A BLAST FROM THE PAST
Morrissey, David H.
A BLAST FPOM THE PAST BY DAVID H. MORRISSEY The weather was nice that spring morning in Mobile, Alabama. It was the kind of balmy March day when schoolchildren hanker for an afternoon out of the...
...Not all is predicated on chance, though, for FEMA has taken steps to ensure civil order...
...It was the kind of balmy March day when schoolchildren hanker for an afternoon out of the classroom...
...four plants produce most of the nation's aluminum, and there are only thirty-four significant oil refineries...
...If Federal planners have their way, twenty prototype blast-proof shelters will be built in the near future...
...in Reactor One and they ordered the mock evacuation of all persons within a six-mile radius of the plant...
...Only one car, with a cardboard missile on top, carried activists from the local Nuclear Freeze organization...
...According to Rodriguez, the drivers' evacuation training was extremely vague...
...In 1975, with an eye on that distinct possibility, Federal planners designated the top 400 U.S...
...Yet, somehow, the reactor's primary coolant system was miraculously repaired by 2:15 that afternoon...
...Allan Appel (Allan Appel is a free-lance writer in New York City...
...On this morning in 1955, students didn't have to bargain and pester their way to an "early dismissal": Classes were canceled because the Soviet Union had launched a nuclear attack on the United States...
...Only about one-third of all roads in the Soviet Union are paved...
...If you want to spend a little money on civil defense, I don't see what harm it will do," Kaplan says...
...The Soviets cannot retarget everything they've got to cover that many areas," adds Sam Slone III, Alabama's director of civil defense...
...FEMA Director Louis Giuffrida has told Congress that American civil defense planning "reduces the ability of the Soviets to coerce the United States with nuclear blackmail...
...The third part of the plan also assumes that some people will survive the holocaust...
...A group of like-minded people in Becket agreed and founded BLAST— the Becket League to Assist the Scorched and Terrified...
...Yet, despite Jones's dithering absurdities ("Everyone is going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around," he chimed), it is the fifth part of the plan that has proven the most controversial...
...once it stopped when several individuals dashed into the woods along Route 8 North—renamed Civil Defense Route 02—for an evacuation of a personal kind...
...They will be transported out of the area to a safe location where you may get them...
...The district's portion of the evacuation zone includes some 12,000 grade and high school students...
...convince parents who supply and drive cars that they should take the first children waiting to be loaded, even though their own children are not among them...
...Back in Alabama, state officials are dusting off old nuclear preparedness documents and patching together a civil defense strategy...
...Local law enforcement agencies and the Massachusetts Office of Civil Preparedness went along for the ride...
...Records of the drill, however, reveal the evacuation bordered on chaos...
...Fred Kaplan, a former fellow of the Center for International Studies at the Massachussets Institute of Technology and author of Dubious Specter: A Second Look at the Soviet The fact that Soviet submarine-launched missiles can hit American soil in minutes seems to have eluded the Civil Defense planners Threat, says the Soviet civil defense program has gaping flaws...
...political and military leaders...
...We've never been told 'number one' about the plan...
...Absolutely not," said Sunny Feen of Zion...
...Federal civil defense planners felt they had been vindicated by the kids in Alabama...
...targets—the areas most likely to come under Soviet nuclear attack...
...That accounted for the festive atmosphere as 37,229 children were hustled out of seventy-five of the city's public and private schools...
...The first calls for the construction of a national network of fallout shelters, to complement thousands of existing facilities scattered across American cities—the hallways and forgotten basements marked with familiar yellow-and-black signs...
...Although the exercise was completed in less than three of the allowed four hours, Tomaney reproached the evacuees for failing to meet key components of the plan...
...White's state has ten targeted zones and some forty host counties, which presumably are not in Soviet missile sights...
...The Zion evacuation plan has been tested once, on July 29, 1981, but area bus drivers didn't participate...
...My two-way radio isn't working—for the second week in a row...
...The Mobile evacuation, dubbed "Operation Kids" by city officials, was the first large-scale nuclear civil defense drill conducted in the United States...
...To find out whether people would heed the instructions—that is, whether the plan would work—I talked to area parents and bus drivers for the Wauke-gan, Illinois, school district, of which Zion is a part...
...After the dust had settled, Federal officials claim, workers could reassemble General Motors, Boeing, U.S...
...As a result of public indifference, Washington spent barely $100 million on civil defense in 1980, less than half the amount spent in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis...
...Shapiro said those Russians who've heard about civil defense programs got their information from the Voice of America or from government booklets "which no one reads and no one understands...
