This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (37 page)

Introduction

1. “D.C. Schools Will Graduate 6000 in 2 Days,”
   WP
   , June 7, 1948, sec. B, p. 1; “The Problem of Civil Defense Today,” June 28, 1948, box 13, folder “Civil Defense 2 of 2,” U.S. Grant III Papers, HSW; David McCullough,
   Truman
   (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 648.
   
2. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Strategic Vulnerability of Washington, D.C.,” September 3, 1948, box 40, folder “Vulnerability of Washington, D.C.,” RG 330.
   
3. As T.S. Eliot ends his poem “The Hollow Men” (1925), “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”
   
4. The Joint Chiefs of Staff weren’t the first to imagine an atomic attack on Washington, D.C. In November 1945,
   Life
   envisioned an atomic bombardment of Washington. See “The 36-Hour War,”
   Life
   19, no. 21 (November 19, 1945). Nor was Washington the only target in these imaginary attacks. Atomic attack scenarios for other U.S. cities began regularly appearing in newspapers and mag
   azines. See Kenneth D. Rose,
   One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in
   American Culture
   (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 52–66.
   
5. In the late 1940s, the metropolitan area was defined as the District of Columbia; the city of Alexandria, Va.; Arlington and Fairfax Counties (Va.); and Montgomery and Prince Georges Counties (Md.).
   
6. Constance McLaughlin Green,
   The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital
   (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 280–2.
   
7. Carl Abbott,
   Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis
   (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 7–8.
   
8. Lucy G. Barber,
   Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition
   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 44–107, 179–218.
   
9. Stanley Harrold
   ,
   Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828–1865
   (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 256.
   
10. Constance McLaughlin Green,
    Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878
    , vol. 1,
    Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800–1950
    (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 296.
    
11. For the international ramifications of the District’s segregation during the Cold War, see Mary L. Dudziak,
    Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 96–9.
    

1. Alan Lessoff,
   The Nation and Its City: Politics, “Corruption,” and Progress in Washington, D.C., 1861–1902
   (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 1–14.
   
2. Frederick Gutheim (consultant) and the National Capital Planning Commission,
   

Worthy of the Nation: The History of Planning for the National Capital

(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), 113–36 (the quote is on 135), 345–56.

1. Howard Gillette, Jr.,
   Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure
   of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C.
   (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 135–69.
   
2. “Statement of Commissioner Robert E. McLaughlin before the Senate Committee on Government Operations,” April 27, 1959, box 228, folder 4–100, RG 351, BOC.
   
3. Executive departments, bureaus, and agencies designated as “wartime essential” included obvious choices such as the Departments of State and Defense, the military services, the CIA, and the FBI. Given the enormous challenges of mobilizing and fighting modern war, however, the list of qualifying agencies was quite extensive. For example, the Coast and Geodetic Survey (within the Department of Commerce) was essential because it provided charts used by the Navy and the Air Force. Likewise, during wartime the military expected to use the mapping capability of the Geological Survey (within the Department of the Interior). The Civil Service Commission’s investigative unit, which had compiled a file of 5.5 million security index cards and 2.5 million “subversive activity information cards” by 1955, was also considered wartime essential. Even the Housing and Home Finance Agency was essential because of its $2.5 billion mortgage portfolio (circa 1955). Rather than list all known wartime essential executive agencies, I refer to them individually as needed. Sources: NSC, “Plan for Continuity of Essential Wartime Functions of the Executive Branch,” January 25, 1954, box 6, folder “NSC 159/4 . . . (1),” NSC Policy Paper Subseries, Annexes I and II; H.F. Hurley to L.J. Greeley, March 1, 1955, box 2, folder “Office of Defense Mobilization (2),” John S. Bragdon Records, Miscellaneous File, Civil Defense Subseries, DDEL.
   
4. FCDA,
   The National Plan for Civil Defense against Enemy Attack
   (Washington, D.C.: 1956), 2. For more on civil defense in the 1950s, see Rose,
   One Nation
   , 22–35; Laura McEnaney,
   Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties
   (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Harry B. Yoshpe,
   Our Missing Shield: The U.S. Civil Defense Program in Historical Perspective
   (Washington, D.C.: FEMA, 1981), 105–287.
   
5. DCD,
   District of Columbia Survival Plan
   , 1959, LOC.
   
6. Steven J. Zaloga,
   The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945–2000
   (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 31.
   
7. Allan M. Winkler
   ,
   Life under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom
   (New York: Oxfor
   d University Press, 1993; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 68–75.
   
