This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (6 page)

The War Department also took interest in civil defense in 1946. The Provost Marshal General’s office completed a modest study in April. It stressed the need to protect the nation’s factories, utilities, and roads.
⁴³
In August, the Strategic Plans Office recommended the establishment of a civil defense program under the military’s direction.
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A few months later, Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower created a Civil Defense Board, chaired by Major General Harold R. Bull. The Bull Board heard the testimony of more than 50 people with civil defense experience, including Fiorello La Guardia and James Landis. Its report, “A Study of Civil Defense,” echoed the Survey’s call for a national civil defense program and emergency rescue teams. The Bull Board also suggested that underground sites could protect key industrial plants. Most important, it declared self-help to be the founda
tion of civil defense and advocated civilian control of the program, explaining that the military services already had enough responsibilities.
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Ansley Coale, secretary of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Atomic Energy, agreed the nation needed a comprehensive civil defense program. He recommended the dispersal of industry and pro
tection of communication networks within the United States. Coale supported international control of atomic weapons, contending that U.N. oversight, coupled with civil defense, offered the best odds in preventing war. The scientist also noted the vulnerability of the nation’s capital: “a single attack upon Washington might be able to destroy the organization needed to direct the nation at war.” He urged the move of vital government agencies out of Washington, duplication of important records, and determination of lines of succession for government officials. Coale was thus among the first to propose readying Washington for an atomic attack.
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However, West Point graduate and Army Corps of Engineer Lt. Colonel David B. Parker bluntly questioned the feasibility of protecting the capital. After imagining three atomic bombs detonating above the Federal Triangle, Pentagon, and Naval Gun Factory (previously called the Washington Navy Yard), he wrote, “if you are a Washingtonian and you want to be sure to survive a forthcoming attack, your best plan is to buy a one-way ticket to the West Coast.” Another article he wrote summed up its main point in the title: “2 Bombs in Rivers—All Washington Dies.” Scientist Ralph E. Lapp authored a similar scenario. Lapp, subtler but no less grim than Parker, put his detonation point above the Potomac. He surmised that not only would the Pentagon be completely destroyed, but so would the Departments of State, Agriculture, and Treasury.
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Clearly, interest in civil defense and the protection of the capital was growing, but it remained inchoate and contradictory. Civilians had to appreciate the destructive power of atomic weapons, yet also believe they could survive an attack on their hometowns. Factories might have to be moved under
ground, but there were no workable ideas on carrying out this relocation. Civilian control of civil defense was best, although the programs still required militaristic structure and guidance. The nation’s capital needed protection, but was its defense even possible? Without resolute guidance, the stirrings of interest in civil defense meant little. Just as important, civil defense needed a dedicated advocate.

James Forrestal was happy to oblige. A former Wall Street bond salesman, Forrestal became the first secretary of defense in September 1947. During World War II, Forrestal had served as undersecretary of the navy and dis
tinguished himself as an able administrator, brilliant and far-sighted; one who could delegate and still pore over the details. Posing for a photograph in 1944, Forrestal exuded the confidence he carried with him to the Pentagon: in a dark suit and tie, a handkerchief perfectly tucked inside the pocket, he cocked his eyebrows beneath a stylishly combed widow’s peak and pressed his lips together, offering a trace of smile, at once charming and intense, like the man. Forrestal’s social grace, his talent at stroking the egos of powerful persons, was admired throughout Washington, and if he was impatient with the incompetent and the obtuse, it was only because he held himself to high standards.
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Forrestal’s deep-set suspicions about the Soviet Union led to his interest in civil defense. Although he had little reason to doubt the President’s anticommunism, Forrestal worried that Truman didn’t care about civil defense. He was right. In the 1946 elections, Republicans had wrested con
trol of Congress, and the new majority promised to slash budgets and trim the federal bureaucracy—hardly propitious circumstances to unveil a costly government program. Meanwhile Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe and communist movements in Greece and Turkey preoccupied the President, resulting in military and economic aid packages that Congress approved only after lengthy debate. More to the point, in 1947 Truman didn’t believe war with the Soviet Union was imminent, and he worried that an ambitious civil defense program would needlessly alarm the American public.
⁴⁹