...Today, though, civil defense planners are reemerging from their basements, lifted out of irrelevance by President Reagan's request for a record $252.3 million civil defense budget for fiscal 1983...
...Nancy Hill, a mother and bus driver, wasn't impressed...
...I haven't met one person who could really tell me anything about it, who was really aware of it...
...A mass exodus would be chaotic—at the very least—if the plan for the Zion, Illinois, area is any example...
...These reinforced shelters would be located near important industrial sites in order to protect those workers who can later help the nation crank up its economy...
...Perhaps the people who would face the hardest decisions are parents who drive buses...
...the implication that forty million people would therefore die is not officially acknowledged...
...Orange T-shirts depicting fireballs were produced...
...According to Dianne Harrakis, BOMBS's co-founder, the organizers wanted to avoid offending anyone...
...Confusion in Zion Atomic war isn't the only catastrophe that might trigger the evacuation of American cities...
...According to the agency, the United States could "survive nuclear attack and go on to recovery within a relatively few years...
...intelligence reports note that few Soviet shelters are stocked with enough food and water, if they are stocked at all...
...School bus driver Bob Webb predicted, on the basis of his military experience, that drivers wouldn't be able to return for second loads, even if they tried...
...I can't imagine anyone coming back for a second bus load," she said, adding, "I wouldn't take a chance on my children being left behind: I would go and get my own...
...That almost two-thirds of the population lives in high-risk areas has not deterred FEMA from urging state governments to develop programs in elaborate detail...
...These are, in order of priority, military installations, military-related industries, transportation and other basic industries, and cities with at least 50,000 inhabitants...
...Indeed, the second part of the plan acknowledges the problems with the first part: The Administration proposes building special blast-proof shelters for about four million "essential" workers...
...The 300,000 people live within ten miles of the Zion plant, on both sides of the Wisconsin-Illinois border...
...If they really believe that, it could be kind of dangerous...
...The job of implementing the official survival policy has been delegated to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA...
...It is estimated that people could relocate from nearly all U.S...
...It's the dirt that does it...
...On the other hand, the evacuees had successfully executed another requirement by dragging along innumerable portable toilets and boxes of diapers...
...To Sharon Rodriguez, such a sane choice might not be possible after an accident...
...if evacuees don't panic...
...The residents of Burlington, Beacon Falls, and Bethlehem, Connecticut, are nonetheless expected to find salvation in what may be the ashes of Becket...
...But the proposed fallout shelters, like the existing ones, will not be blast-proof and would probably be destroyed in a nuclear attack...
...The fact that Soviet submarine-launched missiles can hit American soil in a matter of minutes seems to have been excluded from the official thought process...
...Administration officials concede that some Americans may be left shelterless during the nuclear storm, but the GovernCivil Defense comes out of the cellar ment has informal contingency plans for them, too...
...The Administration claims about 80 per cent of the American people can be saved if plans for crisis relocation and shelters are implemented...
...According to FEMA, the President would issue an order to evacuate high-risk zones if he believed war was imminent...
...If the evacuation race did not lead to war, it would, nonetheless, cause domestic chaos in both countries...
...The Administration is also promoting a seven-year civil defense package which it prices at $4.2 billion, though critics charge it will cost at least twice that amount...
...The Soviet program is such a secret that nobody there knows anything about it...
...Even if the Soviet civil defense program were the smoothly functioning operation some U.S...
...Williams said evacuation planners mistakenly assume bus drivers would risk more exposure to radiation than others...
...During the last few years, Federal officials have clearly linked victory and survival: In 1978, President Carter called for a new type of mass evacuation program, officially named crisis relocation, in which residents of "high-risk" target areas would move to non-targeted host communities before an attack...
...About 60 per cent of all Soviet steel comes from twenty-five foundries...
...But such privileges are not unprecedented: Already, the Government boasts an ostensibly blast-proof shelter for high-level military officials...
...the adults were merely conducting an evacuation drill...
...In 1980, Presidential Directives Fifty-eight and Fifty-nine explored the possibility of a limited nuclear war and suggested ways to reconstitute the Government after an atomic holocaust...
...But as detente replaced brinkmanship as the official U.S...
...In a real nuclear accident crisis, the choice is simple: My own personal safety and that of my family...
...Furthermore, students whose parents didn't have cars were evacuated late...
...If the accident happened today, you'd have parents storming the bus to get their kids—the buses wouldn't move...
...This part of the plan might make a small amount of sense if radiation were the only danger facing evacuees...
...I've been in disaster situations before," he said...
...FEMA is now using this list to prod the states to follow the example of Alabama and promulgate their own crisis relocation plans...
...But it is an austere time and other budgets are being cut...
