This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (25 page)

The lack of Washington’s preparedness didn’t go unnoticed. On January 31, the Military Operations Subcommittee of the House Committee on Govern
ment Operations convened hearings on national civil defense. Washington was frequently the subject of attention. During Fondahl’s appearance, Chairman Chet Holifield (D-Calif.) declared: “So, for all practical purposes, we are sitting here in the Capital of our Nation, a million people in this immediate area, without an effective civilian-defense plan for either evacua
tion or shelter . . .?” Fondahl didn’t take the pointed question personally. He once again described the vicious circle in which DCD was caught. Citing public apathy, Congress refused to grant adequate funds, and without that money he couldn’t build a citywide program. A sympathetic Holifield offered a juicy sound bite: DCD received one-sixth of the National Zoo’s budget.
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The California legislator clearly wanted to show that the failure of civil defense in Washington symbolized national failure. Dr. Merle Tuve, a nuclear physicist and chairman of the National Academy of Sciences’s Advisory Committee on Civil Defense, had suggested this connection to Holifield prior to the hearings, offering his thoughts on why five years of civil defense planning had yielded so few results. “In a large measure this is because they [the public] are waiting to be led. When they look to Washington for leader
ship they see a confused picture in which the very people who maintain that civil defense is a local problem have not provided a local civil defense in their own city—Washington, D.C. The fact that there is no workable program right now for the Capital City as a whole or for the Congress or for much of the Executive branch has been widely publicized.” Willard Bascom whole
heartedly agreed. “The Federal Government should stop setting a poor example—stop leading in the wrong direction—as it does in Washington, D.C.,” he said.
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The WASP committee’s dealings with the FCDA offered strong evidence of Tuve and Bascom’s point. The committee asked for the latest planning assumptions concerning warnings, weapons, and attack patterns so its plan wouldn’t “be obsolete before being placed in effect.” The FCDA refused, saying the WASP shouldn’t be written with particular assumptions in mind, but rather, should cover many contingencies, including the use of ICBMS and attacks that came without warning.
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How could Washington or any other city write a plan for defense against ICBMS when the FCDA wouldn’t share its own data?

“DIG”?