To prod Truman, in February 1948 Forrestal publicly released the Bull Board report. He also announced the creation of the Office of Civil Defense Planning and asked Russell J. Hopley, president of the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company, to serve as director.
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By November, Hopley and his staff, which included military, business, medical, and public works profes
sionals, finished a 300-page study entitled “Civil Defense for National Security.” Dubbing civil defense the “missing link” in national security, the report proposed an Office of Civil Defense answering to the President or, preferably, the secretary of defense. Addressing a problem overlooked by previous studies, the report sketched out a legislative template for civil defense and emphasized the importance of state and municipal programs, which would follow guidelines established by the national office. Like
matrioshka
, hollow Russian dolls, the levels replicated one another, descend
ing in size as they stretched from Washington across states, counties, cities, towns. The federal director had deputies in fields such as Radiological Defense, Communications, and Medical and Health Services; so did the state and local directors. Although Hopley suggested existing bodies such as police forces could carry out certain tasks, for the most part he envisioned a vast, layered bureaucracy.
⁵¹

Yet the report lacked depth. Forrestal had asked for a national civil defense
plan
; Hopley gave him charts for an
agency
and suggested it devise the plan. True, the Hopley report indicated exactly what that plan needed, but listing tasks and staff positions was easy. To state that questions such as “What to do about bomb shelters” needed to be addressed wasn’t the same as providing answers. The hefty study met with doubt and disdain as it thumped down on desks throughout Washington. Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer won
dered whether it was wise for a democracy to embed civil defense within the federal government, noting that the report mostly ignored the role of non-governmental organizations. The Federal Works Agency rejected the Hopley report outright. Although the Army endorsed the report, the Air Force wanted the Office of Civil Defense to report directly to the President.
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For all their hard work, Hopley and his staff had failed. Civil defense still sounded like a high school forensics question: Should the federal government sponsor a civil defense program? Yes, answered denizens of the national security state, but no one wanted to do anything about it. Soon even Forrestal’s support didn’t matter. Truman asked him to resign, and, after grudgingly stepping down in March 1949, Forrestal suffered a mental break
down. Afflicted by paranoia, he committed suicide in May, throwing himself from a window of a Bethesda (Md.) hospital.
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Washington and the 1948 "War Scare"

Meanwhile security for the nation’s capital attracted attention. Sen. Alexander Wiley (R-Wisc.) raised the issue in May 1947, when he decried the concen
tration of federal offices in the District. Wiley wanted to start moving some offices to other parts of the country, a process dubbed “decentralization.”

Budget Director Frederick J. Lawton resisted, contending that a shortage of office space was a national problem and that all cities would be targets.
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Wiley didn’t give up. In February 1948, he published an article that began,
ala
Orson Welles, with a fictitious broadcast: “Comrade Americans, attention! . . . Political commissars have now taken charge of each of the 48 States and of your National Government, which has been temporarily relocated in Kansas. This relocation is necessary because of the atomic radiation which still prevails in your former Capital, which now lies in dust, its inhabi
tants exterminated.” In this article, on the Senate floor, and on NBC radio, Wiley reiterated the need for decentralization.
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If Lawton wasn’t listening, Arthur M. Hill was. In September 1947, Hill came to Washington to serve as the first chairman of the NSRB. Head of the Greyhound Bus Company, Hill looked every bit the senior business executive: square-jawed, round glasses perched atop a broad nose, hair fringed with gray. He was a Republican in a Democratic administration, but he had overseen the Motor Bus Code Authority of Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration.
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As a businessman with government experience, Hill seemed the ideal chairman for the NSRB, which advised the President on coordinating the mobilization of industry and the military for war. However, the NSRB lacked the power to coerce government agencies or companies to abide by its proposals concerning stockpiling, production capacity, materials allocation, and plant location and security.

Oblivious to these limits, Hill believed the Board’s charter authorized him to undertake the preparation of Washington for atomic war.
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How could the NSRB mobilize a wartime economy if atomic bombs reduced the nation’s capital to radioactive rubble, as Wiley imagined? A brief war scare in Washington intensified Hill’s concern. In late February 1948, the Soviet Union forced Czechoslovakia’s president Eduard Benes to step down, open
ing the door to a communist takeover. On March 10, Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, a noncommunist and renowned political figure, fell from his apartment window in Prague. Few in the United States believed his death was a suicide, for the Soviet-sponsored Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) had recently given orders to neutralize political opposition in Eastern Europe. Just five days earlier, the U.S. military governor in Germany, General Lucius Clay, had expressed his fear that the Soviets were preparing a surprise attack against the French, British, and American zones of occupation.
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Like many, Hill wondered if war was imminent.

