This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (21 page)

BOOK: This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War
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To make matters worse, Washington didn’t as yet have an evacuation plan. Movement of the central city population to a four-mile line wasn’t an official plan—it was little more than a suggestion John Fondahl made to the NSC in April.
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The civil defense traffic regulations were complicated and had been pub
lished 18 months earlier.
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And would wartime essential personnel leave the city without calling, or trying to pick up, their loved ones? How could their evacua
tion take place unnoticed and expeditiously, especially since the city and suburbs lacked a circumferential highway? (The Capital Beltway wasn’t finished until 1964.) As Admiral Arthur Radford pointed out during a March NSC meeting, rush hour traffic was so bad it took him an hour to cross Washington.
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Even the President’s safe removal seemed in doubt. Because “an attack can materialize with only a few hours warning, it is apparent that a higher degree of readiness for instant reaction by the Chief Executive is imperative,” urged Beach in April.
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Finally, we should consider the likelihood of the attack itself: “
at no time in the period under consideration
[the 1950s]
did the Soviet Union deploy a substantial strategic bomber force that could play a significant role in an attack on the continental United States
” (emphasis in original). Even on one-way missions, the Tu-4s could only reach targets in the northwestern United States; only the ten M-4s could have reached New York or Washington. The Soviets had approximately 350 atomic weapons; the United States had more than 3,000. Let there be no doubt, the Soviet Union was a formidable power in 1955—it could have carried out a withering atomic and conventional strike in Europe; it could have launched its bombers on one-way sorties against U.S. targets—but it hadn’t as yet achieved strategic arms parity with the United States.
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Did American superiority thus encourage a smug sense of security, the belief the Soviets would never start a war they couldn’t win, rendering early warning and evacuation plans for the capital unimportant? In fact, no; the national security state could only surmise the size of the Soviets’ nuclear stockpile and the capabilities of its delivery systems. At times these estimates imputed greater striking force than the Soviets actually wielded. In May 1955, for example, multiple flyovers of the same ten M-4 aircraft at a military parade prompted unwarranted fears of a “bomber gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union, while in March 1956, the CIA overesti
mated the range and refueling capability of the Tu-4.
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Moreover, the inade
quacies of continental defense—“the Achilles heel of our national security,” as one planner put it—weighed heavily on the national security state.
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Why then was Washington ill prepared? A look at civil defense exercises staged between late 1952 and mid-1955 provides the answer.

Testing . . .

...1: Government Air Raid Drill, Friday, December 12, 1952

At 2 p.m., an undulating wail went out from Washington’s rooftop air horns, and the Bell and Light system activated inside 138 federal buildings. This was a Warning Red—take cover immediately. Most Washingtonians didn’t. Downtown shoppers continued browsing, Capital Transit streetcars kept running. This wasn’t a public exercise, however; it was a test for the Federal Buildings Services (FBS), a wardens corps and warning system for the 200 or so buildings housing more than 200,000 employees of the executive branch. Ferdinand Kaufholz, Jr., of the GSA directed the FBS. On paper, Kaufholz had a warden corps of between 30,000 and 35,000 federal employees, but many didn’t even bother to submit monthly progress reports. The District government also participated in the drill, as did the city’s public and parochial schools.
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Government employees and school principals received advance instructions for the test. Buildings without Bell and Light units sounded the alert with internal electric horns, air whistles, and clock buzzers. The exercise plotted the “simultaneous explosion of two nominal type atomic bombs” at 2:05, so
wardens and occupants had only a few minutes to move to their designated shelter areas. Still, wardens reported rapid responses. The 300 occupants of the Auditor’s Building evacuated in an “orderly fashion and without mishap or confusion,” according to its warden. One Treasury Department partici
pant said, “the drill and purpose behind it were provocative of serious whole
some thought,” making for an “excellent object lesson.” The all-clear signal came at 2:15, and most people returned to work. Building wardens contin
ued with the exercise until 4 p.m., using this time to telephone damage and casualty reports to the FBS’s Control Center at the Federal Supply Building. Prior to the drill, the FBS had given the wardens maps with the surmised destructive range of the two bombs, which “detonated” at 10th and M Streets NW and Arlington Ridge Road and Army-Navy Drive, southwest of the Pentagon. Kaufholz instructed the wardens to use their “own judgment and imagination” to draft these reports.
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For all these creative flourishes, the exercise was something less than a fire drill—most occupants hadn’t even left their buildings. Hallways, basements, and windowless rooms, many above the ground floor, served as shelters. Could they really shield occupants from “nominal type” atomic bombs? A lot of the drill’s participants didn’t think so. Pre-drill grumbling compelled the FBS to explain the merits of seeking shelter in buildings that it admitted, “by any reasonable evaluation cannot provide adequate shelter.” Due to aiming errors, the bombs might detonate miles from the central city. Warnings might leave as little as five minutes to spare. Even if a timely warning permitted a mass evacuation of several miles, the city didn’t have enough reinforced structures at that range to provide adequate shelter. Finally, “it is assumed that any shelter, however inadequate, is better than none; even to the extent of shielding exposed parts of the body with clothing.”
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As Pollyanna, the FBS had plenty of company. In January 1953, DCD told its wardens they could help minimize post-blast fires by picking up garbage and distributing fire extinguishers in their neighborhoods. Later that year, DCD issued instructions for the handling of downed enemy aircrews: citizens should call the police, who would take the survivors into custody and report the crash to the Air Force.
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On Capitol Hill, the Senate Rules Committee decided in July 1953 to reevaluate civil defense preparations for the U.S. Capitol Building Group. The existing plan, prepared in 1951 by Architect of the Capitol David Lynn with DCD’s assistance, consisted mostly of charts of warden, rescue, and welfare services; designation of hallways, corridors, and basement areas as shelters; and descriptions of warning and communications networks—in short, the usual civil defense ephemera. The 1953 changes improved only modestly upon this inauspicious start (figure 7.1). A Bell and Light system went into the Senate Office Building and the Capitol, almost 40 Senate staffers attended a daylong training session at the FCDA’s school in Olney, Md. The FCDA’s legislative liaison resurveyed shelter areas in the Senate wing of the Capitol and the Senate Office Building. He declared that the two structures, including the Senate subway tunnel, offered 23,475 square feet of shelter against a 20-kiloton atomic bomb detonated in the air
half a mile away. This confident prediction didn’t consider, however, the resulting mass fire that would incinerate any blast survivors.
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Guy Oakes calls these specious assumptions “the Cold War conception of nuclear reality” in which massive nuclear strikes against the United States present pointed but not insurmountable challenges. Millions die, but the survivors far outnumber the dead. Deadly fallout appears no more menacing than storm clouds, so the living turn to the task of restoring America to its idyllic, pre-attack state. St. Albans, West Virginia, featured in an FCDA film, exemplified this (ir)reality. The townspeople evacuate swiftly, calmly, safely. A nuclear attack neither kills nor rattles them, and with military-like disci
pline, the townspeople jump-start postal delivery (volunteers sift mail in a country field) and keep the local bank solvent (tellers set up folding tables in another field). Oates: “In the fantasy of nuclear crisis mastery, after the dust of more than 100 nuclear explosions has cleared, letters will be written and delivered; checks will be drafted and cashed; debts will be incurred and settled; employees will show up for work, and the technological, social, and economic conditions for their labor will remain in place.”
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“Nominal type” fission bombs underpinned this reality by allowing exercise planners to keep the levels of destruction at manageable levels with
out appearing preposterous. References to Hiroshima and Nagasaki injected the scenarios with just the right doses of realism and optimism. Hadn’t the

