This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (26 page)

Civil defense in Rockville and Montgomery County reflected this racial divide, with middle-class whites, many of them military veterans and govern
ment or business professionals, serving as leaders. Arthur Farquhar, for exam
ple, was an insurance salesman from Sandy Spring and had flown planes in World War I. In 1952, he had supervised a ground observer post from a shed on his property but had disbanded it after the FCDA refused his request to move the post (see chapter 5). Willing to give self-reliant civil defense another chance, Farquhar briefly served on Montgomery County’s Civil Defense Advisory Committee. General Lewis Hershey, director of the Selective Service, chaired the Committee. A skilled bureaucrat and manager, Hershey “worshipped his own vision of community,” one void of class and racial tensions, where all residents eagerly volunteered for civic duties. Though steeped in myth and nostalgia for the rural Indiana of his boyhood, these views made Hershey, whose crew cuts could never quite tame his wiry hair, the perfect leader for civil defense. His vice chairman, Rockville resident Justice M. Chambers, also had a military background; indeed, his courageous actions at Iwo Jima earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1950. Chambers had worked for the Treasury Department during the 1930s. After the war, he served on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, then accepted the position of executive assistant administrator of the FCDA. Another member of the Advisory Committee, Paul H. Griffith, was a former assistant secretary of Defense and a World War I veteran. The Advisory Committee included just two women, but the volunteer ranks were more evenly divided among white men and women.
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The homogeneity of leaders and volunteers made Rockville and Montgomery County promising places to build civil defense programs.

Furthermore, the FCDA’s training center was near the county town of Olney, offering area residents “an unusual opportunity to learn all there is to know about civil defense.”
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The 260-acre facility was a hybrid of college campus, resort, and firefighting practice grounds. For out-of-towners, it offered overnight rooms and arranged sightseeing tours to Washington. A restaurant served meals and an onsite dry cleaner took in laundry. On “Rescue Street,” volunteers practiced search and rescue in partially destroyed buildings. For relaxation, they could pitch horseshoes or play ping-pong. In the classrooms, they listened to lectures on “Methods of Vulnerability Analysis” and participated in problem-solving exercises on shelters and med
ical aid.
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The facility fulfilled the FCDA’s mission of providing policy, infor
mation, and training to self-motivated civil defense volunteers so they could return to their hometowns and build successful programs. In April 1956, 16 Montgomery County residents did exactly that, spending a weekend at Olney completing the Home Protection Course. Just three District residents joined them.
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If the FCDA’s self-reliant civil defense failed in Montgomery County, then where in America would it work?

