THE MANY MOODS OF CIVIL DEFENSE
Part I The Many Moods of Civil Defense The fallout shelter program is merely the current phase of the continuing illusion of safety in the nuclear era. Civil defense programs have been as fickle...
...We think you can save approximately sixty per cent...
...The answer in the Bull Report was to build "blast shelters" —improved versions of the bunkers and air-raid shelters used in Germany and Britain during World War II...
...we had a monopoly of the bomb...
...As late as January, 1959, New York \ State's Civil Defense Director was still talking evacuation: "Every person in New York City could be moved to the country within fifty hours...
...A new theory and a new cult developed in civil defense: we can survive only if we evacuate our cities...
...Scientists Edward Teller, known as "the father of the H-Bomb," and Dr...
...It is to the everlasting credit of John Foster Dulles that he persuaded President Eisenhower to reject a shelter campaign on the grounds that it would vitiate America's image as a peace-loving nation...
...Catering to an illusion of strength, downgrading the danger of death, and magnifying the prospect of survival give wing to collective acceptance of ever more irrational approaches to the conduct of American foreign policy...
...The mere request for people to "do something" has unleashed chain reactions...
...Yet Peterson foresaw a death toll of about seventy million, even with shelters...
...Evacuation was obviously impossible...
...In October, 1961, Representative Robert Kas-tenmeier complained to the Defense Department that evacuation signs continued to mark the highways in^ Wisconsin...
...For the first time, citizens are being called on to do something—build basement shelters, put aside food and water, buy dosimeters...
...Until the current shelter phase, civil defense was an exercise in rhetoric...
...This was five years ago, when Russia's stockpile of weapons was minis-cule compared to today's supply...
...If you had a completely safe shelter and came out eight days after an attack and stayed out twenty-four hours you would still get sick...
...Such lightning changes in "scientific opinion" represent a disturbing phenomenon— especially because each new set of ideas is so fervently embraced, however briefly...
...Air Force General Curtis LeMay expressed what seems to have been a widespread viewpoint when he said: "I don't think I would put that much money into holes in the ground to crawl into...
...Is this, too, a passing fashion in civil defense...
...This reassuring illusion, however, kept fading from year to year...
...We don't think so," argued Peterson...
...He demanded they be removed on the grounds that they deluded people into a false sense of security by implying a possible escape from nuclear attack...
...The theoretical problem of atomic attack now became a possibility in reality, and a Civil Defense Act was passed in 1950 to plan for blast shelters...
...It has been toned down somewhat in the last few months because the Administration seemed to consider it was "getting out of hand...
...The Administration—and the nation— just would not take the matter seriously...
...For a while the strategists in Wash...
...In 1949, the Russians, to everyone's dismay, exploded their first atomic instrument...
...The great dangers the search engenders are that the continuing illusion will intensify the garrison state mentality and that the war we are trying to avoid will be brought closer by the very measures we are taking to "survive it...
...But the quest for the elusive panacea continues...
...The blast shelters became a relic for military museums...
...It could lead, conceivably, to a collective decision summed up by the exhortation, "Let's get it over with...
...And an Illinois Civil Defense publicist, Colonel Melvin Mawrence, has skyrocketed the estimate to a wholesome 99.5 per cent— providing we have the right kind of shelters...
...The weaponry of war has changed so rapidly that what seems a feasible course of defense one day becomes obsolete long before it can be implemented...
...evacuation became the panacea...
...ington were mired in uncertainty...
...Life magazine, not to be outdone, raised the ante to ninety-seven per cent...
...We now had a two-headed approach, but even so—as the Committee pointed out— there were "few tangible achievements" in the next two years...
...The experience of Hiroshima had shown that only fifteen per cent of the immediate deaths in that ill-fated city had been caused by radiation...
...Military strategists became convinced that we might have only thirty minutes of warning—or fewer...
...The deadly dust spread over 7,000 square miles in these tests, while blast affected only 300 square miles...
...today, the danger has come alive...
...Programs were formulated in government offices, but the average citizen was an undisturbed bystander...
...We had exploded twenty-kilo-ton weapons (equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT) over Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...experiments in the Pacific had proved that local radioactive fallout extended over an area far larger than that affected by the blast...
