(1963) OPERATIONS IN PUBLIC SHELTERS - FALLOUT SHELTER LIFE POST ATTACK A FAIRY TALE

OPERATIONS IN PUBLIC SHELTERS

Office of Civil Defense

1963

Beginning in 1961, architects and engineers across the United States set out to inspect thousands of buildings which could potentially serve as public fallout shelter spaces.  This project, known as the National Fallout Shelter Survey, culminated with the marking and stocking of many suitable locations.  Once the signs and supplies were in place, however, the Office of Civil Defense often left subsequent administerial responsibilities to local officials.  Federal programs still sought to train local shelter managers by creating a body of films and literature designed to examine each phase of a shelter stay.  This “shelter living” material frequently stressed absolute reliance on bureaucratic procedures implemented long before any emergency.  Instinctive following of these procedures, it was expected, would allow for calm attitudes to suppress the chaos which would no doubt ensue after an enemy attack.  Few films demonstrate this principle better than the 1963 OCD production Operations in Public Shelters.

                              

Operations in Public Shelters follows an impromptu leader, Gary Bates, as he gradually gains control over the hectic situation unfolding in his local shelter.   Opening in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear exchange, citizens mill in panic, crowding the entrance of Public Shelter 126.  Those inside fare little better, as shelter manager Bill Floyd is among the dead and his deputy, Bates, must assume command.  This scenario is addressed briefly in the 1963 filmPlanning for Public Shelter Entry, which notes the existence of special paperwork to be completed should the shelter manager fail to survive.  Bates instead reacts with frustration, trying to shirk his duty while shouting with other occupants.  The opening minutes of the film are frantic, with infants crying, phones ringing, and refugees shuffling aimlessly.  Bates reluctantly accepts his role, pressing the fact he was out of town when the shelter protocols were designed.  Fortunately, however, his communications operator patiently explains the shelter was established in accordance with uniform federal guidelines.  "We set up by the book, you shouldn't have any problem!"

                              

Bates faces several immediate problems, rising temperatures, a lack of food for infants, and fallout quickly accumulating on the Western edge of town.  Examining the shelter operations 

plan, prepared by volunteers in peacetime, Bates is able to form a radiological monitoring team to retrieve infant formula and additional supplies.  Through a similar reliance on bureaucratic methods, a detailed shelter schedule is devised, along with a food service system, and  information/moral procedures.  The film also focuses on Bates' ability to assign shelter jobs in accordance with occupants' skill sets.  A handyman with a thick accent, for example, is able to use his plumbing skills to retrieve extra water, while those with craft skills fashion privacy curtains to surround a makeshift commode.  Also offering his assistance is Gil Thompson, Shelter 126's enthusiastic health and sanitation manager.  Gil is played by a young Anthony Zerbe, a prolific actor who would later appear in films such as The Omega Man and Rooster Cogburn.  As the days go by, reports filter in from a local command center urging local populations to remain sheltered.  Bates turns this potential demoralizing peice of news into a challenge he and the shelter occupants strive to meet.  "We'll do it!  We'll use training, recreation, useful work, and special activities to make shelter living more acceptable!"

"THANK YOU ATOMIC HOME CINEMA" A GREAT PLACE FOR ALL ATOMIC FILMS THAT YOU THOUGHT WERE GONE BUT HAVE BEEN FOUND! THIS PARTICULAR SITE IS A PERSONAL FAVORITE AND I RECCOMEND IT TO ALL SHELTER MOVIE BUFFS, YOU CAN FIND IT AT - ATOMICTHEATER.COM
THIS POST IS FROM ATOMIC THEATERS SITE AND ARE GIVEN FULL CREDIT.

(1969) THE LAST OF THE CIVIL DEFENSE FILMS "IN TIME OF EMERGENCY" AND MASS MAILED HANBOOK

In Time of Emergency

Office of Civil Defense

1969

One way to view American civil defense is as a series of informational campaigns, each lasting a few years and each having the same overall goal of preparedness.  The 1950's, for example, saw Alert America in the early part of the decade and Operation Alert in the latter years.  Both were nationwide efforts to enlist volunteers and were supported by films, posters, air raid drills, and traveling displays.  This pattern would continue into the 1970's with the Your Chance to Live program, which used everyday disasters to remind viewers of the importance of emergency planning.  Nestled in between was the In Time of Emergency campaign, principally embodied through lengthy pamphlets of the same name released in March of 1968.  From the outset, government officials sought to connect civil defense planning with preparation for natural disasters.  While 95% of the publication is devoted to fallout protection and planning for an atomic attack, the final pages explain how the same procedures will help in case of blizzard, conventional fire, earthquake, and hurricanes.  To supplement the pamphlet, an LP was released which highlighted the atomic aspect but neglected the conventional disasters.  Similarly, a film was created in 1969 which featured a prologue by the Office of Civil Defense director John E. Davis who briefly mentions natural disasters, though the rest of film focuses on home fallout protection and the responsibilities of living in the nuclear age.

