Fallout Shelters
Ch 3: Morality and National Identity at the Shelter Door1961 (80) “Fear of nuclear war was certainly on many people’s minds, and the shelter business was quick to capitalize on such apprehensions, nurturing customers with what Newsweek called, “equal parts of show biz., peep show, and hard sell.”
JAN 1962 (81) “It was apparent how quickly the tide against shelters had changed when just four months after Life’s initial cover story it published another cover story in which the editors were furiously backpedaling. Now Life was saying that there was “unwisdom, if not added danger, in an over-ambitious shelter program.” The 97% claim had also been abandoned, and now the editors were saying that “shelters would somewhat increase the chances of survival” and “under certain ghastly circumstances they might save millions of lives—and the nation.”
(86) Thomas E. Murray (AEC member): “a great nation falling back upon sheer survival as its all-consuming purpose in history”
George Kennan: “Are we to flee like haunted creatures from one defensive device to another, each more costly and humiliating than the one before, cowering underground one day, breaking up our cities the next, attempting to surround ourselves with elaborate electronic shields on the third…”
MICRO MORALITY
(93) Leo Hoegh (cd director under Ike) testified in 1960: many shelter owners hid their shelters to keep neighbors from knowing
MACRO MORALITY
Las Vegas vs. Los Angeles
(99) “It was not only Las Vegas that feared the predations of an uprooted LA population. Indeed, this scenario captured the imagination of several civil defense coordinators. Keith Dwyer, civil defense coordinator of Riverside County, also suggested that the county arm itself against the onslaught of a ragged stream of refugees fleeing an H-bombed LA.”
PUBLIC RELATIONS GAME
(88) shelter proponents could not find good metaphors (“extremely difficult to put an admirable (much less heroic) spin on burrowing into the earth to save one’s hide, regardless of the reasonableness of such an action”)
NEGATIVE METAPHORS WERE NUMEROUS
What were they?
MOLE (rodent existence) Dylan song
CAVE MEN (89) “a devolution of the human species, and that humanity’s long climb out of the dark caves was now being reversed.”
| MAGINOT LINE |  |
(112) “To many Americans, there was something inherently shameful about burying themselves under the earth to save their lives, despite the excellent utility of such a move in the wake of a nuclear attack. Compounding the shame was the barbarism of threatening to kill one’s neighbor to protect one’s shelter, what Walter Lippmann called the “evil” of “each family for itself, and the devil take the hindmost.”
Chg 4: Taking Government, Business, and Schools Underground
(113) “Without precedent on which to draw, civil defense officials in effect did what the military is often accused of doing—they prepared for the last war rather than the next one.” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
“Civil defense planners had seen the British taking shelter and surviving the Blitz during World War II, and the Germans digging out from under the rubble at the war’s conclusion and producing an economic miracle. Surely hearty, determined Americans could do the same in the next war. While many civil defense officials might privately admit that World War II would bear the same resemblance to a thermonuclear war as World War I did to the Seven Years’ War, they might also insist that making some preparations, however inadequate in the face of nuclear war, was preferable to the feeling of helplessness and despair that was the alternative.”
(114) continuity of Am life required
- massive bunkers to house govt officials (like Greenbrier, built 1956-62)
- stocking away paper $
- “Little Pentagons” for defense continuity (like Site R)
- INDUSTRIAL DISPERSAL (119) 1954 Moreel Report: 2 nuclear bombs could eliminate 1/3 Am steel capacity
“Dispersal, as one writer noted, “is still regarded by the industrialized states . . . as a ‘dagger pointed at the heart of every industrial region.’ In Connecticut Senator McMahon’s view, what dispersal meant to New England residents was “the move to Nevada.” - (132) school drills—teach reaction plans with as much mundane description as possible
- (133) ID tags given to children in major cities
- ENLIST WOMEN: (141) “the GENDERED holocaust”— women as primary organizers for civil defense
fallout shelter controversy in fall 1961 “created a startling and unprecedented public involvement in this debate, claiming the passion and energies of citizens from all strata of society”
- Berlin crisis in 1961—Khrushchev threatened to create new agreement w/ E Germany to force Allied removal by end of year
- Kennedy speech on 25 July 1961 called for $207 million to fund civil defense initiative
- “an official enunciation of what was already a fait accompli: the American home had been put on the front lines of the Cold War.”
