The City Under the Bomb

Time was when a small American who got vaccinated and looked both ways before crossing streets had a reasonable chance of outliving his boyhood. But a new complication to survival has been added. One recent treatise on the subject seriously inquired: "Can Junior fall instantly, face down, elbow out, forehead on elbow, eyes shut? Have him try it tonight as he gets into bed." Junior could probably do the trick all right. A little practice and an understanding of the situation might save the life of a small boy born into the Atomic Age. The treatise-explained how: "Junior will feel the wind go by, the dirt and pebbles blown with hurricane force against his head . . . A few cuts on the arms and legs aren't important. His playmates, standing upright, will be blown over like matchsticks. Some may get concussion, some broken bones."

Junior's terrifying new problem of survival was the problem of millions of his countrymen. For the first time a great many Americans were beginning to realize that the U.S. had become the target of a determined and ruthless enemy.

The U.S. thought about its dilemma on various levels. Some architects in Boston conjured up a design for a circular house (flat surfaces are vulnerable to shock waves), built of concrete, with double-thick windows and stainless steel doors. Washington realtors advertised houses and lots "beyond the radiation zone." Worried people in Atlanta inquired about insurance policies against atomic-bomb damage.

Such precautions would help. There were other steps every citizen could take to save his own life if his city should be bombed (see box). But to save the lives of others, to keep a bomb-shattered community going, would require plans and cooperation such as the U.S. had never been forced to think about before.

Good, Bad, Indifferent. Against the common danger, the U.S. was slowly mobilizing its defenses. Eighteen months ago, President Truman had ordered up a study of civilian defense. Last fortnight the National Security Resources Board issued a careful, lengthy set of instructions to local governments. Net of NSRB's study: the states must be primarily responsible for organizing themselves and for their own welfare in the event of attack; they would get some federal aid in stockpiling and training.

The 48 states were making plans, good, bad & indifferent. A handful of states had appropriated money for civilian defense. The others had blueprints, authorizations and, at the very least, good intentions. Some of them moved to unite their efforts; last week New York's Governor Dewey signed a mutual aid pact with New Jersey's Driscoll.

On a local scale, a better than ordinary example of preparation was being carried on in a building on New York City's East 28th Street. There General Lucius Clay, U.S.A. (ret.), topflight military staff planner, the man who stubbornly steered Berlin through the Russian blockades, who was now chairman of the state's Civilian Defense Commission, earnestly turned his mind to the moment when the awful crisis might arrive.

Panic or Apathy. The problem was complex. The job required building and maintaining for an indefinite future a vast, complex organization that would be needed, no one knew when, that might never be needed at all. Uncertainty posed a psychological dilemma. Keeping civilians in a constant state of fear would produce impossible local demands on government, provoke the panic in an emergency which would compound catastrophe. Kept in a state of induced calm--even if that were possible--people would get apathetic.

There were some brutal facts to make clear. "Defense" was a misnomer. If an atomic bomb ever exploded above a U.S. city, thousands would die despite all the efforts of such men as Clay and his staff. Cities are pretty much defenseless and their populations are naked under the enemy. No one would be safe, yet many could be saved. Thinking of the worst, even while the "worst" itself could not be measured, Clay and his staff prepared to do what they could, basing their plans on a horrendous hypothesis.

For example:

The Horrendous Hypothesis. Suppose that on an overcast, autumn morning, a Russian bomber carrying an atomic bomb the equivalent of 50,000 tons of high explosives swept through the stratosphere above New York and dropped its missile. Suppose that the bomb was timed to explode half a mile in the air over Union Square.

Within a radius of one mile of Union Square (Ground Zero), the city would appear to have been struck by a giant fist. Within that radius would be the lofty Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building; the teeming cliff dwellings of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town; Klein's department store; 14th Street's subway complex; a labyrinth of gas mains, water lines, telephone cables, electric wires; 55 elementary schools, high schools and trade schools; 17 universities and private schools; twelve of the city's hospitals.

Whole sections would be obliterated.

Within a second zone, 1/4 mile wide, the destruction would be only a little less complete. In that area would be Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Hell's Kitchen, the Metropolitan Opera House; the Holland and Queens vehicular tunnels, the Williamsburg Bridge, the Pennsylvania and Grand Central stations. Many more buildings would be wrecked by the explosion, and gutted by fire.