CHECK OUT PRESIDENT NIXON ON THE WALL

                              

John Davis opens the film by stating its true purpose.  "Many thousands of disasters hit the United States each year, that's more than fifty disasters per day!  But even the greatest natural disaster we could imagine would be dwarfed in loss of life and property in the event of a nuclear attack.  Our purpose in civil defense is to protect you, so you can protect yourself in time of emergency."  The protection Davis speaks of is symbolized by the fallout shelter signs dotting America cities.  The National Fallout Shelter Program began with great fanfare during the Kennedy administration, though by the late 1960's its publicity had declined significantly.  Still, shelter spaces which had been surveyed and deemed appropriately secure, received federally funded supplies in 1969 and beyond.  Fallout protection was being encouraged in new buildings as well.  This is important, the narrator explains, because while only 5% of the United States would likely fall victim to the blast and heat of a bomb, the entire landmass could be covered with fallout.  Is fallout protection a priority for most people?  "There are of course those that give up, that feel there is no hope for surviving a nuclear attack, that speak of it as an absolute end.  As the Cuban crisis showed us, however, this kind of talk is . . . just talk.  Most people will seek some sort of protection."  

"Well, this protection is here now."  Ample shelter space developed across the nation in apartment buildings, businesses, office spaces, and shopping centers, however, civil defense planners were ever weary of a shelter shortage in the suburbs, where much of the population retired each night. The solution to this problem began with a homeowners' survey.  Delivered in the mail, the survey provided a questionnaire, asking Americans to consider home construction details believed to benefit the occupants in time of nuclear emergency.  If the homes themselves were found to offer suitable fallout protection, then further reading was recommended to instruct families on how to turn sturdy corners of their basements into personal shelter spaces.  If caught unprepared, the average family could improvise a shelter out of bookshelves, heavy furniture and even dirt from the garden if necessary.  While these improvised measures of home protection would reduce the danger of fallout, In Time of Emergency emphasizes they should only be utilized as last moment solutions.  As the film explains, an average family's best chance for survival lay in finding the nearest public shelter, marked and stocked by the government across the country.  Supplied with vital water, medical, and food supplies, the shelters were also to have trained management staffs. "Even so, shelter life would be spartan.  None of the comforts of home!"

COURTESY OF ATOMIC HOME CINEMA

 THE BOOKLET AND FILM WAS ONE OR THE LAST GASP FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL DEFENSE ONLY TO BE FOLLOWED BY CARTOON LIKE SHORT FILMS OR MARIONETTES ACTING OUT DISASTERS AND THE HIDDEN MESSAGE NUCLEAR WAR. THE NEXT BATTER UP FOR THE JOB OF CIVIL DEFENSE CAME WITH "FEMA" FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, GONE WAS THE CD INSIGNIA  AND IN WAS A FEDERAL EAGLE TYPE INSIGNIA WITH A TINY CD TRIANGLE HIDDEN WITHIN THIS LOGO THIS BLOG WILL NOT GO IN TO THIS PERIOD OF NATIONAL CIVIL DEFENSE SINCE IT WAS A PAPER PUBLISHING AFFAIR NOT LOOKING FOR CIVILIANS TO JOIN BUT USING AGENCIES LIKE LOCAL FIRE DEPARTMENTS AND OTHER EMERGENCY SERVICES AND OFFERED CIVILIAN INVOLVEMENT THROUGH  HOME STUDY COURSES THAT BASICALLY NEVER GOT MORE INVOLVED THAN THAT ,GONE WERE THE NATIONAL SHELTER PLAN AND EMERGENCY SUPPLIES STOCKED AROUND THE COUNTRY THE SHELTER SYSTEM WAS BASICALLY ABANDONED IN PLACE AND LEFT TO ROT. FEMA HAD ITS SHINING MOMENT AND SHOWED THE NATION AND WORLD HOW PREPARED OUR GOVERNMENT WAS  AND  WHAT MODERN CIVIL DEFENSE LOOKED LIKE AND WHAT A NATIONAL SIZE EMERGENCY WOULD LOOK AND BE HANDLED LIKE DURING "HURRICANE KATRINA" PERHAPS THE WORST MOMENT IN CIVIL DEFENSE  AND PREPAREDNESS AND STILL THE AGENCY IS LOST TAKING ON THE ROLE OF HOMELAND SECURITY PREPARING FOR LARGE CIVILIAN DISTURBANCES HOW TO QUELL THEM AND DETAIN AMERICANS.  IN THE YEAR "2014" CIVIL DEFENSE IS NON EXISTENT IN A EMERGENCY PEOPLE ARE TOLD TO SHELTER AT HOME NOTHING MORE NOTHING LESS, ALTHOUGH A VERY BRIEF PREPAREDNESS PUSH IS RESURFACING IN NYC , SINCE WE HAD NO MORE AIR DEFENSE CENTERS IN 2001 4 JET AIRCRAFT WERFE HIJACKED TWO CRASHED INTO THE WORLD TRADE CENTERS ONE HIT THE PENTAGON ONE WAS CRASHED IN A FIELD IN SHANKSVILLE PA INROUTE TO POSSIBLY THE WHITE HOUSE,THIS WAS THE DEADLIEST EVENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY CONCERNING ATTACKS WITHIN OUR BORDERS AND BOY DID THEY CATCH US UNAWARE! OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE BELIEVES THAT TERRORISTS ARE PLANNING TO SMUGGLE A NUCLEAR WEAPON AND DETONATE IT WITHIN A LARGE CITY , NUCLEAR SEARCH TEAMS ARE A CURRENT SITE IN MANHATTAN NYC, EVERY PRESIDENT SINCE REAGAN HAS SAID " THEIR NIGHTMARE IS WHEN  OUR NATIONS ENEMIES DETONATE A NUCLEAR WEAPON WITHIN A AMERICAN CITY  AND THIS KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT BECAUSE ITS NOT IF THEY DO IT ,ITS WHEN WILL THEY DO IT. " THIS  NOT WORD FOR WORD QUOTE CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO ONE OF MANY OF PRESIDENTS BUT I BELIEVE PRESIDENT WILLIAM CLINTON HAD SAID THIS AND SO HAS EACH OF THE BUSHES AND YES OBAMA,