He first asked the President to seek Congressional authorization for the NSRB to set wage and price controls and to allocate industrial resources.
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The request showed either admirable or deplorable ignorance of the political cli
mate. Asking for the reintroduction of unpopular wartime measures six months before the presidential election would hardly be savvy, especially since pundits were already sharpening their pencils to write Truman’s political obituary. Hill was ignored. Undaunted, he turned his attention to Washington itself.

In April, Hill formed an interdepartmental panel to study the capital’s security, saying he wanted to prepare “for the location of future Government
buildings in and about Washington, D.C. which will provide greater security against possible atomic attack.”
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The Department of Defense, the Bureau of the Budget, the Federal Works Agency, and the NSRB dominated the panel, which faced a formidable task. In 1948, more than 800,000 people lived in the District, and the metropolitan population numbered more than 1.25 million. The executive branch alone employed 206,110 persons, of whom 135,000 worked on or near the Mall.
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During the week, these civil servants filled the Federal Triangle’s buildings, the tempos, and scores of other government offices. Rush hour traffic clogged the District’s avenues and the precious few bridges spanning the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. If war came, would the federal government still be able to function in the District? One prediction heightened the question’s ominous tone: “Any attack made on Washington is likely to be a surprise attack initiated with the utmost secrecy and aimed at destroying the operations of the federal government at the beginning of hostilities.
It cannot be assumed that there will be any warning whatsoever”
(emphasis in original).
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2

Augur: To prognosticate from signs or omens; to divine, forbode, anticipate.
Oxford English Dictionary
, s.v. “Augur”

I
magine
...a city with several hundred thousand residents, a regional center of industry and commerce. It might be Milwaukee or Pittsburgh, cities that grew rapidly during the nineteenth century as the nation industri
alized, as factories and rail yards filled urban centers, as immigrants crowded into stifling tenements. Surround this city with residential suburbs and put in it a bustling downtown: granite-sheathed banks, theaters, towering office buildings, department stores straddling whole blocks. Now draw a wide circle through the farm fields and undeveloped land ringing the suburbs. Along the circle, at points four to five miles apart, build new, small commu
nities, each with a maximum population of 50,000. No more than two miles wide, these “cluster” cities are self-contained, supplying their own electricity and heat, yet are linked by highways, telephone lines, and railways. As the cluster cities arise, the urban center steadily loses population, industry, and investment; it doesn’t “die,” but instead yields to redevelopment, becoming a cluster city itself.

This might seem the stuff of Cold War science fiction, but after World War II, many urban and civil defense planners believed cluster cities, also called dis
persal, should be the future of the American metropolis. These planners, like the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, imagined atomic firestorms engulfing American cities and advocated preventative measures such as dispersal. Just one or two atomic bombs could level a concentrated metropolitan area, but cluster cities would suffer far less devastation: enemy bombers could strike some, but not all, key targets, allowing the unharmed cities to aid in recov
ery. Hydrogen bombs, stockpiled weapons, and missiles eventually nullified dispersal’s protective merits, but in the late 1940s, years of both unease and optimism, when military planners still used a 20-kiloton atomic bomb as a benchmark and the Soviet Union hadn’t yet assembled an atomic bomb, dispersal seemed to offer realistic protection.
¹

Fear of atomic annihilation wasn’t the only source of interest in dispersal. Many urban planners believed dispersal could spur slum clearance, diminish
industrial pollution, and produce parks. Not only would dispersal shield America’s cities, it would save them from problems of their own making. Consider the highways needed to link cluster cities. Detroit planner Donald Monson and his wife Astrid, an economist, recommended that 100 yard buffers of open land should flank each new highway, offering a firebreak and clearance space for postattack detritus. They also proposed highways cut through city centers in order to “greatly increase our present slum-clearance and relocation programs.”
²

Dispersal’s antecedents included Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City,” introduced in 1898, and pre–World War II industrial suburbanization. Like the garden city, many postwar dispersal plans used concentric rings to plot development, placing factories and industry on the outer ring and scattering small population bases throughout natural, open space. In 1908, future dispersal advocate Clarence S. Stein toured Bournville, England, a planned community with garden city elements. Stein came away excited about the concept. “Utopian dreams can be made realities, if only we go about it in a practical, sane way,” he wrote his brother. Forty years later, Stein was an accomplished community planner, architect, and dispersal advocate. Industrial dispersal wasn’t new, either. By the mid-nineteenth century, suburbs with factories ringed Boston; outside Pittsburgh, steel mills dominated the community of Homestead; and south of Chicago, George Pullman built a railroad car plant and model town for his workers.
³