8. Even before continuity preparations were underway, Clinton L. Rossiter addressed this problem in his book
   Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies
   (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948). According to Rossiter, a dictatorship would be needed after an atomic attack; the challenge was to set up, prior to war, constitutional limits to ensure the dictatorship wasn’t permanent.
   
9. Guy Oakes,
   The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture
   (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–9, 52–4; Paul Boyer,
   By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
   (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 319–33; Andrew D. Grossman,
   Neither Dead nor Red: Civilian Defense and American Political Development during the Early Cold War
   (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–19; McEnaney,
   Civil Defense
   , 3–10.
   

1. DCD, “In Case of an A-Bomb Attack What Should You Do?,” January 1951, Vertical Files, folder “Defense 1951,” Washingtoniana.
   
2. John Mintz, “U.S. Called Unprepared for Nuclear Terrorism,
   ”
   WP
   , May 3, 2005, sec. A, p. 1.
   

A Nuclear Weapons Primer

1. Lynn Eden
   ,
   Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation
   (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 15–26. As Eden’s excellent book explains, for 50 years, U.S. military and security planners greatly underestimated the mass fires (or firestorms) that the thermal effects of nuclear detonations would produce.
   
2. David Miller,
   The Cold War: A Militar
   y History
   (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 75.
   
3. William Daughtery et al., “The Consequences of ‘Limited’ Nuclear Attacks on the United States,”
   International Security
   10, no. 4 (Spring 1986): 3–45.
   
4. Steven J. Zaloga,
   The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945–2000
   (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 12–21, 26–8.
   
5. Zaloga,
   Kremlin’s Nuclear
   , 72–5, 241, 254; Miller,
   The Cold War
   , 95–9, 110–2.
   
6. NSC Planning Board, “U.S. Policy on Continental Defense,” July 14, 1960, in William Burr, ed., “Launch on Warning: The Development of U.S. Capabilities, 1959–1979,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 43, April 2001, accessed June 23, 2005 at
   http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ NSAEBB/ NSAEBB43/
   .
   
7. Kenneth Schaffel
   ,
   The Emerging Shield: The Air Force and the Evolution of Continental Air Defense 1945–1960
   (Washington, D.C.: USAF
   , Office of Air Force History, 1991), 210–7.
   

1 By the Bomb’s Imaginary Light

1. “Army of 3690 from WPA Starts Strengthening Capital Defenses,”
   WP
   , June 11, 1940.
   
2. Louis J. Halle,
   Spring in Washington
   (New York: Antheneum, 1963), viii, 8–11.
   
3. Constance McLaughlin Green
   ,
   Washington: Capital City, 1879–1950
   , vol. 2,
   Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800–1950
   (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 468–9; Green,
   The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital
   (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 251–6.
   
4. Green,
   Washington
   , 473.
   
5. David Brinkley,
   Washington Goes to War
   (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 107; Leslie T. Davol, “Shifting Mores: Esther Bubley’s World War II Boarding House Photos,”
   Washington History
   10, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1998–99): 49, 52.
   
6. Stephen Vaughn,
   Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information
   (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 98–114; Elwyn A. Mauck, “History of Civil Defense in the United States,”
   BAS
   6, nos. 8–9 (August–September 1950): 265; Virgil L. Couch, “Civilian Defense in the United States, 1940–1945,” unpublished mss., box 1, folder “Civilian Defense in the U.S., 1940–1945 (1),” Virgil L. Couch Papers, DDEL, 3–5.
   
7. Mauck, “History,” 266.
   
8. Donald A. Ritchie,
   James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators
   (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 103–5.
   
9. Mauck, “History,” 266; Ritchie,
   James M. Landis
   , 105; Laura McEnaney,
   Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties
   

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17–8; “Conferees Return OCD to LaGuardia,”
NYT
, January 15, 1942, sec. 1, p. 14.

1. “House Forbids OCD Funds for ‘Dancers,’ Donald Duck,”
   NYT
   , February 7, 1942, sec. 1, p. 1.
   
2. Ritchie
   ,
   James M. Landis
   , 105, 108–15; Sidney M. Milkis, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and The Transcendence of Partisan Politics,”
   Political Science Quarterly
   100, no.3 (Autumn 1985): 492–6.
   
3. Brinkley,
   Washington
   , 96.
   
4. CR
   , 77th Cong., 1st sess., December 12, 1941, vol. 87, part 9, 9741–2; 77th Cong., 2nd sess., June 15, 1942, vol. 88, part 4, 5222; Ritchie,
   James M. Landis
   , 111; Mike Reilly to Frank Wilson, December 16, 1941, box 50, folder “103-A Bomb Protection, Etc.,” RG 87, 7.
   