(1951) PROPAGANDA CHILDREN TRADING CARDS "THE RED MENACE" No.23/No.47

NYC BOMBED OUT AT 23rd and BROADWAY WITH THE GRIM REAPER HOVERING ABOVE NYC. THESE CARDS  DONE AFTER THE SOVIETS TESTED JOE 1 THEIR FIRST ATOMIC WEAPON SO ACROSS AMERICA THE RED SCARE WAS ON THE ROSENBERG ESPIONAGE TRIAL AND DEATH SENTENCE  THE RED HUNT AND BLACKLISTING OF MANY OF HOLLYWOODS STARS A LOT OF PERCIEVED SOVIET THREATS WERE IMAGINED NON STOP. COMMUNISM WAS BEHIND EVERY THREAT AGAINST AMERICA AND THE BEST WAY WAS TO ENSURE THIS WAS TAKEN CARE OF CARDS LIKE THE"RED MENACE" WERE MADE SO KIDS COULD SEE AND READ ABOUT THESE ENEMIES THAT WOULD ATTACK US AND KILL US FOR NO REASON AND DROP ATOMIC BOMBS ON OUR COUNTRY. THE SAME KIDS WHO GOT THE PATRIOTIC MESSAGE WERE MOST LIKELY THE FIRST TO ENLIST TO FIGHT COMMUNISM IN VIETNAM .

Red Menace

Bowman Gum Inc. released their Red Menace card set in 1951. There are 48 cards in the set, each measuring 2-1/2" by 3-1/8". 

The meaning behind Bowman's grim & gritty Red Menace card set is clear: Communists are lurking just around the corner, ready to spread death and destruction and totalitarianism if they ever get the chance. This is heavy stuff, but for kids of the immediate postwar period, it was just part & parcel of the time. 

The Red Menace cards depict various horrific and terrible scenes: mushroom clouds over bombed-out cities, not to mention giant hovering wraiths; citizens being harassed or even shot by grim-faced military officers; homes being searched for anti-Communist propaganda; and more. The obviously jingoistic and sensationalist images (not to mention the text on the backs of the cards!) was heavy stuff, but it wasn't that much worse than much Cold War propaganda being fed to Americans - even kids - during the 1950's. And, who's to say it wasn't accurate: after all, Communist takeovers around the world were indeed brutal. 

The card fronts offer a piece of color artwork surrounded by a white border. The card backs (in dark blue and red ink against a white background, no less) give the words CHILDREN'S CRUSADE AGAINST COMMUNISM along the top, followed by the card number and title, then a block of (lurid) text. At the bottom was the phrase FIGHT THE RED MENACE between two stars, and the Bowman copyright matter at the bottom. 

Additional cards in the set offered American generals and even personages such as Chairman Mao in portraits; but most of the photos were downright pandering in their depiction of violence

1960 CIVIL DEFENSE CONELRAD TELEVISION COMMERCIAL

CONELRAD

1950s CONELRAD GUARDING NORTH AMERICA EARLY TELEVISION COMMERCIAL

(1951) NYS DECLARES WAR AND TELLS HER CITIZENS TO BRACE FOR THE COMING ATOMIC ATTACK!