WW1: civilian casualties = 5%
WW2: cc = 50%
WW3 prediction: cc > 95%
(9) “While most Ams found no paradox in the fact that they both greatly feared nuclear war and approved of its use against communist aggression, Am allies often maintained a very different perspective. When both Ams and Britons were asked by Gallup pollsters in 1961, “Suppose you had to make the decision between fighting an all-out nuclear war or living under communist rule; how would you decide?” 81% of Ams opted for nuclear war, while only 21% of the British chose this option.”
(10) “very few Americans took any steps toward preparing their homes against nuclear attack.”
- $$$$$
- shelter might realistically protect from fallout, but not from blast and heat
- post-Berlin and -CMC tensions waned
- “troubling moral aspects”
- personal ethics
- social relationships
- national identity
- visions of postapocalyptic life
Chapter 1: A New Age Dawning
(19) most important strategic document of Truman administration: NSC 68 (1950)—competition b/w US & USSR as a bleak struggle for survival
- “the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake”
- “building up our military strength in order that it may not have to be used”
VIDEO: TESTS AT BIKINI ATOLL, 1946
Eisenhower + John Foster Dulles (Sec. State)
strategy of “MASSIVE RETALIATION”: threat of overwhelming nuclear response to wide range of situations (1k nukes in 1953 –> 18k in 1960)
OVERALL PROGRAM WAS TO CUT SPENDING WHILE REVVING UP RHETORIC (national shelter program would cost $20-$30 billion)
VIDEO: atomic troop maneuvers, 1953
Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) created by executive action in 1950: suggested “an interest in developing a coherent, national civil defense policy.”
(24) in early 1950s, FCDA was thinking BOMB SHELTERS, not fallout shelters.
Congress rejected funding, 1951-1953
Eisenhower’s FCDA chief (Val Peterson) looked to save $ while protecting population:
switched emphasis from shelters to evacuation (evacuation = cheap, shelters = not cheap)
VIDEO: H-bomb tests in 1954
| March 1954 Bravo test of H-bomb at Bikini Atoll: 15mT instead of 5 (Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were 16kT and 21 kT)radioactive coral carried over 1000s of square miles from ground zero |
Ralph Lapp (CD editor for BAS): “the new peril from radioactive fall-out is more than just a threat to civil defense; it is a peril to humanity.”
Lapp interview w/ Val Peterson
Q: It would seem that if a man 70 to 80 miles downwind of an H-bomb detonation can be killed by radioactive fall-out that civil defense faces a radical new threat.
A: Well, that isn’t a question. That is just a plain statement.
(27) 1954: “Operation Alert” exercises began (simulated nuclear attacks on Am cities)
THE PUBLIC COULD HARDLY HAVE CARED LESS
(28) Bureau of Public Roads, 1957: estimated cost for national evacuation at $23 billion (same as national shelter program)
Why, according to Rose, should we care that the FCDA set the initial fallout shelter protection factor at 5000?
(31) 1955: FCDA “protection factor” (PF) standard for fallout shelters
| 19555000195810001960100196240 | At 5000 PF, concrete walls had to be 26″ thick. |
“public perceptions of what constituted a fallout shelter continued to be extremely thick walls and costly single-purpose construction long after these standards had been abandoned.”
Chapter 5: The Theory and Practice of Armageddon
(150) “It was one of the cold comforts of the thermonuclear era that the Soviets seemed as bewildered as the Americans. The Soviets were making their own preparations for surviving a nuclear war, but the ramifications of such a war were perhaps even more disturbing to Soviet ideologues than they were to Western theorists.” CRISIS FOR MARXIST-LENINIST THEORY OF WAR = RISE OF SOCIALISM
(152) “The counterforce idea, that nuclear war could be controlled if the belligerents restricted their strikes to the enemy’s strategic military forces (its counterforce), and secondarily to industrial assets, was an element of the flexible response strategy installed by the Kennedy administration. But the suggestion that nuclear war and total annihilation were not necessarily convertible terms had already attracted considerable attention by the late 1950s.”
(154) Bernard Brodie of RAND: “By the time he published Strategy in the Missile Age in 1959, Brodie’s thinking on nuclear attack had shifted significantly, and he had abandoned a number of his previous positions, including the notion that any nuclear attack would be an “all-out” attack directed against cities, and that shelters against such an attack would be relatively worthless. Like other RAND researchers, Brodie was influenced by ?game theory? and the supposition that geopolitical behavior proceeded according to rules of rational behavior and self-interest. Now Brodie argued that attacking the civilian population simply did not make sense militarily, and in fact the enemy could gain a greater military advantage by “burdening the opposing government
with masses of dispossessed and panic-stricken citizens rather than in killing them.”