A first glance seems to show a white middle-class family enjoying a moment of domestic leisure in their basement. Beneath joists, a middle-aged father, his brush cut fringed gray, kneels next to his daughter, who perches on a folding chair. Her older sister leans against a bare wall, peering at what might be a board game. Wearing a pleated dress and high heels, a smiling mother stands beside a utility shelf. But something is amiss. The mother isn’t gazing at her loved ones; she’s reading the label on a can. The shelves don’t hold
toys or tools but canned food, a kerosene lamp, a candelabrum. The girls aren’t occupied with games, but a first aid kit and a battery-operated radio. Atop a worn card table sits a camping stove. No ordinary snapshot, this staged photograph depicted the Leo Hoegh family in an “improvised atomic radiation shelter” in the basement of their suburban Maryland home located about seven miles from the zero milestone marker. Unless Leo Hoegh had improvised insulation, thermal-resistant doors, and an oxygen supply, his family shelter replicated Mount Weather about as much as a child’s play fort resembled Fort Knox. Had the Warning Yellow come, however, a military helicopter would have ferried Hoegh,
sans
family, to Mount Weather, for he was the new Federal Civil Defense administrator, and the purpose of the photograph was, as the newspaper caption put it, to show America’s civil defense chief “practicing what he preaches.”
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The sermon’s theme: a fallout shelter in every basement, a chicken (canned) in every pot on the camping stove, a family recognizing that nuclear survival was
their
own responsibility. By January 1958, when the Hoeghs posed for the camera, the FCDA had thoroughly reconsidered its preference for evacuation. Val Peterson had resigned in July 1957, but he was responsible for the shift. Estimates that fallout would incur the brunt of the casualties in a nuclear war worried Peterson, as did rapid progress on ballistic missiles. During the Holifield hearings, he admitted that once ICBMs became operable, “we have little choice except shelter,” a point one of his assistants also made to the NSC. Accordingly, in December 1956 Peterson delivered a $32.4 billion blast and fallout shelter plan that outlined building shelters for 50 million people, with the federal government paying $28.6 billion of the total cost.
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Peterson wasn’t alone in seeing shelters as the future of civil defense. A bevy of panels, legislators, and think tanks were releasing shelter plans or supportive reports. The NSC study
Consideration of Policy on Continental Defense
(NSC 5606), finished in the summer of 1956, called for shelters.
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In January 1957, Holifield introduced a bill to establish a Department of Civil Defense and to require it to construct “group shelters” in every target zone. A panel organized at the President’s behest, the Gaither Committee, proposed in November 1957 a fallout shelter program costing approximately $25 billion. In early 1958, both the RAND Corporation and a panel headed by Nelson Rockefeller published reports calling for national shelter programs. Shelter advocates shared two assumptions: one, Americans had nowhere to go if Soviet nuclear weapons found their targets; and two, shelters had considerable deterrence value. As the Gaither report put it, shelters would discourage “the enemy from attempting an attack on what might otherwise seem to him a temptingly unprepared target.”
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Eisenhower didn’t agree. The exorbitant costs of shelters bothered the budget-conscious President, as did his growing conviction that shelters were really a
symptom
of the greater malady: the unwinnable nature of nuclear war. In August 1956, after listening to a grim description of an imaginary Soviet nuclear attack, he remarked that the nation could easily spend $113 billion on shelters, but such an attack, followed by American retaliation, would
paralyze both nations.
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After listening to a presentation from the head of the Gaither Committee in November 1957, the President called shelters a low priority and said defensive measures should protect the military’s striking forces. Eisenhower also still believed in the principle he had defended at a March 1956 news conference: “You cannot give civil defense to Atlanta from New York City or vice versa. The people on the spot have got to take an interest or it cannot be done.”
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As suggested by the “improvised” Hoegh family refuge, the administra
tion didn’t entirely reject shelters. In May 1958, Hoegh unveiled the National Shelter Policy, premised “
firmly
on the philosophy of the obligation of each property-owner to provide protection on his own premises.” It promised to “bring to every American all the facts as to the possible effects of nuclear attack and inform him of the steps which he and his State and local governments can take to minimize such effects.” Informational efforts, par
ticularly concerning fallout, would be intensified, and prototypes would be built. The administration also promised to require fallout shelters in new fed
eral buildings. The National Shelter Policy distilled the principle of self-reliant civil defense into its purest form yet, and it dissolved, for the time being, the chances of implementing a federally funded shelter program. It reaffirmed the ideal that Alert America had projected in 1952: civil defense began at home, in the basement. What were residents of The Cairo apartment building in Washington, D.C., or apartment dwellers in any of America’s cities for that matter, supposed to do? What about homes without basements? The appealing symbolic features of the National Shelter Policy deflected such questions. Not only did the family shelter symbolize self-reliance, it repre
sented freedom, individual choice, and private enterprise, the essence of the “American Way of Life,” as Alert America had put it. Into the privately owned home went the shelter; into it, stockpiles of food and supplies readily available at supermarkets and hardware shops. The home, stores, and goods signified the superiority of capitalism and its capacity to provide for survival. In contrast, a communal shelter built and paid for by the federal government smacked of the central planning and coercive ways of Soviet communism.
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Many saw right through the flimsy veil. “Self-help cannot provide nation
wide protection against the deadly effects of exploding nuclear bombs any more than self-help can build the bombs,” fumed the Holifield subcommittee.
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Its chair accused the administration of failing to safeguard Americans. If Congress were to reject a federally funded program, as it had in years past, “then I say the blood will be on the head of the Congress,” declared Holifield. “But until it is offered, until that leadership is offered, the blood is on the hands of those responsible under the Constitution for the protection of the lives of the people in case of war.” To the Congressman’s chagrin, the majority of his colleagues proved quite willing to share responsibility for the people’s “blood.” So entrenched was opposition to shelters that the legisla
tive branch refused to fund fallout shelters in new federal buildings.
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Even if Eisenhower had put forth Val Peterson’s $32-billion shelter plan, it likely would have met the same fate as Truman’s dispersal plan.