NEW YORK STATE EMERGENCY DEFENSE ACT

NYC BEING NUKED ONCE AGAIN, WHY DOESN'T ALBANY THE STATES CAPITAL USED? I AM SURE NYC RESIDENTS WOULD LIKE TO SEE THAT PICTURE. ThE EMERGENCY DEFENSE ACT Mentions AND REFERS TO NYC QUITE A BIT.

THE FOLLOWING WAS DRAFTED AND PASSED BY NEW YORK STATE IN 1951.THIS LEGISLATION NEVER MENTIONS AN ENEMY, ALTHOUGH KOREA IS DISCUSSED AND THE VARIOUS ACTS OF AGGRESSION BY COMMUNISTS IN EUROPE AND ASIA, FUNNY THEY SAY THE WORD ENEMY BUT NEVER MENTION ONE, SO I WILL SAY IT......THE SOVIET UNION! JOSEPH "IRON JOE" STALIN AND HIS CRONIES IN THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE THE SOVIET UNION GOING TIT FOR TAT WITH THE UNITED STATES, THIS SCARED NYS AND NYC (which is mentioned as part of the coming attack possibly to throw off the soviet union into thinking Albany is not the capital so don't point any bombers our way send them to nyc,,,joking)SO BADLY THEY DREW UP THIS LEGISLATION AND PASSED IT. NYS WAS PROBABLY THE MOST CIVIL DEFENSE DEVOUT WHEN GOV. ROCKEFELLER WAS IN OFFICE AS WELL AS NYC MAYOR LAGUARDIA WHO WAS KNOWN TO JUMP ON A FIRE ENGINE OR TWO ON ITS WAY TO A FIRE. THIS EMERGENCY ACT WAS A VERY DETAILED PIECE OF WORK AND BESIDE SHOWING HOW SCARED THEY OF BEING ATTACKED THEY HATED COMMUNIST'S THAT WALKED QUIETLY AMONG US AND WANTED EACH AND EVERY ONE IDENTIFIED AND DEALT WITH. THE WHOLE COUNTRY WAS BLACKLISTING ANY SUSPECTED COMMIE MANY ARTISTS,ACTORS,WRITERS WERE RUINED BY THIS BUT THAT WAS THE COLD WAR.

THIS WHOLE NEW YORK STATE DEFENSE EMERGENCY ACT OF 1951 IS LONG BUT VERY INTERESTING TO BE ABLE TO SEE INTO THE WHAT PEOPLE WERE THINKING AFTER THE SOVIETS DETONATED A ATOMIC WEAPON  AND ALSO BEING ABLE TO PUT A BEEPING SATELLITE CALLED SPUTNICK INTO ORBIT RIGHT OVER AMERICA'S HEADS!!A FEW YEARS AFTER MOST OF THEIR COUNTRY WAS DESTROYED BY THE NAZIS AND MOST OF THE COUNTRYS ESSENTIAL MATERIAL FOR BUILDING DEPLETED.BUT AMERICA SAW THE MUSHROOM CLOUD ON TINY TV SCREENS OR NEWS REELS BEFORE MOVIES. I NEVER KNEW WHAT THIS LEGISLATION WAS BUT I SAW IT ON SIGNS AROUND AIRPORTS AND OLD DEFENSE PLANTS I EXPLORED. "NO TRESPASSING ALLOWED BY ORDER OF THE NYS EMERGENCY DEFENSE ACT" THESE SIGNS AND OTHERS ARE A RARE FIND IN THE 21st CENTURY

I HAVE INCLUDED ONLY THE FIRST PART OF THIS LEGISLATION SINCE THE SIZE OF IT IS QUITE LARGE IT CAN BE READ IN ITS ENTIRETY AT -law.onecle.com JUST TYPE IN THE TITLE OF THE NYS DEFENSE ACT.