Spencerville resident Joseph Cunningham and Chevy Chase resident Charles

H.
Tower played their parts. Married with a family, Cunningham worked in Washington as a businessman. He was also an amateur actor, and in 1956, he starred in “Warning Red,” an FCDA-commissioned film shot on location at Olney using members of the local Sandy Spring Theater Group. Cunningham’s character resembled himself, a suburban homeowner. In the aftermath of a nuclear attack, depicted by fires lit on Olney’s grounds, Cunningham searched frantically for his family. The film, intended for national distribution, dramatized the “dos” and “don’ts” of postattack actions. Tower’s contribution looked not to the screen but the sky. By May 1956, Tower had tapped civic organizations in lower Montgomery County to find 75 spotters for the ground observer post he set up atop the Weller Road School in Wheaton.
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The Cabin John Civil Defense Rescue Squad played its part as well. Methodist minister D.G. Chandler had organized the squad in early 1954 to divert young white bikers from racing their motorcycles past his church. He also hoped to offset community apathy toward civil defense. The bikers, who were really bored teenagers rather than Brando-like “Wild Ones,” responded enthusiastically. Within two years, they had used the proceeds from a donkey baseball game to buy a junked 1941 Ford truck and rebuild it into a rescue vehicle with siren, stretchers, and firefighting equipment. Four boys attended the Home Protection Course at Olney. Inspired by their male peers, 16 teenage girls asked to join the squad, raising its membership to more than 30. The Red Cross and Glen Echo’s and Cabin John’s volunteer fire departments provided first aid and firefighting training. Whether marching in Cabin John’s Fourth of July Parade or showing off their truck at Washington’s annual home show, the squad made “a neat, attractive appearance wherever they [went] as representatives of Montgomery County.”
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Henry Rapalus, a National Security Agency employee and Rockville resident, channeled his interest in broadcasting into volunteer civil defense
work. Rapalus, a congenial family man, headed up Rockville’s Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES). In case an attack incapacitated regular communication lines, RACES would provide a backup network. Rapalus collected operating crystals for frequencies, vacuum tubes, and microphones, which he distributed to his fellow radio enthusiasts for practice. In addition to Rapalus, Rockville had eight “staff” members (actually volunteers) in charge of other civil defense services, including radiological monitoring, wardens, police, and personnel and training. At its peak, Rockville’s civil defense outfit had some 50 volunteers.
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America’s first Civil Defense Week, held in September 1956, drew Montgomery County’s participation in several ways. A nationally broadcast NBC program featured the training school at Olney, and almost 80 residents volunteered to record radio spots about civil defense for three local stations. School principals scheduled civil defense drills. The teens in Cabin John’s rescue squad received an invitation to join an exercise staged at Fort Myer on Sunday, September 9. The next evening, local civil defense leaders met at the County Building to evaluate the county’s readiness for nuclear war. On September 11, residents were urged to pull out their leaflet
Your Survival Montgomery County
—earlier that year, the County had printed and distrib
uted 100,000 copies—and check on their individual readiness.
Your Survival Montgomery County
recommended that residents ten miles or closer to the zero milestone marker evacuate, while those living ten to twenty miles from the marker take shelter, or evacuate if they had no shelter. The leaflet advised residents living twenty miles away to prepare to receive evacuees. A map iden
tified eight arterials into the District that would become one way outbound and feed District and down county residents to reception areas. (In tiny type, a note explained that assignment of reception areas to “specific groups or urban areas” awaited completion of the WASP.)
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Yet all wasn’t well in Montgomery County. Rockville’s civil defense office noted that “[U]ntil the full Civil Defense picture has been developed,” it could do little more than inventory resources useful for survival and recovery.
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As it had in the District, the FCDA shift from evacuation to shelter brought confusion rather than clarity. According to
Your Survival Montgomery County
, Rockville residents should take shelter or evacuate on the Warning Yellow. According to Rockville’s civil defense office, however, residents were “
safer staying in [their] city than trying to get out
” (emphasis in original).
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Presumably the WASP committee would offer up-to-date guidelines for all metropolitan residents, but members remained stymied. In October 1957, after two years of work, the committee had written three-fourth of the basic plan. One year later, Fondahl revised this estimate—downward. Now the plan was considered only 65 percent finished. He blamed the executive branch, observing: “Absence of policy regarding plans of Federal agencies continue [
sic
] to delay finishing the annexes.”
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By the time Hoegh announced the National Shelter Policy, civil defense activity was dwindling away in Montgomery County. Directed at middle-class, white, homeowning families, the policy was tailored to the area, but
residents had concerns that basement shelters couldn’t meet. A special com
mittee of the Montgomery County Civic Federation recognized that weapon delivery improvements presented serious challenges.

In view of major changes in national civil defense concepts, of rapidly increas
ing Soviet capabilities for delivery of nuclear weapons by short-range missiles launched from submarines as well as by IRBM’s [intermediate range ballistic missiles] and ICBM’s, and of the estimated reduction of warning-time to 15 minutes, it is suggested that . . . the necessary changes in survival planning and preparations be undertaken
immediately
.
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(emphasis in original)

The National Shelter Policy, however, had no solutions for these problems— it befit the era of blackout curtains better than it did the missile age. Nevertheless, the Montgomery County Civil Defense Advisory Committee tried to establish a home shelter program. It failed, prompting the dispirited acting chairman, Worthington Thompson, to write an obituary of sorts for civil defense in Montgomery County. In a letter to the County Council, he described the committee as “frustrated and discouraged,” warning that “unless sincerity, vigor and direction are injected into the program, it will fall into complete decay . . .” He criticized the “something-for-nothing” and “bargain basement” approach and practically begged the council to take “prompt and energetic action to develop effective civil defense.”
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Thompson could have addressed his letter to the president, Leo Hoegh, and every member of Congress. The Montgomery County Council had hardly originated the “bargain basement” approach. Curtained behind rhetoric of self-help and individualism, it had been the mainstay of national civil defense since the FCDA’s founding.

