The Price of Life

CIVIL DEFENSE The Price of Life Streaming through Washington last week like a rocket's vapor trail was the news of a mysterious report on U.S. defense that had been handed the National Security Council and the White House for top-secret study. Newsmen who traced the smoke to the rocket found that the report was the work of the little-known Gaither committee, headed by onetime Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither Jr. and set up six months ago by the President.

Its chief assignment: public safety in all-out war.

The Unknown Area. The committee's prime finding was already a matter of public knowledge, i.e., the U.S.'s first line of defense is its capacity to retaliate, combined with the ability to intercept and detonate an enemy's guided missiles before they can damage the U.S. proper. But beyond that was a vital area where serious exploration has made little if any inroad in public consciousness. Prime question: What can shelters do to protect people in all-out thermonuclear war?

Into this area, where others have been too bored to tread, the high-powered committee stepped with courage and imagination. The members--onetime Deputy Defense Secretary William C. Foster; onetime State Department director of policy planning Paul H. Nitze; Williams College President James Phinney Baxter III; onetime Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett; and Sprague Electric Co. Board Chairman Robert C. Sprague--admitted the probability of substantial enemy success in a missile attack. Said one committeeman: "That leaves the question of what to do against this thing called fallout. Maybe in six months some bright guy will invent a pill we can all take, but he hasn't yet. The only thing we have is the thing we learned about as far back as the X-ray shielding. So it boils down to what kind of protective shelter against radioactivity we can build at a cost that isn't too unreasonable."

How Much Time? The committee rejected blast shelters because of their great expense, and because a sudden attack would leave little time for people to get to safety. This meant turning down a program advanced by onetime Civil Defense Administrator Val Peterson, who startled the Administration early this year by announcing that civilian salvation lay in $34 billion-plus worth of heavy, blastproof bomb shelters. Some authorities, like Scientist Edward Teller (TIME, Jan. 21), even envisaged a vast underground network where men could survive for an indefinite time after an attack. Civil Defense Administrator Leo Hoegh (who replaced Peterson last July) has, like the Gaither committee, virtually abandoned the blast-shelter idea in favor of fallout shelters. Reason: radioactive fallout, with all its dangers, can be fought; it comes as a delayed reaction of nuclear explosions, produces aftereffects more slowly. Explains a committee member: "A fallout shelter, of course, would not withstand a direct hit, but it could be any one of a number of things--from a rigged-up basement in the ground covered by dirt to the kind of steel-and-concrete thing you could put up in your backyard." Cost for a system of fallout shelters would run upwards of $20 billion (priced singly, according to one CDA man, "at about the cost of a medium-priced car").

"How Much Dough?" Said a high-ranking Gaither committee member: "Don't get the idea that we're starting at the lower spectrum, digging a Maginot line and suggesting crawling underneath it. Obviously, our first protection is our offensive. The defensive has to be secondary, and it becomes a question of how much dough you can afford to put into it once you've built up your retaliatory capabilities."

The answer, from the point of view of civil defense experts, is simple: spend the money. For though millions of American lives might be lost in a sudden attack, the presence of shelters across the broad expanse of the nation would make certain that the survivors would come through--with the material means to build and fight once again. And the prospect of failure in a knockout blow might well deter the Russians from ever trying one.

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