              CHAPTER 784/51
                    NEW YORK STATE DEFENSE EMERGENCY ACT
 
  Article I. Short title; definitions.
        I-A. Succession to office of governor.
         II. State defense council.
        III. Civil defense.
       II-A. Shelter protection.
         IV. Powers of agencies.
          V. Power of dispensation from certain limitations of law.
         VI. Closing or restricting use of highways; posting of property.
        VII. Banking.
      VII-A. Insurance.
       VIII. Violations and penalties; peace officers.
         IX. Miscellaneous provisions; construction and duration of act.
                                   ARTICLE 1
                          Short Title; Definitions
 
  Section 1.   Short title.
          2.   Declaration of purpose and findings.
          2-a. Further declaration of purpose and findings relating to the
                 protection  of  the people in the event of nuclear attack
                 and recovery and rehabilitation after attack.
          3.   Definitions.
    Section 1. Short title. This act shall be known and may be  cited  and
  referred to as the "New York state defense emergency act."
    § 2. Declaration of purpose and findings. The legislature hereby finds
  that  there exists a serious danger that this state will be subjected to
  enemy attack, including attack by atomic  bombs  or  other  radiological
  weapons.
    On  December  sixteenth,  nineteen hundred fifty, because of the grave
  threat to national security, the president of the United States declared
  a state of national emergency, summoning all state and local leaders and
  officials to  cooperate  fully  with  the  military  and  civil  defense
  agencies of the United States.
    The  federal  civil  defense  act  of nineteen hundred fifty passed by
  congress on January second, nineteen hundred fifty-one and signed by the
  president on January twelfth, nineteen hundred fifty-one, as amended  by
  public  law eighty-five-six hundred six declares it to be the policy and
  intent of the congress that the responsibility for civil  defense  shall
  be  vested  jointly  in  the federal government and the states and their
  political subdivisions.
    Nations with communist governments presently dominate one-third of the
  population of the world. Some of these nations have aided  and  assisted
  the  nations  which  have  perpetrated  aggression  in  Korea.  Acts  of
  communist aggression have occurred in other parts of Asia and in Europe.
    These  communist  governments  have  conducted  incessant   propaganda
  attacks   upon   the   United   States  and  have  engaged  in  repeated
  demonstrations of hostility. The president  of  the  United  States  has
  stated  that  in  one  of  these  nations  there  has occurred an atomic
  explosion. Our military leaders have  informed  us  that  these  nations
  possess  bombers  capable  of  flying an atomic bomb to any point in the
  state of New York.
    The national security resources board has in its plan  for  organizing
  civil  defense  stated  that an atomic bomb exploded in a large city can
  destroy  virtually  all  property  and  lives   within   a   radius   of
  three-fourths  of  a  mile  from  the point of explosion and cause great
  damage at even greater distance. It is  estimated  that  a  single  such

  explosion  would kill nearly eighty thousand persons and severely injure
  many more.
    In view of the professed determination of the government of the United
  States  to  resist  further  communist  aggression,  and  because of the
  likelihood of resort to atomic and radiological weapons in the event  of
  further conflict between this nation and communist aggressors, the peril
  to  the  people of this state is sufficiently great that the precautions
  embodied in this act must be taken.
    The present inadequate  size  of  our  armed  forces,  their  lack  of
  equipment,  critical shortages in essential goods and certain production
  facilities make necessary intensified mobilization to the end  that  the
  defense  of  the  United States be strengthened as speedily as possible.
  Under all of the circumstances it is obvious that the  enormity  of  the
  defense  effort which must be made by the United States will cause great
  dislocation to its normal economy. One of the further purposes  of  this
  act  is  to minimize the hardship resulting from these dislocations, and
  to permit the fullest participation by the people of this state  in  the
  defense effort.
    It  is  the  purpose  of  this  legislation  to meet these dangers and
  problems with the least possible interference with the existing division
  of the powers of the government and the least possible  infringement  of
  the  liberties of the people, including the freedom of speech, press and
  assembly.
    § 2-a. Further declaration of purpose and  findings  relating  to  the
  protection of the people in the event of nuclear attack and recovery and
  rehabilitation  after  attack. The legislature hereby finds and declares
  that the aggressive forces of communism are employing threats of nuclear
  attack to achieve their plan and purpose  of  world  domination  and  to
  confound  the  aspirations of free people everywhere. It is increasingly
  apparent that effective fallout protection as  an  integral  part  of  a
  strong  civil  defense is essential to the nation's military defense, to
  our negotiating strength, to the deterrence of nuclear aggression and to
  our resistance to nuclear blackmail. In the  event  of  attack,  fallout
  protection  and  a  comprehensive civil defense program are essential to
  minimize injury and loss of life and to make possible  the  recovery  of
  the  people,  the  restoration and rehabilitation of the state's economy
  and the preservation of the spiritual, cultural and  political  heritage
  of our nation.
    The  entire  population  of the state is now exposed and vulnerable to
  death or disability from any  nuclear  attack  that  might  be  launched
  against us. While the radioactive fallout which follows the explosion of
  nuclear  weapons  would  create  the most widespread danger faced by our
  population in the event of a nuclear attack, the  means  for  protecting
  the state's population from such fallout are known and are feasible.
    In  furtherance  of the national goal declared by the president of the
  United States to reach for fallout  protection  for  every  American  as
  rapidly as possible and as an integral part of the state's comprehensive
  civil  defense  program,  a  major objective of the state is to have for
  each person in the state  of  New  York  fallout  protection  ready  and
  adequate   for   survival,   which   will  make  possible  recovery  and
  rehabilitation in the event of nuclear attack.
    This objective can be achieved only  by  a  cooperative  effort  which
  mobilizes the resources of individuals, business, labor, agriculture and
  other  private  groups and government at every level--federal, state and
  local. All levels of government must recognize and accept  their  mutual
  obligations  to  plan, encourage and assist the orderly establishment of
  adequate fallout shelters, readily accessible to all the people, but the
  effectiveness of the  joint  effort,  public  and  private,  to  protect