Disperse?

Contradictions and inconsistency also spelled dispersal’s
coup de grâce
. In January 1956, the ODM finally updated its guidelines. Rather than set a fixed minimum distance from presumed ground zeros, ODM Order I-19 spelled out eight specific criteria, including high yield weapons, to use in site selec
tion. However, it also rolled over the exemption clause from the previous guidelines. “[I]t is not the intent of this policy that new facilities be located on the basis of security considerations only,” Flemming wrote; if a dispersed site would impede the operations of agencies, then they could ignore the order.
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And ignore it they did. Soon, a spate of federal building projects in the District made a mockery of the order. At 400 Maryland Avenue SW, the GSA erected Federal Office Building No. 6. As the uninspired name suggested, the structure wasn’t affiliated with a specific agency. Federal Office Building No. 10 went up just a few blocks from No. 6. Row upon row of identical, symmetrical windows accentuated the generic interior offices, which could be adjusted using movable partitions. These structures were part of the
Southwest redevelopment project, which had begun with the razing of whole blocks and the relocation of residents in 1954. Construction of the project’s centerpiece, the 10th Street Mall and L’Enfant Plaza, began in 1960, adding more office buildings, an underground parking garage, and a shopping arcade. The GSA didn’t promote dispersal in its ten-year construction plan for the seat of government, instead, it emphasized the need to consolidate agencies, demolish tempos, and erect structures that were functional, plain, and inexpensive. The GSA confidently predicted that completion of the ten-year program, which included some two dozen new buildings or additions, would rehouse 35,000 federal workers within or close to the District.
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The GSA did recommend Defense consider “locating certain elements” outside of Washington. Eisenhower agreed. In March 1958, he told national security aide Gordon Gray that new buildings for Defense should be located 30–50 miles from Washington.
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The President’s instructions echoed the NSC’s latest production, “U.S. Policy on Continental Defense” (NSC 5802/1), which advised that “new Federal facilities and major expansion of existing Federal facilities, important to national security, should not be located in target areas.”
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At Eisenhower’s request, the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks undertook a “feasibility study” of shifting some 30,000 Defense personnel from the District to sites between 23 and 35 miles from the zero milestone marker. These employees worked in District tempos and other buildings scheduled for razing, adding urgency to the survey. Unlike the CIA, the Navy worked closely with the NCPC and the NCRPC, which were identifying suburban sites suitable for federal offices and compatible with new highway construction.

The Navy should have entitled its November 1958 report an
infeasibility
study, however, for it detailed several reasons why “the Department of Defense [should] be relieved of any restrictions on distance from Washington in siting the new facilities.” First, many of the 29 sites surveyed posed a threat to the District’s and Alexandria’s water sources. The NCPC wanted to limit sewage discharge above the Potomac River’s Little Falls and into Alexandria’s Occoquan Creek, and it worried that community development around new federal campuses in these areas would contaminate water sources. Second, none of the 29 sites adjoined highways able to carry the estimated traffic of 8,000 vehicles that outlying campuses would produce. Third, employees would resist moving to nearby communities, which were presently too small to support office campuses. Finally, the Navy questioned the viability of dispersal at any distance. Thermonuclear weapons detonated over central Washington during nonworking hours would kill employees who hadn’t moved. Also, “it can be reasonably assumed that . . . other atomic weapons will be directed at military targets in the area,” thus spreading the devastation into the dispersal zone. NCPC chairman Harland Bartholomew, Leo Hoegh, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense all supported the Navy.
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In May 1959, Eisenhower, despite being sure dispersal was “the right thing to do,” withdrew his objection to Defense building structures in or close to the District.
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