5. WS
   , “You and an Air Raid: What You Should Know,” 1942, Pamphlet File, “Civil Defense,” HSW;
   CR
   , 77th Cong., 2nd sess., May 11, 1942, vol. 88, part 3, 4072-3; Ritchie,
   James M. Landis
   , 110–1; Theodor Horydczak Collection, “Potomac Electric Co. Building: Air raid equipments and personnel III,” LOC, Prints and Photographs Division.
   
6. Caryl A. Cooper, “The
   Chicago Defender
   : Filling in the Gaps for The Office of
   Civilian Defense, 1941–1945,”
   The Western Journal of Black Studies
   23, no. 2 (1999): 111–8; Barbara Orbach and Nicholas Natanson, “The Mirror Image: Black Washington in World War II-Era Federal Photography,”
   Washington History
   4, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1992): 4–25, 92–3; Spencie Love,
   One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew
   (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 49; photographs in RG 208, Records of the Office of War Information, Series “Negro Activities in Industry, Government, and the Armed Forces, 1941–1945,” Still Picture Records, Special Media Archives Services Division, National Archives, College Park, Md.
   
7. Gregory Hunter, “Howard University: ‘Capstone of Negro Education’ during World War II,”
   Journal of Negro History
   79, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 63–5; Brinkley,
   Washington
   , 251–2.
   
8. Report of the Committee for the Protection of Cultural and Scientific Resources, April 12, 1943, box 2, folder “Documents 1941–1951,” LOC Archives, Committee for the Protection of Cultural and Scientific Resources, LOC, Manuscript Division; Alvin W. Kremer, October 7, 1942, box 735, LOC Archives, Central File: MacLeish/Evans, accessed November 16, 2004 at
   http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mff.002039
   .
   
9. Edward T. Folliard, “All Presidents Are Architects,”
   WP
   , January 11, 1948; William Seale,
   The President’s House: A History
   , vol. II (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 1986), 980–4.
   
10. Brinkley,
    Washington
    , 95; L.E. Albert to Frank Wilson, February 16, 1942, box 50, folder “103-A Bomb Protection, Etc.,” RG 87; Reilly to Wilson, December 16, 1941, 7.
    
11. “Defense Setup of District Held Undermanned, Ineffectual,”
    WP
    , January 14, 1943.
    
12. Dr. Robert McElroy, “Narrative Account of the Office of Civilian Defense,” November 1944, box 1077, RG 330.
    
13. “President Announces Termination of OCD but Urges Continued Volunteer Efforts,” May 2, 1945, box 8, folder “(OEM) Office of Civilian Defense,” HST Papers, Files of Raymond R. Zimmerman; “All Civilian Defense Inactivated by Order of Commissioners,”
    WS
    , May 7, 1945.
    
14. Arata Osada, comp.,
    Children of the A-Bomb: T
    estament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima
    (Ann Arbor: Midwest Publishers, International, 1982), 97, quoted in Richard Rhodes,
    The Making of the Atomic Bomb
    (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 719.
    
15. Rhodes,
    Making
    , 699–734 (the Tibbets quote is on 710).
    
16. Ibid., 740–2.
    
17. For Americans’ responses to the use of the atomic bombs, see Paul Boyer,
    By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
    (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 7–21.
    
18. Brinkley,
    Washington
    , 278.
    
19. Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee
    ,
    Buildings of the District of Columbia
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 157–8.
    
20. Brinkley,
    Washington
    , 71–3; R. Alton Lee, “Building the Pentagon,”
    USA Today Magazine
    121, no. 2572 (January 1993): 90 ff.; Alan P. Capps, “The Pentagon,”
    American History Illustrated
    28, no. 2 (May/June 1993): 46 ff.; Alfred Goldberg,
    The Pentagon: The First Fifty Years
    (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1992), 6–19.
    
21. Lee, “Building the Pentagon”; Capps, “The Pentagon”; Gene Gurney,
    The Pentagon
    (New York: Crown Publishers, 1964), 1–15, 29; Brinkley,
    Washington
    , 72.
    
22. Robert McMahon, “The Republic as Empire: American Foreign Policy in the ‘American Century,’ ” in Harvard Sitkoff, ed.,
    Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 94.
    
23. Pau
    l
    Y. Hammond,
    Organizing for Defense: The American Militar
    y Establishment in the Twentieth Century
    (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1961), 187–205.
    
24. Daniel Yergin,
    Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War
    , rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 5.
    