  against  the  dangers  of nuclear attack will depend in large measure on
  the success and vigor with which local communities and families organize
  for their survival.
    The state must give leadership and direction in this important task of
  establishing a strong civil defense and achieving fallout protection for
  each  person in the state. To this end the legislature has established a
  broad coordinated civil defense program.
    A primary consideration in this program for survival and  recovery  of
  our  state  following a nuclear attack is the necessity for preservation
  of our young people. Therefore, as an essential part of the  coordinated
  civil  defense  effort  in each community, the authorities of public and
  private  schools,  colleges  and  universities  should  provide  fallout
  protection in or near their buildings and the state should encourage and
  assist  financially  through  state civil defense aid the development of
  such fallout protection. The state, by fostering fallout  protection  at
  the  schools,  colleges  and  universities scattered over the length and
  breadth of the state in every community, will not only aid in  providing
  protection  for  our  young  people  but  will  also  thereby  provide a
  direction and an awareness of the need for public and private action  in
  support of the civil defense effort.
    In addition, as a part of this program, the state should
    --encourage and assist private individuals to provide adequate shelter
  protection for their families, either singly or in groups;
    --encourage   and   foster   the   construction  of  shelters  in  all
  publicly-assisted housing;
    --encourage and assist landlords  and  employers  to  provide  shelter
  protection for their tenants and employees;
    --encourage   local   offlcials  and  community  leaders,  within  the
  framework of a coordinated civil defense plan, to take positive steps to
  promote and assist the development of shelter protection by the citizens
  individually and collectively in each locality; and
    --construct and install shelters on state-owned  property  to  provide
  protection for state workers and other occupants.
    Furthermore, the state must cooperatively supplement the program being
  provided  and  developed  by  the  federal government and the state must
  share with the federal government the responsibility  of  insuring  that
  all  protective  measures  adopted  reflect  the  latest  techniques and
  developments available.
    At all times the objectives and planning of civil  defense  should  be
  directed  to  the  survival  not  only of the people of the state but of
  their way of life. Intensive efforts must be made to establish the means
  and methods which will, in the event of nuclear  attack,  make  possible
  the  recovery  of  the people and the rehabilitation of the economic and
  social life of the state following any such attack.
    § 3. Definitions. As used in this act the following terms  shall  mean
  and include:
    1.  "Agency."  An  office,  department,  division,  bureau,  board  or
  commission of the state or of a political subdivision thereof, including
  volunteer agencies.
    2. "Attack." Any attack, actual or imminent, or series of  attacks  by
  an  enemy  or  a foreign nation upon the United States causing, or which
  may cause, substantial damage or injury to civilian property or  persons
  in  the  United States in any manner by sabotage or by the use of bombs,
  shellfire,  or  nuclear,  radiological,  chemical,  bacteriological,  or
  biological means or other weapons or processes.
    3.  "City  director."  The  director  of  civil defense heading a city
  office.

