millions of people in a few minutes, why can we not find an equally revolutionary means to save our own lives...

...Mr...

...Yet, as I propose to show, such is the nature of nuclear war that, in the long run, even objectives as limited as the goals of civil defense cannot be achieved...

...On the contrary, many are motivated by the purest humanitarian objective—to save the lives of their fellow men...

...THE CASE AGAINST CIVIL DEFENSE by SIDNEY LENS INTRODUCTION ILLUSION OF CIVIL DEFENSE "If we could see where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how io do it" —Abraham Lincoln Few issues of our tune have commanded wider attention or stirred greater controllers}' titan the issue of civil defense...

...Lens attracted wide attention more than a decade ago with his critical survey of the labor movement in his book, Left, Right and Center...

...The means no longer exists by which an army, a navy, and an air force can prevent the death of tens of millions of our civilian population in the event of a nuclear assault...

...His manuscript was read for accuracy by a leading physicist and a distinguished geneticist...

...The government officials and private citizens involved in this quest are, for the most part, neither venal nor dishonest...

...Lens brought to this assignment a rich background in the interpreting of public affairs...

...This development is so revolutionary that most of us cannot grasp it...

...He is the author of a number of books, including The Crisis of American Labor, A World in Revolution, and The Counterfeit Revolution, the last a critiial analysis of Communism as a revolutionary force...

...It was no ivory-tower idealist or picketing pacifist who summed up the principal thesis of this study I have made for The Progressive...

...As the Chicago San-Times reported, they agreed on one major point: "Somebody has to tell all the people that nuclear war would probably wipe most of them out, and must keep on telling them that until they believe it...

...It was the tough-minded Minister of Defense for Great Britain, Harold Wat-kinson, who said: "An air raid shelter is not going to be of the slightest use in the next war...

...Air...

...For the object of all policy should be not to make it tolerable, which can't be done, but to avoid it altogether...

...The official line, where there has been one, has changed sharply and frequently...

...Emphasis added...

...With the advent of atomic and hydrogen bombs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, civilians have become totally vulnerable...

...In our national frustration we have fashioned one illusion about defense after another...

...The Virginia Quarterly Review, Fellowship, Commonweal, The Christian Century, and, frequently, The Progressive...

...We refuse, or we are reluctant, to face up to the fact that an era has ended, that no longer can there be any meaningful defense in the event of nuclear war...

...His articles ha-ve appeared in many publications in this country and abroad, including the Yale Review, Harper's, Harvard Business Review, Rotarian, The Reporter...

...Such a morbid preoccupation," said the man who now serves as special consultant to the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, "reflects a bankruptcy of lucid political thought...

...The very concept of "civil defense" suggests that we have experienced, but not yet absorbed, an historical development of stunning proportions...

...The report said: "Any shelter program short of one that places the nation's entire population and industry permanently underground can be negated by a corresponding increase in the attacker's power...

...The fundamental fallacy in the whole concept of civil defense is to be found in the wishful thinking that defense is possible...

...His researches took him to the White House, the Pentagon, and the halls of Congress...

...There is something sad, as Thomas E. Murray, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission for seven years, put it, "about the sight of a great nation falling back upon sheer survival as its all-consuming purpose in history...

...It continues unabated...

...As Albert Einstein expressed it several years before he died: "The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe...

...But the presentation has been largely one-sided as the government, some scientists and most of the mass media of information hax>e combined to argue the case for civil defense...

...We are devoting most of this issue of The Progressive to what is avowedly the other side—"The Case Against Ciiul Defense...

...Our military force can attack the peoples of other nations, but it cannot prevent or defend against an attack on us...

...A union of-fiiiul, Mr...

...More recently, the Kennedy Administration has sought to cope with the chaos by embarking on a new program...

...Behind the civil defense drive lies the tacit admission that for the first time in history military forces are no longer capable of defending a nation's civilian population...

...How hopeless that quest is was emphasized December 23, 1961 by a distinguished committee of scientists in a report to the Denver convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...

...Emphasis added...