"Die"?

The two-year tussle over shelters left metropolitan Washington civil defense leaders and residents unsure of their next step. In January 1956, DCD worked with a PTA chapter to offer a civil defense course at Anacostia High School, in Southeast Washington. Among other topics, the class covered home shelters. By the year’s end, however, Fondahl had all but renounced the guidelines given to Anacostia residents. He publicly observed that no structure within five miles of a hydrogen bomb detonation could offer pro
tection, and basements could provide just five to ten percent shielding. “The present situation seems pretty near hopeless,” he admitted. His annual report for 1956 offered more pessimism as well as familiar complaints. A lack of funding, public apathy, and a stubborn faith in the military’s ability to pre
vent an attack left Washington’s civil defense program sputtering, broken. Worse, disagreements between Congress and the FCDA further alienated the public. “Controversial statements from high level sources relative to effec
tiveness of proposed protective measures—shelter vs. evacuation, etc., . . . have confused the public,” he wrote. Surveying the stagnant state of civil defense in his hometown, Fondahl didn’t flinch from a damning judgment: “No one realizes more clearly than the Office of Civil Defense how inade
quate preparations are in the District of Columbia to cope with any Civil Defense Emergency.”
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The situation didn’t improve during 1957. DCD bought 1,000 traffic signs to mark evacuation routes but couldn’t install them until the WASP was finished. Concerned parents wondered if the evacuation plans devised by many PTA chapters were still valid; Superintendent of Schools Hobart Corning didn’t know. Pending identification of reception areas in suburban locations, a task of the WASP committee, he suspended drills to test school evacuation plans. Yet progress on the WASP continued fitfully. During a spring two-day conference, committee members failed to produce a mutually acceptable final draft, leading to more studies. National Civil Defense Week, held in mid-September, revived one of
OPAL
55’s most unconvincing displays of readiness. As the sirens blared, some 26,000 federal employees in 11 build
ings briefly vacated their offices to assemble curbside. Another 14,000 employees in three buildings sought shelter. At Fort Myer, Va., the Military District of Washington assembled troops and a 32-foot communications truck for a review by Hoegh. Searching for a way to flatter these empty exer
cises, Fondahl could only write, “[c]onsiderable publicity was given [to] these CD events by the local newspapers.”
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The one bright spot for DCD was the reactivation of Washington’s Ground Observer Corps. In December 1955, a new post formed, using as its observation spot the roof of the WTOP television station (located in a build
ing called the “Broadcast House”) at 40th and Brandywine Streets in the Northwest neighborhood of Tenleytown. Lorenzo Miller’s post had folded in 1952 because volunteers had balked at driving to Marshall Heights, but the new post’s location wasn’t a problem for its most dedicated volunteers,
many of whom were women. Barbara Luchs, for example, lived just a few blocks away. In July 1957, the post, which had 150 volunteers, won an award for its outstanding record. Later that year, Luchs and seven other spotters received individual rewards for logging 500 hours or more at the post. At the peak of its success, however, the post went on reserve status—improvements in the Air Force’s aircraft detection systems meant spotters were no longer needed.
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Fondahl may have looked with envy at neighboring Montgomery County (Md.), where—it seemed—civil defense thrived, particularly in Rockville, the county seat. Located about 15 miles from Washington, Rockville experienced rapid suburbanization in the postwar years. Housing developments con
sumed farm fields; federal loans supported home ownership and spurred further construction; city services strained to meet the needs of the swelling population. In 1940, Rockville’s population was 2,047; in 1960, it was 26,090. Veterans and federal workers comprised much of the new population. Loans available to veterans kept mortgage payments as low as $42 per month for new homes in Twinbrook, a Rockville subdivision, and improvements to the Washington National Pike (U.S. Route 240) eased workday commutes into the District, attracting additional federal workers. Like many U.S. suburbs, parts of Rockville practiced racial exclusion. Covenant clauses, discriminatory lending policies, and racism kept African Americans out of the new developments.
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