Head in the Sand

"The supreme irony of civil defense in the U.S.," said the House Military Operations Subcommittee last week, "is that the American people and many of their elected and appointed policy officials refuse to accept the distasteful facts of reality simply because they are distasteful." The distasteful facts, as set forth by the subcommittee with help from Rand Corp. researchers: a thermonuclear attack on the 150 largest U.S. cities could wipe out 70% of the nation's industry and kill 160 million people, about 90% of the population.

But the subcommittee also found "promising possibilities" for averting such catastrophe. The hydrogen death rate, said the subcommittee, would drop dramatically in proportion to the strength of a civil defense system of blast and fallout shelters (see chart), now virtually nonexistent. With reasonable time to evacuate, a complete shelter system might cut the death cost to 3%. Other practical steps, e.g., sheltering mothballed machine tools and moving key industrial plants underground, might help U.S. industry return to normal within a decade.

"To save over 90% of the population and restore the pre-attack American standard of living in less than ten years," said the subcommittee, "should be sufficient incentive to give civil defense its rightful place in the defense system of the U.S. . . . We are confronted with the grim, brutal reality of the nuclear threat. An ostrichlike policy will not save American lives and property."

Despite the subcommittee's stark warning, the U.S. Congress plainly intended to keep its head in the sand on civil defense: just two days after the House subcommittee issued its report, the Senate Appropriations Committee flatly turned down Civil Defense Boss Leo Hoegh's modest request for $13,150,000 to get a prototype shelter program started.

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