...Although it was conducted under favorable circumstances—residents knew about it in advance and supported the effort—major traffic jams developed and radio announcers failed to broadcast essential information...
...This proposal, euphemistically called "continuity of government," means that a few powerful people will be accorded special treatment not available to the rest of us...
...Last March, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive Twenty-six, which declared that civil defense "complements" America's nuclear war-fighting capability...
...The roads are so clogged now at certain times that you can't get out of the city," Hartman noted...
...officials insist it is, the Russians would still be dealt a fatal blow in any nuclear exchange because of the concentration of their industry...
...Both Burlington and Becket are conservative, Republican communities: Humor proved to be the best way to involve people of all political persuasions...
...They pretended a steam release had occurred at 11:07 a.m...
...The basic premise is to save lives by dispersing the population," says David White, an Alabama civil defense planner...
...Chuck Hartman, a special education bus driver, said buses would bog down in traffic jams...
...She concluded, "I'll evacuate my kids...
...Ellen Williams, a bus union steward, driver, and mother of two, also suggested the plan is likely to fail...
...For example, the scheme calls for each person—presumably even owners of compact cars—to bring nine sandbags...
...The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the President's request...
...I don't know of any parents who would leave their children in town...
...Slone admits the plan would be effective only if it were implemented on a national scale...
...all diesel engines are made in five cities...
...On the day of the drill, a few hundred miles away, eleven people were arrested at the Groton, Connecticut, shipyard while protesting the launch of a nuclear-armed submarine...
...In all honesty, I don't know what I was supposed to be looking for anyway," she added...
...they weren't told whom to pick up, what routes to take, or even where they should go in the event of a nuclear accident...
...The role-playing was all the officials needed to get high marks and a stamp of approval from the Federal Emergency Management Agency...
...In a spirit of friendly, if macabre, competition, the two organizations set about planning the drill...
...The expense has been justified all along by a Government proposition as simple as it is unfounded—the assumption that the United States can win a nuclear war, pick up the ashes, and go on with business as usual...
...In fact, about 65 per cent of the risk population could be evacuated by the end of the first day [although] it would probably take an extra day for the residents of New York City...
...The real danger is if leaders—either American or Russian—really believe this gives them anything, either in terms of security or bargaining strength, or if either of them believe it alters the strategic balance...
...Catherine Quigg (Catherine Quigg is research director for Pollution and Environmental Problems, Inc., a public-interest group in Palatine, Illinois...
...cities in three days or less," FEMA says...
...The success of the Zion evacuation plan rests on the availability of buses and bus drivers...
...There's no way we could get all these children out of town in one trip," said Dumas...
...What would constitute the basis for such a decision is not exactly clear, but one line of reasoning suggests the White House would Burlesque in Burlington For the citizens of Burlington, Connecticut, a nuclear evacuation plan wasn't enough...
...The message being sent to the states is "gear up...
...a cablegram was sent to the Soviet government, advising it that Burlington's actions would not be a prelude to nuclear attack, and a letter was posted to President Reagan, telling him that the test would "put to rout the carping editorialists and effete, cynical vilifiers who have derided, even ridiculed, the notion that evacuation can provide an effective civil defense strategy...
...But such problems didn't put a damper on the event: In fact, the evacuees were having a blast...
...But Sharon Rodriguez said she's already made her choice: "I'm going to be very greedy and make sure my children are safe...
...And, resting on a patch of grass, the grim reaper himself smiled on the excitement...
...The planners committed us to something we know nothing about...
...Although it de-emphasizes speculation that a nuclear war is imminent, FEMA insists that "a nuclear attack on the United States remains a distinct possibility...
...But more importantly, it is suicidal, for it signifies that Government leaders are more optimistic about surviving a nuclear war than they are about disarming the nuclear time bomb...
...The festivities amounted to a demonstration against civil defense, but the atmosphere of the evacuation was not anti-Reagan...
...A FEMA pamphlet lists firearms, narcotics, and alcoholic beverages as examples of "What Not to Take With You...
...All schoolchildren inside the ten-mile zone are supposed to be moved out within two hours and forty-five minutes of the evacuation order, while persons without cars and those in institutions are expected to be relocated within three hours and twenty minutes...
...it seemed that mass evacuation could make it possible for Americans to survive communist nuclear aggression...
...I asked parents whether they would follow the plan's instructions and drive off without their children...
...In light of Soviet vulnerability—and, indeed, our own—a reinvigorated American civil defense program is a provocation and a waste of money...
...The governor and important bureaucrats would flee Montgomery because Federal civil defense planners consider the city a Soviet target...