Among postwar dispersal advocates, few were as important as Tracy Augur. Born in 1896, Augur graduated from Cornell University in 1917. His age put him within the “Lost Generation,” but in outlook and tem
perament, Augur was optimistic, even utopian, a liberal who believed firmly in the government’s ability to provide better lives for its citizens. In 1933, Augur took the position of chief town planner for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), one of the New Deal’s first programs. The TVA built dams and locks across the South to stop flooding and to generate electrical power. Outside of Knoxville, the TVA developed Norris, a federally owned community offering curved streets, modern homes, and a town common. A few years later, Augur served as a general adviser in the planning of Greendale, Wisconsin, another federally developed town. Augur was also consulted in the planning of the atomic research laboratory and campus at Oak Ridge, Tenn.
⁴

The TVA and Greendale showed Augur that entire communities could be built from the ground up with federal help, while Oak Ridge reminded him of the peril of atomic weapons. How could America’s cities protect themselves? In August 1946, Augur answered that question in an address to the American Institute of Planners. He hardly needed a introduction; he had already served as the organization’s president. In a future war, said Augur, an enemy would want to paralyze the United States by targeting cen
ters of industrial production, corporate organization, and governmental admin
istration. Dispersal not only made these targets less enticing, it also increased the nation’s ability to carry out “quick and effective retribution.”
⁵

By 1948, Augur had refined his ideas. Today’s cities are obsolete, he proclaimed, because they continued to expand on patterns set in the nineteenth century, when rudimentary communications and reliance on rail
roads required the concentration of industry and labor. Telephones, motor vehicles, and broadcasting could link “clusters of well dispersed small cities,” allowing the economy to function efficiently. By Augur’s reckoning, a city of 1 million broken into 20 cluster cities of 50,000 persons each and separated by 4 to 5 miles of open land could avoid destruction. While one bomb could inflict massive devastation on a typical city filling a circle with a 9 mile dia
meter, it could score a direct hit on just 1 of the 5 cluster cities that fell within that circle. (In Augur’s plan, the other 15 clusters would lie outside the 9 mile perimeter.) “A one in five chance of losing a city of 50,000 is not a pleasant prospect,” he admitted, “but it is better than a one in one chance of losing a larger portion of a bigger city.”

Augur used more than this morbid calculus to justify dispersal. Like the Monsons, he believed dispersal would eliminate slums, reduce pollution, and increase recreational opportunities. He also offered ideological reasons: “It is not to be expected that people who are forced to live in slums will give unquestioned allegiance to the system that keeps them there.” Although the United States didn’t yet “offer a very fertile field for the breeding of serious unrest,” further decay of America’s inner cities could push millions toward “subversive ideas and actions,” that is, communism.
⁶
Augur’s warning echoed a justification offered for the newly inaugurated European Recovery Program, which provided economic aid to Western Europe. When he pro
posed the plan, Secretary of State George Marshall strongly hinted that hunger and poverty in European cities nurtured communism.

In outlining cluster cities, Augur didn’t mention race, but it cast a long shadow over dispersal. Chicago’s “Black Belt,” segregated public housing in Detroit, white neighborhood associations in Washington, D.C.: race molded life, work, and social activity in America’s cities. If dispersal actually happened, would whites welcome blacks into the cluster communities? Ongoing settle
ment of blacks in northern cities sharpened the question. During the “Great Migration” of 1915–1918, some 500,000 black Southerners moved to northern cities, but an even greater migration occurred during the 1940s and 1950s, when close to three million blacks left Dixie for the north.
⁷

Much more than the specter of atomic annihilation, African American migration concerned many residents of northern cities. Between 1940 and 1950, Detroit’s black population doubled. After the war, black residents worked for a peaceful end to citywide housing discrimination, but whites formed neighborhood organizations dedicated to excluding blacks from their enclaves. A white resident expressed a popular sentiment when he wrote, in 1951, “I’d like to see the city sectioned off and have different races sectioned off and each live in their own area. I hate to see a territory invaded, like by colored.” Although class, religion, and ethnicity divided Detroit’s whites, they found—and protected—common ground based upon their whiteness.
⁸
In 1947, Cincinnati city planners drafted a master growth plan that blended
the principles of dispersal with the practice of segregation. Just like Augur’s cluster cities, the Cincinnati master plan projected the growth of satellite communities with populations of 20,000 to 40,000 people, separated by buffers such as parks and industrial districts. The communities would share governance and highways, yet each would be self-contained. Planners hoped to transplant existing homogeneous neighborhoods to the new communities, which meant racial divisions would also follow. Cincinnati’s plan “accepted racial residential segregation as normal and something to be preserved.”
⁹