    4. "City office." A city office of civil  defense  or  a  consolidated
  city office of civil defense.
    5.  "Civil  defense."  All  those  activities and measures designed or
  undertaken (l) to minimize the  effects  upon  the  civilian  population
  caused  or  which  would  be  caused  by an attack, (2) to deal with the
  immediate emergency conditions  which  would  be  created  by  any  such
  attack,  and  (3)  to  effectuate emergency repairs to, or the emergency
  restoration of, vital utilities and facilities destroyed or  damaged  by
  any  such  attack. Such term shall include, but shall not be limited to,
  (A)  measures  to  be  taken  in  preparation  for  anticipated   attack
  (including  the  establishment of appropriate organizations, operational
  plans, and the supporting agreements; the recruitment  and  training  of
  personnel;  the  conduct of research; the procurement and stockpiling of
  materials necessary to the survival, recovery and rehabilitation of  the
  state and of its inhabitants; the provision of suitable warning systems;
  the  construction  or  preparation  of  shelters  and  control  centers;
  provisions for the continuity of state and local governments; and,  when
  appropriate,  the  non-military  evacuation  of  civil  population); (B)
  measures to be taken during attack (including the enforcement of passive
  defense regulations prescribed by duly  established  military  or  civil
  authorities;  the  movement  of  personnel  to  shelters; the control of
  traffic and panic; and  the  control  and  use  of  lighting  and  civil
  communications);   and   (C)  measures  to  be  taken  following  attack
  (including but not limited to  activities  for  fire  fighting;  rescue,
  emergency  medical,  health  and  sanitation  services;  monitoring  for
  radiation and other specific hazards of special weapons; decontamination
  procedures; unexploded bomb reconnaissance; essential debris  clearance;
  emergency  welfare  measures;  immediately essential emergency repair or
  restoration of damaged vital facilities; the implementation of the means
  and methods for the recovery and rehabilitation of the state;  effective
  utilization  of  all  persons  and materials; care and shelter for those
  made homeless; distribution of stockpiled food, water, medical supplies,
  machinery and other equipment; the preservation of  raw  materials;  the
  restoration    of   essential   community   services,   industrial   and
  manufacturing capacity, and commercial and financial activities  in  the
  state; and the resumption of educational programs).
    6.  "Civil  defense forces." Agencies, public officers, employees, and
  enrolled   civil   defense   volunteers,   all   having    duties    and
  responsibilities  under or pursuant to this act in connection with civil
  defense.
    7. "Commission." The state civil defense commission created by article
  three of this act.
    8. "Communication facility" or "communication device" shall  not  mean
  or include a newspaper.
    9.  "Council."  The  New York state defense council created by article
  two of this act.
    10. "County director." The director of civil defense heading a  county
  office.
    11.   "County   office."  A  county  office  of  civil  defense  or  a
  consolidated county office of civil defense.
    l2. "Defense effort." The preparation of the United States  and  other
  nations  cooperating  with  it  for  defense  against attack and for the
  conduct of war.
    l3. "Defense emergency." The period beginning with the effective  date
  of this act and ending upon the termination of the national emergency as
  proclaimed  by the president of the United States on December sixteenth,
  nineteen hundred fifty.

    14. "Drill." Any duly authorized activity of the state  civil  defense
  commission  or  a local office of civil defense, or subdivision, service
  or unit thereof, with  or  without  the  participation  of  the  general
  public,  held  in  training  or  preparation  for  enemy  attack  or for
  rehabilitation  and  recovery  procedures  following an attack. Drill is
  synonymous with authorized  test,  training,  or  training  or  practice
  exercise. Drill includes assistance by civil defense forces in combating
  natural  or  peacetime  disasters upon the direction of a public officer
  authorized by law to call upon a civil defense director  for  assistance
  in protecting human life or property.
    15. "Facilities." Buildings, shelters, utilities, and land.
    16.  "Fallout  shelter." A building, structure or other real property,
  or an area or portion thereof, so constructed, altered or improved as to
  provide protection against harmful radiation resulting from  radioactive
  fallout  in  accordance  with  the  plan,  regulations  or orders of the
  commission  pertaining  thereto,  including  such   plumbing,   heating,
  electrical,  ventilating,  conditioning,  filtrating  and  refrigerating
  equipment and other mechanical additions or installations,  if  any,  as
  may be an integral part thereof.
    17. "Law." A general or special statute, law, city or village charter,
  local  law,  ordinance,  resolution,  rule, regulation, order or rule of
  common law.
    18. "Local director." A county director or a city director.
    19. "Local office." A county office or a city office.
    20. "Materials." Raw  materials,  food,  water,  supplies,  medicines,
  machinery,  equipment,  component  parts  and  technical information and
  processes necessary for civil defense.
    21.  "Municipal  agency."  An  agency  of  a   political   subdivision
  responsible  for  police, fire, sanitation, public works, street, sewer,
  water,  health,  emergency  or  other  services  involving  duties   and
  responsibilities in connection with civil defense.
    22.  "Political  subdivision."  A  county, town, city, village, school
  district or other  district,  district  corporation  or  public  benefit
  corporation.
    23.  "Shelter."  A  building,  structure or other real property, or an
  area or portion thereof, which is to  be  used  for  the  protection  of
  persons  during  or  after an attack, including such services, utilities
  and equipment, if any, as may be an integral part thereof.
    24. "State director." The New York state director of civil defense.
    25. "Volunteer agencies." Agencies  sponsored  or  authorized  by  the
  commission  or local offices of civil defense the personnel of which are
  in major part selected from  among  volunteer  persons  serving  without
  compensation   and   may  include  wardens,  shelter  captains,  warning
  services, auxiliary police, auxiliary firemen, bomb squads, radiological
  units and personnel, rescue squads, emergency medical  units  and  other
  medical   forces,   nurses'   aides,   repair   crews,   monitoring  and
  decontamination squads, demolition crews and all  other  similar  forces
  and services having duties and responsibilities in connection with civil
  defense.
                                  ARTICLE 1-A
    §  5.  Persons  eligible  to  succeed  governor. If, as a result of an
  attack or a natural  or  peacetime  disaster,  the  office  of  governor
  becomes  vacant  and  each  of  the  lieutenant  governor, the temporary
  president of the senate and the speaker of the  assembly  is  unable  to
  discharge  the  powers and duties of the office of governor or is absent
  from the state, then the officer of the state  who  is  (a)  highest  in
  order  of the following list, (b) not otherwise unable to discharge such
  powers and duties, and (c) not absent  from  the  state,  shall  act  as