...Presumably, these survivors could be tapped into service to bury their co-workers who were deemed nonessential...
...We won't be going anywhere," she shrugged...
...Once inside Camp Becket, as it was dubbed, the relocated citizens encountered two teens in surgical masks who ominously scanned entrants with Geiger counters...
...A similar bunker sixty miles north of Capitol Hill, "Raven Rock," will do duty as the Pentagon...
...if food and water can be provided...
...Clearly, civil defense is an idea whose time has come again...
...According to this portion, the United States would develop the capability to dismantle, disperse, and bury major industrial complexes before an attack...
...Their plan coolly designates Troy as the "first alternative" state capital, should a hard rain fall...
...This is the proposal for "crisis relocation" or, as it used to be known, evacuation...
...American scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory who translated the Russian publication called this design error "the most serious flaw in the whole Soviet civil defense planning...
...What was the point of the parade...
...According to Feen, there aren't enough buses in the district to move students out in one trip...
...if there is time to evacuate...
...Smaller exercises throughout the 1950s and 1960s hurled children into the hallways of schools across the nation...
...Chock full of electronic gadgetry, food, and supplies, Mount Weather will serve as the nation's capital if Washington is destroyed...
...U A Tennessean waits for the State to commit the most premeditated murder 38 / FEBRUARY 1983...
...I couldn't read it now if I had to...
...The plan backed by Reagan consists of five major parts...
...asks one FEMA publication...
...On this score, the Burlingto-nians had failed miserably...
...The idea that the Soviets could quickly evacuate their cities prior to launching an attack is "science fiction," he told me...
...Steel, and other major producers as if they were Lincoln logs...
...Furthermore, U.S...
...Actually, I probably won't even know when an accident happens...
...A serious accident at one of the nation's seventy-four nuclear reactors would force thousands of people to flee their homes, places of work, and schools...
...The following year, Korean war hysteria sparked Federal expenditures of $26 million for civil defense, and by 1962, Washington was spending $207 million in response to President Kennedy's tough talk about Cuba...
...Civil defense officials claim crisis relocation programs are necessary to put the United States on an equal footing with the Soviet Union, which is said to have an advanced civil defense system...
...Only about one-fourth of the country is currently included in such plans, according to the agency...
...A Soviet civil defense handbook revealed that the air filters in the shelters are inadequate to prevent the buildup of carbon dioxide...
...The same applies for nursing home residents and hospital patients...
...doctrine, most Americans forgot about survival biscuits, "duck and cover," medical kits, portable basement toilets, and other trappings of civil defense...
...the others are covered by mud or snow much of the year, making them useless for moving large numbers of people...
...But, like the plans for wartime civil defense, the plans to evacuate communities near reactors won't work...
...The notion of defending civilians from nuclear attack surfaced in the United States not long after American planes had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945...
...The group responsible for the high-spirited exercise was BOMBS, the Burlington Organization for the Movement of Bodies to Safety...
...He added that he didn't see a single civil defense drill in Moscow after World War II...
...The Federally mandated scheme calls for about 300,000 people to be relocated if a major accident occurs at Commonwealth Edison's twin nuclear reactors along Lake Michigan...
...In response to that inequity, the author of a civil defense booklet, woefully ignorant of the suffocating racial history of Mobile and much of the South, suggested that "an important phase of evacuation planning is to David H. Morrissey, a former reporter for The Anniston Star in Alabama, is studying government accountability at the University of Oregon...
...There aren't enough buses to leave simultaneously," she said...
...I would go to school and get them...
...But it was not until 1950—one year after the Soviets broke the American nuclear monopoly— that a Civil Defense Act was passed to implement the Bull plan...
...No one seems to know why Beacon Falls and Bethlehem are included in the Becket zone, though some suspect it's because they also begin with the letterB...
...The evacuees were, of course, throwing a barb at the Burlington-Becket civil defense plan—at its mindlessness and futility...
...The document called for the "survival of a substantial portion of the American people in the event of a nuclear attack...
...The responsibility of developing a winning nuclear strategy has been left to the Pentagon...
...if civil order can be maintained in the host areas, and if the Soviets don't simply retrain their weapons on the newly populated host zones...
...According to a Government civil defense handbook published soon after the event, the exercise had demonstrated that "effective evacuation of all schoolchildren could be completed" before atomic blasts obliterated the city on Mobile Bay...
...Although the BOMBS/BLAST activists are not ready for civil disobedience—and may never be—the Government would be mistaken to write off an action such as Burlington's: It is easier to scoop up eleven persons for disorderly conduct than it is to bamboozle an entire community that has experienced a dry run of death...