Dispersal advocates also rarely identified cities that might serve as proto
types. Perhaps they wanted to first obtain as many converts as possible, for if the logic of dispersal was simple, the logistics weren’t. Breaking a city into clus
ters required not only the cooperation of that city’s government, businesses, and residents, but those of surrounding communities as well. However persua
sive on paper, dispersal remained unproven in practice—would any American city want to undertake a reconfiguration that couldn’t be easily reversed? Ideally, the first cluster cities needed to arise around a city that fulfilled tasks essential to the nation’s ability to wage war, so that the need for dispersal was obvious. At the same time, this city needed to be a “one-company” town, for if the most important employer moved to the periphery, then employees would follow. And in case dispersal faced opposition, this city would ideally be ruled by unelected officials who could impose drastic change upon the unwilling. As Augur wrote, “the form and size and location of our cities is a matter of national concern, to be set by the mandates of national welfare rather than the whims of individual builders.”
¹⁰
But America was a democracy built on the bedrock of property rights. Where could anyone find such a city?

On the banks of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. Augur’s dispersal ideas were just what Arthur Hill and the NSRB needed as they studied the capital’s security against atomic attack. Unable to elect their own leaders, Washingtonians couldn’t stop the Board of Commissioners, the president, and Congress from moving government offices out of the District. Furthermore, dispersal of the capital was a realistic first goal; the federal government could begin by building office campuses, which would entice private developers to erect homes nearby. Highways, utilities, and commercial districts would follow as dispersal of Washington’s key industry, government, gained momentum. Washington’s dispersal would then lay down a stepping stone for national dispersal. If the future could happen in the nation’s city, then the govern
ment would wield the moral authority to promote or even force dispersal elsewhere.

No one was more qualified to plan Washington’s dispersal than Augur. In 1949, the Federal Works Agency hired him as an Urban Planning Officer, and, acting under the authority of the NSRB, instructed him to find dispersed sites for wartime essential government offices.
¹¹

Planning to Plan

Augur didn’t have to begin from scratch. On October 27, 1948, Arthur Hil
l
had submitted his panel’s report on Washington to the President. “Securit
y

for the Nation’s Capital” began by explaining, without a trace of whimsy, why Washington had to remain the national capital. Moving the seat of government was prohibitively expensive, such a shift “would be extremely damaging to the morale of the people.” Furthermore, all U.S. cities were possible targets, and Washington had continued to serve as the capital during past wars. “[P]eace will continue for at least the next five or ten years” asserted the report, but precautions were needed: the construction of underground office space within the District for 5,000 essential government personnel, an evacuation plan for executive agencies, and the selection of several “alterna
tive locations for the seat of Government.” Drawing on the principles of dis
persal, “Security for the Nation’s Capital” called for the scattering of new federal offices at least five to ten miles from the city center. The report also recommended the Mall tempos be razed and that the number of executive branch employees working in the vicinity of the Mall be capped at 135,000.
¹²

“Security for the Nation’s Capital” was a tidy, terse report—and deeply flawed. The tally of 135,000 Mall-vicinity federal workers omitted employees of the Judiciary (580), Congress (7,046), and the District Government (approximately 18,000). Uniformed service personnel were also left out.
¹³
The report’s title hinted at further exclusion. Security for the “Nation’s Capital”: not Washington, not the District of Columbia, but the seat of government. What were Washingtonians who didn’t work for the executive branch supposed to do in case of an attack? By limiting the scope of planning, security planners starkly separated the city from the capital. Vague recom
mendations also plagued “Security for the Nation’s Capital.” To ask that “each department and agency prepare a plan for its orderly evacuation from Washington” invited confusion of the highest degree. Nearly 150,000 persons would share limited routes out of the city; the odds of multiple “orderly” evacuations weren’t good. Even if the evacuation worked, where was everyone going? The report said the NSRB would draft plans for alternate seats of government but gave no clues about where these sites might be located.