In the zone beyond, destruction would be--as atomic scientists describe it--"severe." As the mushroom cloud drifted off, in the cluttered, congested, trapped island of Manhattan, storms of fire would lick furiously across the stricken city. An estimated minimum of 75,000 people would be dead, 75,000 would be dying.

History's Biggest Pile of Rubble. No one could predict with any great confidence or in any specific detail what would happen next. But civil defense officials could visualize, at least, what would have to be done.

Around the periphery of the conflagration, firemen would set up mobile stations, try to supplement the inadequate and ruptured water supply with water pumped from the island's flanking rivers. Policemen would make their way into the devastated area, directing squads of mechanics who would turn off gas mains, burn through tangled girders, tunnel into debris after the entombed. Health department squads would penetrate into the dust-thick hell, monitoring radioactivity. Rescue squads and equipment would be ordered to the scene from undamaged, outlying communities.

The wounded and the panic-stricken would be led or carried out. The aimless would be guided into hotels, other havens marked with red, white & blue signs: "This is the emergency welfare center for this area." Evacuees would be routed into tunnels that were still open, over bridges that were still intact--carried to nearby communities by trains, buses, taxis, autos. Soup kitchens would be set up. Registration points would be established to record the names of the homeless.

From across the rivers would roll contraptions for clearing roads--bulldozers, road scrapers, clamshell scoops, cranes resembling prehistoric monsters--to try to cope somehow with history's biggest pile of rubble. Medical squads would treat the maimed and the burned, administer blood, try to save the thousands of victims of shock, who would die within a few hours if they were untended.

In Central Park ditches would be bulldozed for mass burial of the dead.

At East 28th Street. Could the civil defenders rise so systematically to such an incalculable emergency? The answer was to be found, in large part, in the aged, granite building on East 28th Street.*

New York's legislature created its Civilian Defense Commission in May. It was supposed to operate on an appropriation of $100,000. To run the show, Governor Dewey had picked Lucius De Bignon Clay, the wiry, sharp-nosed, imperious West Pointer who accepted the chairmanship of the commission as a sideline to his new null job as chairman of Continental Can Co.

Clay persuaded Lawrence Wilkinson, 45, onetime banker who served in the Ordnance Department during the war, to resign a postwar banking job for the $17,500 post of defense director. Their staff consisted of 55 full-time employees, four of them volunteers. The key men in their setup were the state's own department heads in Albany, e.g., the Commissioners of Housing, Health, the Director of Safety, the Superintendent of Public Works.

The Burden Bearers. Clay's was a planning and coordinating job. Wilkinson was the commission's operating head. As a first step they enlisted 109 county and city directors of civilian defense to work beyond and below the state level. The enormous task of organizing the defenses of New York City fell to Arthur W. Wailander, onetime police commissioner, now on leave from a job with a utility company. On Wallander and his staff would fall the burden of trying to pick up the shattered pieces of humanity, industry and communications while aid, directed by Clay's state organization, was arriving from outside.

With his key men picked, Clay sent directives to state, county and city officials, telling them what he expected them to do. He set a target date of Dec. 1, by which time organization was supposed to be complete.

367,240 Lbs. of Dynamite. Transportation men made inventories. Firemen made plans for moving equipment across county lines. The Department of Public Works counted up and tagged for emergency use some 24,000 pieces of equipment, e.g., 5.949 dump trucks, 2,120 stake and rack trucks, 155 tractor-mount cranes, 265 arc welders, 845 compressors, 558 concrete mixers, 444 hydraulic jacks; 40 million feet of timber, 640,000 feet of water pipe, 243,106 barrels of cement, 367,240 Ibs. of dynamite. It lined up such specialists as 91 blacksmiths, 671 bulldozer operators, 307 crane operators, 45 pile-driver operators. Task forces of private construction companies were set up in ten state districts all of which were supposed to be ready on a moment's notice to move men, tools, equipment and materials into the bomb zone.

The Welfare Department, in charge of clothing, housing, feeding and registering the homeless, began canvassing the city's schools for shelters to supplement their 15 existing centers. They hoped to organize such big chain restaurants as the Horn & Hardart automats to prepare food (sample menu: soup, beefstew, bread, coffee); clothing would be requisitioned from the big department stores.

