This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (22 page)

...3: Operation Alert (
OPAL
54), Monday, June 14, 1954

At 12:56 p.m., a 50-kiloton bomb detonates 3,400 feet above 11th and F Streets in downtown Washington. It kills 137,000 people, injures almost 400,000, and flattens every structure within nine-tenths of a mile. Fire engulfs the heart of the city. Within the inner radius, telephone switchboards, gas and water mains, and the electrical grid lay destroyed or broken; streets up to 2.6 miles from ground zero are impassable. Just 643 of the District’s 2,000 practicing physicians are unhurt, 12 hospitals are destroyed or not functioning. But there’s good news. The president, wartime essential personnel, and Congress evacuated Washington before the bombing and “are safe and operating at distant points.” The Pentagon suffered only light damage. Panic erupted only in scattered areas. All bridges are intact, Capital Transit has 570 working buses, and rail yards withstood the blast.
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Familiar stuff, these rosy projections, especially the one-bomb assumption. The same month this
OPAL
took place, Duke University sociologist Hornell Hart discussed the possible effects of an atomic attack on the United States. Hart briskly dismissed the notion the Soviet Union would only expend a single bomb on a target as rich as Washington, surmising it would use four
100-kiloton atomic bombs, creating a 100 square mile blast area. However, the “vital point to be considered is not the precise number of bombs which the Kremlin now has at its disposal, or is expected to have in the future.” What mattered more was that available information pointed “toward the like
lihood of a steep increase in Russia’s destructive potential.” It might be one atomic bomb today, but tomorrow it would be four; and the day after, two hydrogen weapons equivalent to eight atomic bombs. Harsh but prescient, Hart’s conjectures challenged civil defense leaders to anticipate the future, but like the generals of folklore, they were still planning for the last war.
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Operation Alert 1954 was Washington’s biggest civil defense drill to date. District Commissioner Samuel Spencer asked Eisenhower to issue a directive offering paid release for federal employees so they could participate. Not only did Eisenhower give the order, he also directed the executive branch to par
ticipate and instructed Flemming to test relocation plans for selected agen
cies.
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When the Warning Red sounded, the President, his wife Mamie, and staff decamped to the White House’s shelters, where they remained for 25 minutes. Executive branch employees filed into their buildings’ shelter areas. (Congress, however, kept working.) Three State Department employees pro
ceeded to Front Royal to check on the site. En route, they were stopped by a Virginia State Police Officer who ignored their DCD vehicle pass and forced them to pull over. At the National Guard Armory, a vacant lot served as a landing strip for Piper Cubs and other small aircraft piloted by volunteers in the Civil Air Patrol’s National Capital Wing, stationed at Hybla Valley field in Alexandria. The planes dispersed to points as far as Wilkes-Barre, Pa. (180 air miles), and Roanoke, Va. (200 air miles), to pick up mock stockpiles of blood, bandages, and medical supplies. On the District’s streets, police offi
cers waved traffic to the curb; buses and streetcars halted. Downtown, only a few drivers refused to stop. Meanwhile wardens in white helmets guided pedestrians to the nearest building with a shelter. Remarked one observer, “[c]ompliance was so complete that any persons seen on F Street during the 10 minute period looked like intruders on an empty movie lot.” The neigh
boring counties and communities in Virginia and Maryland followed a similar protocol, sounding sirens and horns, halting traffic. Operation Alert 1954 was a national drill, but metropolitan Washington put on a better show than most cities. In Chicago, pedestrians stayed on the streets, and protesters held up signs reading “Work for World Peace Is the Only Civilian Defense.” In San Francisco, the cable cars kept running during the Warning Red.
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The direction of the public to shelters contradicted the Eisenhower administration’s current emphasis on evacuation. Upon taking office, Val Peterson had disavowed a national shelter program and made improvements to the early warning system his first priority. He hoped these changes could provide at least two hours’ notice of an attack, thus giving urban residents sufficient time to evacuate.
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Of course, successful evacuation required high
ways, as Public Buildings Commissioner W.E. Reynolds had observed in 1952 when he urged Congress to fund a circumferential highway for metro
politan Washington. Indeed, construction of the Capital Beltway began in
Maryland in February 1955, one year before Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act, again showing how the capital served as a testing ground for national policy.
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Also in February 1955, Eisenhower cited the need for “quick evacuation of target areas” to justify the interstate highway system.
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(As the commissioner of the Bureau of Public Roads later admitted, however, the highway program given to Congress didn’t plot routes to enable mass evacuations.)
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Even with increased warning time and new highways, however, the evacu
ation of Washington was a daunting challenge. In April 1954,
Life
used FCDA evacuation guidelines to outline a two-stage evacuation for the District. Police would stop all vehicle traffic downtown and direct everyone to a “loading perimeter,” where lines of buses and streetcars would take them to “rallying points” in Virginia and Maryland. Residents beyond the loading perimeter would evacuate using prearranged carpools. However, the city’s 987 buses and 477 streetcars could only accommodate some 115,000 people; Washington’s daytime population was almost one million. “Most people,” suggested
Life
, “would have to follow prearranged pedestrian routes.”
³²
In July, the Operations Research Office of Johns Hopkins University joined with the Army to study a hypothetical hydrogen bomb attack on Washington. The researchers didn’t think evacuation of Washington was fea
sible, estimating that movement of the city’s population over the eight bridges spanning the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers would take five and a half hours, and that figure was based on the assumption that each vehicle would carry five passengers.
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And what about fallout? Although Fondahl had announced in August 1953 that DCD was shifting its attention from shelter to evacuation, he later observed that it was “obviously useless to evacuate population” only to leave them exposed to fallout. Civil defense research simply wasn’t keeping pace with weapons improvements, he told the Civil Defense Committee of Takoma Park, a suburb along the District’s northeast border.
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Nevertheless, in April 1955 the Board of Commissioners approved an improvised shelter and evacuation policy that assumed an advance warning of one hour. Washingtonians would flee the city in their vehicles; all arterial roads would become one way leading out of town, with cross-traffic prohibited. At Warning Red, drivers would halt their cars, and everyone would seek imme
diate shelter. “Citizens should remember that a basement room will afford much protection against fall out,” claimed the policy, which conspicuously lacked details.
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The plan had plenty of critics. Rep. Olin Teague (D-Tex.), chair of the District civil defense subcommittee, excoriated it. If the warning comes dur
ing the daytime, when families are separated, will parents “jump into cars and head for the highways out of town without knowing what is happening to each other or their children?” he asked dubiously (figure 7.2). He also wanted to know if Virginia and Maryland were even ready to receive evacuees from the District. Teague’s doubts led him to block action on his own bill giving the Board of Commissioners broad emergency powers, yet his concerns