U.S.
Strategic Bombing Survey scientifically cataloged the bombs’ effects? Hadn’t these cities rebuilt? Nuclear reality appeared in attack scenarios nationwide, from Portland to New York, but it was most prominent in Washington. For all the depiction of self-reliance, survival and recovery obviously required federal direction and support, and if the government couldn’t function after an attack, then the fantasy became untenable. In this sense, imaginary low yield atomic bombs “detonated” in Washington served as the linchpin of the national nuclear reality: just like the people of St. Albans, the federal government (at least the president and the executive branch) would elude the bombs, find a field, and roll up their sleeves.

Such delusion disturbed Dr. Vannevar Bush. An accomplished engineer and academic, Bush was a leader in the research and development wing of the national security state. In March 1953, Bush met with the NSC and urged the government to be candid with the public about hydrogen weapons. Said Bush, as paraphrased by the recording secretary, “New York City could survive 2 or 3 A-bombs but one H-bomb and no more N.Y.C. There is all too little intelligent thought being given to change created by the magnitude of destructiveness of H-bomb.” Bush also said top government officials should surrender their penchant for secrecy when discussing nuclear bombs, suggesting that a little openness could shrink public apathy without spread
ing panic. In May, Bush and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory during World War II, personally enjoined the President to lay the facts about hydrogen bombs before America. “Only a wise and informed people,” said Oppenheimer, also paraphrased by the secretary, “could be expected to act wisely.” Eisenhower replied that candor was a good idea—in principle. In practical terms, he thought it ill-advised. Too much classified information was leaking out already, and, if the government remained deliberately vague about the differ
ences between atomic and hydrogen weapons, even to the point of expunging references to “thermonuclear” from official statements, the Soviets might find it more difficult to assess the state of U.S. weapons.
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The candor urged by Bush and Oppenheimer didn’t occur. For the FCDA to sponsor another Alert America, one designed to educate Americans about the staggering difference between atomic and hydrogen bombs, risked imploding the prevailing nuclear reality and gutting civil defense’s established premises. Nurtured by subsequent drills in Washington, nuclear reality had a long life.

...2: Operation Fireball, July 20, 1953

At 7 a.m., the DCD used shortwave radio to send a message to a dispatche
r
in College Park, Md.: Washington had just been bombed. The dispatche
r

relayed the message to various civil defense centers in the Maryland commu
nities bordering the District, and hundreds of volunteer firemen hurried to their stations. With sirens blaring, they raced 78 firefighting vehicles and pieces of equipment to the Tidal Basin, where they helped District firefighters pump 7,000 gallons of water to extinguish “fires” caused by the imaginary explosion. This was Operation Fireball, the first civil defense exercise con
ducted jointly by the District and Maryland. It didn’t go well. Errors disrupted the alerting, equipment arrived late. The firemen didn’t put out the mock blaze until 12:10 p.m., almost two hours later than planned.
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Operation Fireball exposed the structural defects of localized civil defense. The NSRB, the FCDA, Congress, the military, the White House—each wanted to keep civil defense a local and state responsibility. As a result, civil defense offices became budgetary and administrative outcroppings of municipal and county governments. Federal officials reasoned correctly that citizens preferred local oversight and would feel more comfortable volunteering for a community service than a federal program. The drawback, however, was that local civil defense offices developed insularity and detachment, conditions that the ceaseless struggle to lure and hold volunteers only made worse. We know the racial divisions, Congressional drubbings, and fizzled recruitment drives that dogged Fondahl’s every step: the drive to simply keep his program alive left Fondahl little time and few resources to coordinate with his suburban counterparts. Thermonuclear weapons required unified civil defense covering at least a ten square mile area, but greater Washington had a messy patchwork of programs that duplicated one another, yet remained isolated. One study even identified eight independent civil defense agencies within the range of a hydrogen bomb detonated in Washington.
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