...Only the knowledge that it was, after all, just an exercise kept the numerous problems from overwhelming the evacuation...
...order Americans to get moving if spy satellites detected a Soviet evacuation...
...Instead, emergency planners in Illinois and Wisconsin mobilized hypothetical statistics...
...A utility company booklet mailed to area residents advises, "If your children are in school and the school is in the evacuation zone, do not try to pick them up...
...Some existing shelters have not even withstood hurricanes, tornadoes, or winter storms...
...Would the survivors of nuclear attack envy the dead...
...In more than three decades of civil defense expenditures, American taxpayers have shelled out about $2.6 billion...
...The Mobile drill was unique only in its size...
...State police officers handed out shelter assignment forms to evacuees as they entered the staging area at the intersection of Routes 8 and 20—just past the sign that warned, "Water contaminated, cold beer ahead...
...Rodriguez said she was taught how to read a pocket dosimeter for radiation exposure, "but the trainer took it back...
...Data and conclusions from complex and sophisticated studies do not support that view...
...Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors, and throw three feet of dirt ontop,"DeputyUnder Secretary of Defense Thomas J. Jones suggested in a Los Angeles Times interview...
...if traffic jams don't make evacuation impossible (as almost happened in Mobile...
...The Western Virginia Office of Controlled Conflict Operations, known as Mount Weather, is an underground city carved out of granite hills about forty-seven miles west of Washington...
...The Government claims that the United States could not be caught off guard, and would have days—or even a week—to evacuate...
...Reagan officials are also talking up, though not yet endorsing, a $70 billion program to build a nationwide network of blast shelters...
...Federal planners say persons in targeted cities can safely move to rural "host areas" before a nuclear attack...
...You can go one way, but you don't come back too well...
...But this perception of the Soviet threat doesn't square with the observations of some Soviet-watchers...
...FEMA documents quote from a 1978 CIA report: "The critical decision to be made by the Soviet leaders in terms of sparing the population would be whether or not to evacuate cities...
...With or without necessities, most Soviet shelters are improperly ventilated...
...The whole idea rests, of course, on several "ifs": If the reports on Soviet intentions are accurate and not a false alarm...
...steel, wood, and concrete can block out some radiation from fallout...
...The FEMA scenario assumes that evacuees would move via public and private transportation and carry with them enough food, clothing, and medicine to last three days...
...A civil defense board established under the direction of Major General Harold Bull recommended the Government build "blast shelters" to protect the population...
...Not a real attack, of course...
...Becket, the supposed safe haven, is itself only sixteen miles from a General Electric ordnance plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts...
...Reagan's plan also calls for protecting top U.S...
...Bill Tomaney and a friend had launched BOMBS two months earlier, over beers at a Fourth of July barbeque...
...On a sunlit morning early last September, the townspeople took it upon themselves to test the crisis relocation scheme prepared by Federal mandate for their corner of the Naugatuck Valley...
...Of course, ordering an American evacuation on the basis of perceived Soviet actions poses grave risks, the most dangerous of which is to cause Soviet leaders to up the ante in a spiraling drive toward war...
...Led by an old volunteer fire department truck that could barely negotiate the hills, a caravan of about 150 cars snaked its way to Becket, Massachusetts, the designated "host community" sixty-five miles north of Burlington ground zero...
...Food in host area supermarkets and drugs in host pharmacies would be appropriated for public use...
...The Senate cut it to $152 million, an increase of about $24 million over the previous year...
...If the Government is going to invest $4.2 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency plans, it's only right that someone should check them out," he said at the time...
...While the Soviets do have some ostensibly blast-proof shelters— primarily for use by high officials—they have never been able to stage a mock evacuation of a major city...
...Margaret Dumas drives the district's only bus that can accommodate wheelchairs...
...Henry Shapiro, who retired in 1973 from United Press International after forty years as a correspondent in Moscow and Eastern Europe, also says the Soviet civil defense system is overrated...
...The funereal procession sputtered to a halt on two occasions because autos ran out of gas...
...The plan presupposes that people would save themselves from the consequences of a nuclear attack by moving from a totally irradiated area to one with slightly less—but still lethal—amounts of radioactivity...
...Not surprisingly, FEMA finds the idea of outliving a nuclear exchange entirely plausible...
...She makes several trips a day to the same schools because the bus holds only four wheelchairs and there are fourteen wheelchair students in the district...
...Those planners take it for granted that government will continue to function after a nuclear war, but it's more likely that the sleepy little college town of Troy would be nothing more than Alabama's post-mortem capital...
Vol. 47 • February 1983 • No. 2