Figure 7.2
By June 1954, when these elementary students in Washington received an “A for effort” for seeking shelter during the first Operation Alert, “duck and cover” was already obsolete. In response to the development of hydrogen weapons, the D.C. Office of Civil Defense instructed schools to plan to evacuate. Many principals simply asked stay-at-home parents to pick up their child and as many other pupils as the vehicle could carry. Copyright
Washington Post
; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library.

extended beyond the District. Washington needed a workable plan, he said, because “there’s no question that whatever plan is adopted here is going to be copied by cities around the country.” Teague believed mass urban evacu
ations were impossible, pitting him against Peterson, who bluntly declared, “[t]he reality is you either evacuate or die.” As a Senate Armed Services sub
committee pointed out, however, few U.S. cities had detailed evacuation plans, and preparations to house, feed, and care for evacuees weren’t as yet underway.
³⁶
The controversy continued into June. Fondahl claimed all Washingtonians could evacuate within two hours, but Colonel Barnet W. Beers, the Defense Department’s civil defense expert, told Teague’s commit
tee that even with four hour’s warning, “it would be pressing pretty hard to make an orderly evacuation of Washington.” Chagrined, Fondahl changed his estimate to three to four hours. Meanwhile, DCD’s deputy director John Garrett Underhill publicly denounced the belief that Washington could be evacuated and criticized the commissioners for failing to tell the public just how destructive the latest nuclear weapons were.
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Eisenhower and his team stayed clear of the public fray, but they also debated the logistics of evacuating the District. At a March 1955 NSC meeting, Robert Cutler wondered whether the administration should order DCD to immediately evacuate the city on Warning Yellow or order only the evacuation of wartime essential personnel. He alluded to the same problem Gordon Russell Young had identified four years before: a Warning Yellow would immediately leak out, sparking a panicked rush. Peterson and Eisenhower thought all of Washington should be evacuated on Warning Yellow—the President even said every city should evacuate on yellow—but the Joint Chiefs disagreed, contending that the resulting traffic jams would still prevent wartime essential personnel from reaching the Arc. Eisenhower decided to ask Fondahl for his input.
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The next month, Fondahl used slides to outline the DCD and operation of the Key Point. He also explained his reasons for proposing a four-mile evacuation: there were more traffic lanes and shelter space. (While evacuation to the eight-mile line would put on average 21 people in each housing unit, he estimated that at the four-mile line there would be just five people to a home.) Fondahl also confidently stated that advance evacuation of the wartime essential personnel posed no other chal
lenge than a “psychological” one. Eisenhower was unconvinced. Twice he emphasized the need to get the essential personnel to their relocation sites. The other great problem, he said, was to save the lives of the general popu
lace. Peterson also questioned the viability of a four-mile evacuation line, stating that survival required a minimum distance of eight to nine miles from the ground zero.
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Clearly a practice evacuation was needed.

OPAL
55

We see first, in black and white, clock hands aligned on noon and a calendar turned to June 15, 1955. An aerial view of a full parking lot follows, then we see the exterior doors of the Pentagon. Inside an office, five white men in suits sit at desks. In another room, military officers pore over papers and talk on telephones. Jump cuts: two twin-rotor helicopters landing on the south
west lawn; a black officer triggering the alarm system at five minutes past noon; people looking up from their desks in unison. We see a pipe rapped out into an ashtray, cigarettes stubbed. A gum-chewing secretary represses a grin as she locks papers in a file cabinet. Men and women stream into hallways, their expressions calm, even blank; a few look bored. Queues are orderly on the Pentagon concourse. Outside, wardens with arm bands and white helmets preside over an almost leisurely exodus from the exits. Secretary of Defense Charlie Wilson, looking dapper in a double-breasted suit, pauses at two microphones to read a brief statement before boarding one of the helicopters.