(156) “The most likely scenario, according to Kahn, would be a counterforce or a counterforce plus avoidance attack, enabling the attacker “to use the cities and the survivors as hostages to deter retaliation or to negotiate a favorable cease-fire.” For this reason, Kahn defended the Kennedy administration’s fallout shelter program “as a relatively inexpensive form of insurance against a Soviet attack concentrated upon our strategic military force.”
(160) “Thus, because of its expense and questionable viability, an effective urban shelter program was a political nonstarter. Instead, the program that eventually was created carried with it, according to one observer, “the built-in notice to millions of city dwellers that they are expendable.” Oskar Morgenstern claimed that if policy makers built only suburban fallout shelters without urban blast protection, “people living in the large cities will know that they are to be sacrificed in case of large-scale war….This would cause social stratification, privileges and advantages, which cut across all existing ones.” That nuclear survival was enhanced by residency in the suburbs was noted by others, including John Kenneth Galbraith. In a letter to Kennedy, Galbraith called the suburban bias of the fallout shelter program “a design for saving Republicans and sacrificing Democrats.”
(163) “While Soviet newspapers derided American “moles” who were digging fallout shelters, and while Nina Khrushchev was assuring American peace marchers that no shelters were being built in the Soviet Union, the Soviets began quietly planning the construction of what may be the most elaborate shelter ever built. Secretly constructed under the Moscow suburb of Ramenki and completed in the early 1970s, this facility was capable of sheltering thirty thousand Russian elites for several months. The Ramenki complex was served by an underground railroad and was maintained by a section of the KGB known as Directorate 15. The original Ramenki complex had movie theaters and a swimming pool that were designed, as the journalist Carey Scott put it, “to keep the politburo amused as the rest of the population was being irradiated above them.”
(169) “While military strategists argued about counterforce theory, physicists debated the thermal effects of nuclear weapons. Whether or not nuclear weapons would start massive firestorms—and in the process render all but the most elaborate shelters worthless—was one of the key areas of contention. The phenomenon of the firestorm was first seen in a week-long incendiary bombing raid on Hamburg in July 1943, an operation that Arthur Harris, commander of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, code named “Gomorrah.” How firestorms are created is poorly understood, and the physicist Freeman Dyson, who served with the RAF Bomber Command during the war, noted that while “in every big raid we tried to raise a fire storm,” they had failed until the Hamburg raid. The Hamburg firestorm may have been what Dyson called a “technological accident,” but the phenomenon itself resembled a force of nature.”
(171) “Despite the lack of hard data on this phenomenon, the firestorm scenario was nearly irresistible to opponents of civil defense. Unmistakably, there was something primordial and savage, even biblical, in the image of a roiling wall of flame devastating everything in its path. The firestorm stimulated the apocalyptic imagination.”
(173) “But as the decade of the 1950s wore on, physicians as well as the general public became increasingly disturbed by indications that radioactivity did pose a threat. There was mounting evidence of an accumulation of radioactive particles in the environment, and physicians were becoming progressively less willing to accept the AEC?s benign assurances. The destructive
power of nuclear weapons had also grown exponentially in a little over a decade, and many physicians now began to express doubts about the efficacy of civil defense and about the medical community’s ability to do anything about the disaster of a nuclear war.”
(180) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—created the BULLETIN CLOCK in 1955
(185) “The counterforce argument that the civilian population would largely be excluded from the effects of nuclear war is certainly not validated by the results of the two world wars, where excesses that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of these wars became political necessities as casualties mounted and vast sums of money were spent. One of the obvious flaws of the counterforce argument is that, even more so than in the case of World War II, it would be virtually impossible to isolate the civilian population from attacks against the military. Even if directed at counterforce targets, the power of nuclear weapons, and the errors that are invariably made in the fog of war, would virtually guarantee large numbers of civilian casualties. //
Once the counterforce argument has been eliminated and the likelihood established that a nuclear war would be a total war against both military and civilian populations, the assumptions of civil defense fall like a house of cards. Evacuation in the face of an enemy intent on destroying the civilian population would be futile, even ludicrous. Perhaps even more pathetic is the notion that an individual could assure the survival of his family from an all-out nuclear war by building a fallout shelter. The forces arrayed against such an individual were simply too great, and a realization of this Nuclear Age fact of life would play an important role in the American rejection of fallout shelters.”