25. Gurney,
    The Pentagon
    , 85–7.
    
26. Melvyn P. Leffler
    ,
    A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War
    (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 10–23; Aaron L. Friedberg,
    In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy
    (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 336.
    
27. Michael J. Hogan,
    A Cross of Iron: Harr
    y S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954
    (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–22.
    
28. Michael S. Sherry
    ,
    In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s
    (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 139.
    
29. Ted Gup
    ,
    The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives
    (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 15.
    
30. Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan
    ,
    Atomic Shield 1947/1952
    , vol. II,
    A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission
    (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 42.
    
31. B. Franklin Cooling, “Civil Defense and the Army: The Quest for Responsibility, 1946–1948,”
    Military Af
    fairs
    36, no. 1 (February 1972): 11.
    
32. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey,
    The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
    (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1946), 11, 33–43.
    
33. “What Atom Bomb Means to U.S.: Revision of Plans for Defense,”
    United States News
    21, no. 1 (July 5, 1946): 16–7.
    
34. Nehemiah Jordan, “U.S. Civil Defense Before 1950: The Roots of Public Law 920” (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of the Army, 1966), 58–9.
    
35. Colonel Dziuban, “Civil Defense, the Problem,” August 28, 1946, box 1069, folder “Strategic Plans Civil Defense,” RG 330.
    
36. Jordan, “U.S. Civil Defense,” 64–9; Office of the Secretary of Defense, “A Study of Civil Defense,” February 1948, box 55, RG 328, Office Files of Director John F. Nolen, Jr.; Mauck, “History,” 269.
    
37. Ansley Coale, “Reducing Vulnerability to Atomic Attack,”
    BAS
    3, no. 3 (March 1947): 71–4, 98.
    
38. David B. Parker, “Can Washington Be Defended against an Atomic Bomb Attack?”
    Coast Artillery Journal
    (May/June 1947): 23; Parker, “2 Bombs in Rivers—All Washington Dies,”
    WP
    , August 3, 1947; Ralph E. Lapp, “Atomic Bomb Explosions—Effects on an American City,”
    BAS
    4, no. 2 (February 1948): 49–54.
    
39. Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley,
    Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of
    James Forrestal
    (New York: Knopf, 1992), 139–49.
    
40. William H. Kincade, “U.S. Civil Defense Decision-Making: The Ford and Carter Administrations” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 1980), 242–7.
    
41. Jordan, “U.S. Civil Defense,” 75.
    
42. Office of Civil Defense Planning
    ,
    Civil Defense for National Security
    (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1948).
    
43. Charles Sawyer to Forrestal, December 28, 1948, box 30, folder “381 Civil Defense,” RG 304; “Comments on ‘Civil Defense for National Security,’ ” undated, box 35, binder “Comments on ‘Civil Defense for National Security,’ ” RG 330.
    
44. Hoopes and Brinkley,
    Driven Patriot
    , 444–68.
    
45. Wiley to James Webb, May 10, 1947; Lawton to Wiley, June 11, 1947, box 30, folder “381 (Decentralization of Federal Activities),” RG 304.
    
46. Alexander Wiley, “We Must Decentralize,
    ”
    Reserve Officer
    (February 1948), reprinted in
    CR
    , 80th Cong., 2nd sess., February 3, 1948, vol. 94, part 9, A640-3;
    CR
    , 80th Cong., 2nd sess., February 11 and 24, March 25, 1948, vol. 94, parts 3 and 9, 3457-8, A783-4, A1080-1.
    
47. “Arthur M. Hill Resigns as Chief of National Resources Board,”
    WS
    , December 7, 1948.
    
48. The National Security Act of 1947 authorized the NSRB to provide advice to the president on “the strategic relocation of industries, services, government, and economic activities, the continuous operation of which is essential to the Nation’s security.”
    
49. Stephen E. Ambrose,
    Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938
    , 7th rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 90–2; Martin Walker,
    The Cold War: A History
    (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 53.
    
50. Friedberg,
    In the Shadow
    , 209.
    
51. Kreager to Symington, “Background on NSRB Board Meetings,” May 1, 1950, box 18, folder “Secretariat—NSRB Board,” RG 304, Office File of W. Stuart Symington.
    
52. “Notes on Population Growth of D.C. Area,” August 1948, box 6, folder “Security—D.C. Dispersal,” RG 304, Office File of I.D. Brent.
    
53. General Services Administration, “Basic Principles and Assumptions Governing Preparation of the Long-Range Plan for the Security of the Nation’s Capital,” June 1950, box 48, folder “545-15-85 ‘Security for the Nation’s Capital,’ ” RG 328, Planning Files, i.