...In a thermonuclear war there are no means of saving all of the people...
...We have changed our philosophy," Edward McDermott, deputy director of the Office of Emergency Planning, told me...
...Civil defense programs have been as fickle as women's fashions...
...Defense" of civilians still seemed possible...
...Former President Eisenhower's Civil Defense Administrator, Val Peterson, argued in February, 1957, against reports issued by the Navy Radiological Defense Laboratory, which had claimed the government could build shelters to protect the American nation for $38 billion and save ninety-nine per cent of the people...
...It made little difference, he said, whether you were five miles or 100 miles from the impact point of a half-megaton bomb', you would have little protection...
...In May, 1958, Leo Hoegh, director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, told a House committee chaired by Representative Holifield that the government civil defense policy then included both evacuation of cities "if time permits" and "the use of shelters to provide protection from radioactive fallout...
...But in the last few months, under a new Administration, there has been an abrupt about-face...
...Now, with alarming suddenness, every American has been drawn into the maw—bewildered, uncertain, terrified...
...In 1953 the Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb- one thousand times more powerful than the "midget" atomic weapons—and by 1954 U.S...
...How would we defend ourselves...
...But the possibility of accident is greatly heightened by the pyramiding war psychosis brought on by civil defense...
...At the time we stood proud and confident...
...W. E. Strope, then head of the Military Evaluation Group of the Naval Radiological Defense Labor*1 tory, was highly pessimistic about defense against fallout...
...Most Americans felt we were secure from attack for a long time...
...Yesterday, nuclear war and death were distant...
...But for the sake of military theorizing, General Bull assumed we might be hit by weapons as large as fifty kilotons...
...The Navy Radiological Defense Laboratory estimate of $38 billion for shelters has been knocked down to the bargain-basement price range of |5 billion to $20 billion...
...In this same region it would be two years before the intensity would drop to a point where it would meet the peacetime AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] tolerance for gamma radiation...
...Only rarely in American history have we experienced such a "hard sell...
...I would rather spend more of it in offensive weapons in the first place...
...But will the fallout shelter, too, turn out to be hopelessly behind the pace of weaponry...
...But in 1957 came the Soviets' first satellite, Sputnik I. Now it was clear that nuclear warheads would no longer have to be delivered by "slow" ocean-crossing airplanes but could be sent hurtling through the air—as missiles—at 18,000 miles an hour...
...Most probably, if the clear-cut evidence of the past provides a helpful guide to the future...
...For many years people were afraid that a war might begin by accident, by the possibility that someone would misread a radar screen or push the wrong button...
...Back in 1956 Val Peterson said that "if [nuclear] war occurs, life is going ' to be stark, elemental, brutal, filthy, and miserable...
...It was, in his view, a "very near hopeless problem...
...defense, therefore, was needed primarily against blast, the great explosion itself...
...We now regard civil defense as vital...
...Willard F. Libby, former member of the Atomic Energy Commission, have given us a figure of ninety to ninety-five per cent survival...
...He voiced his "contempt for anybody who attempts to minimize the sheer destructiveness and death and desolation that will befall mankind if these weapons are dropped...
...There has been a startling shift in official opinion which deserves careful examination...
...Following World War II a civil defense board was established under Major General Harold R. Bull to study what would happen to the United States if a nuclear attack were unleashed on our soil...
...Even the military, only a year or two ago, had little faith in shelters...
...Inaction was compounded by confusion and the pervasive suspicion that there was no possible defense anyway...
...What started as a relatively moderate proposal by the Administration has been propelled by the momentum of militarism into a tornado of misinformation and a whirlwind of self-defeating assumptions...
...The war that was "unthinkable," in President Eisenhower's words, has become "thinkable" and both laymen and a small coterie of official scientists have been vying with each other in a game which James R. Newman, an editor of Scientific American, calls "idiot arithmetic"—predicting how many can survive a nuclear holocaust...
...It simply can't be done...
...Strope's view on fallout has been reversed from pessimism to optimism...
...Val Peterson's estimate of forty per cent killed in nuclear war has now been reduced, by computer magic, to three per cent by Life, and twenty-eight per cent by Congress' Joint Committee on Atomic Energy...
...Even if it does pass, the shelter program will leave deep, perhaps permanent, scars...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