New York City police began organizing an auxiliary force of 40,000 volunteers, appointed "incident" officers for each of 82 precincts. The city was divided into zones of 500,000 people, zones into sectors of 5,000, sectors into posts of 500. Some civilian zone and sector wardens were named. The crucial men would be the post wardens, who would be charged with knowing their neighborhoods from cellars to roofs, knowing who were the aged, the blind, the infirm, knowing when the neighbors went to work and when they were expected home. So far no post wardens have been appointed.

Muzak & Pigeons. Police officers began training courses under a nuclear physicist. The city planned to give everyone of its 18,850 cops a briefing. Emergency communications were being installed. To supplement the existing police radio net, communications experts were thinking about training pigeons to respond to supersonic whistles, planned to enlist 20,000 high-school students and Boy Scouts as messengers. Plans were already afoot to tie the Muzak canned music circuits into the emergency system. The city's transportation men ordered a batch of city buses rigged with hooks for stretchers. The hospital department started briefing doctors in the medical aspect of atomic war.

But in the voluminous reports, charts, inventories were great holes and insufficiencies. Transportation men declared that they could not make specific evacuation plans for traffic-jammed Manhattan* until they knew exactly what they were supposed to do. Would evacuation be mandatory or voluntary? No one could lay down a policy, nor would anyone have the authority to until the governor declared a state of emergency.

Firemen had made some plans, but the city's Acting Fire Commissioner Nathan Horwitz observed fatalistically: "We won't be much good at handling radiological work until we've tried." A statewide mutual aid plan was being developed, but some firemen were not too enthusiastic about it; some were even a little resentful. Said B. Richter Townsend, state fire boss: "I can't blame the boys up at Poughkeepsie for being mad when I tell them they're going to have to be ready to send five of their six engines to New York. It's never been done before."

The insufficiencies were not so much in the willingness of men, however, as in the apocalyptic task itself.

600,000 Pints of Blood. No phase so graphically underlined the immensity and difficulty of the situation as the medical.

It was estimated, for example, that 100,-ooo casualties would require 600,000 pints of blood over a period of six weeks. It would take 17 freight cars to hold that many pint bottles. To distribute it to casualty stations the city would have to mobilize every vehicle with a refrigeration unit, from meat trucks down to Good Humor wagons.

New York City's 17,000 doctors, many of whom would be victims themselves, could not possibly handle the situation. Dentists, pharmacists, chemists would have to be trained to give emergency professional care. So would many plain civilians, who could be taught to perform one specific task--carrying litters, treating shock or burns, administering blood plasma.

People would have to be taught to look out for themselves. The state commission had made a start in that direction by issuing a booklet: You and the Atomic Bomb, What To Do in Case of an Atomic Attack, for free and wide dissemination. Like the advice to Junior, it was a manual for survival. But the necessity went beyond that.

Said one state medical officer: "These booklets are all right. But people have to be trained. When a guy runs by with half his face blown off and blood running down his shirt front, the booklets won't mean much. Then is the time that training and a job to do can keep down panic. People will have to learn that their survival depends on everyone keeping his wits about him and learning not only to help his neighbor but to rely on his neighbor's help. Everyone must become his brother's keeper."

As a matter of fact, if every department enrolled all the volunteers they said they needed, one out of every ten people in the city would have a specific job in the army of civilian defense. Many more would have to help out on a moment's notice. The biblical injunction to love thy neighbor was being forced on men by man's own unneighborliness. Communism and the atom had posed a problem of total war in which civilians were totally involved.

To Face, To Live With. There was one important modifying factor. Washington figured that 140 cities in the U.S. were potential targets. The others could relax.

But in the cities listed in the enemy's target folders--the centers of industry, aircraft-manufacturing centers, arsenals, key harbors, where an atomic bomb would pay the highest dividends--people had to face the possibility of disaster. This was the problem of survival which the U.S. had just begun to comprehend. U.S. citizens would have to face it and live with it for a long time to come--while Junior practiced throwing himself flat on the ground to escape the blow which would crush all small Americans unlucky enough to be standing in its path.

*Atomic Attack, a Manual for Survival, written by Scientists John Balderston Jr. and Gordon W. Hewes, published by the Council on Atomic Implications (University of Southern California), $1. * Which would itself be eliminated by a bomb over Union Square. Against just such an eventuality, an alternate headquarters has already been set up well outside the target zone. *After a brief tour of traffic-clogged Manhattan last week, four traffic experts from cluttered London found just the words to describe what they saw: an impenetrable "bramble-tangle."

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