  governor:        attorney    general,   comptroller,   commissioner   of
  transportation,  commissioner  of  health,  commissioner  of   commerce,
  industrial  commissioner,  chairman  of  the  public service commission,
  secertary of state.
    §  6. An individual who is acting as governor under this article shall
  continue to do so until the vacancy in the office of governor  shall  be
  filled  by  election or by the qualification of the lieutenant governor,
  the temporary president of the senate or the speaker  of  the  assembly.
  The  removal  of  a disability or the termination of an absence from the
  state of an officer higher on the list contained in section one of  this
  article  shall  not  terminate  the service in the office of governor of
  such individual who is acting as governor.
                                  
                       
 

NEW YORK FEMA TARGET LISTING 1990 FROM NUCLEAR WAR SURVIVAL SKILLS- C. KEARNY

THIS IS FROM THE BIBLE OF NUCLEAR WAR SURVIVAL AND WHAT TO EXPECT INFORMATION THERE IS NO BETTER, HIS BOOK "NUCLEAR WAR SURVIVAL SKILLS" SHOULD BE IN EVERY LIBRARY OF ANYONE REMOTELY INTERESTED IN CIVIL DEFENSE TO NUCLEAR WAR YOU CAN EVEN GET THE BOOK AS A APP ON THE IPHONE!
Nuclear Threats in
New York The purpose of this page (in a post-nuclear situation) will be to map out any targets in the state that were actually nuked.
At the bottom of this page is the 1990 FEMA nuclear target map for New York. It was just a conceptual map about the nuclear threat. Even an all-out nuclear war - did not by any means mean that every site would be hit. For some states VERY FEW and POSSIBLY / PROBABLY NONE of the sites will be hit but others may have some very significant targets. Because circumstances have changed since 1990 some of the targets in many of the maps should be removed and possibly there are others that should be added.
Besides nuclear weapons there can be various radiological and other weapon hazards within your state and radiological threats may come from outside your state.
1. Nuclear power plants (think Chernoybl) for one. When the power, technology and personnel may not be available to maintain the plants - there is no telling what may happen to / with them.

2. The same applies to the storage of used nuclear fuel which presently has to be kept cooled and maintained. 3. Then there might somewhere be a stockpile of nuclear weapons. 4. Storage concerns should not be with just nuclear weapons but also with biological and chemical weapons. 5. There may just be hazardous stores of industrial chemicals that are no longer being maintained and protected. 6. There can be armories and warehouses of weapons and explosives that could fall into dangerous hands. 7. Whatever may be added to this list - needs to be identified and dealt with.

The following is a conceptual map of how a nuclear event one place in the US can affect other localities. This map is based upon past prevailing wind patterns but in the expected catastrophic events they may be much different from this.

Fallout Pattern Map for US (FEMA 212/September 1990)
For the same reasons as fallout from power plants located elsewhere - fallout can come to your state from nuclear targets elsewhere. For this reason here is a map of all the targets that FEMA visualized in the US in 1990. In reality we should be showing nuclear targets throughout the world - because nuclear fallout can go anywhere in the world.

Nuclear Weapon Target Map for US (FEMA /September 1990)
And we haven't even mentioned EMP. Weapons exploded at high altitude for the sole purpose of creating EMP could turn off the lights in America. Permanently. Or in any case it could take a very long time to turn them back on - if you can imagine life without electricity.

EMP - Turning off the lights in America
Nuclear Weapon Target Map for New York (FEMA-196/September 1990)
Nuclear Power in New York (FEMA-196/September 1990)

---

(1963) DEPT. OF DEFENSE PUBLIC SHELTER LIVING - THE STORY OF SHELTER 104

SHELTER No.104

LIFE IN A COMMUNITY SHELTER DURING A ATOMIC ATTACK

A GREAT STORY ALMOST MADE FOR TELEVISION SHOWING THE POSSIBILITY THAT FALLOUT SHELTERS IN YOUR COMMUNITY AT ONE TIME WERE MAINTAINED AND READY TO OCCUPY. I CAN NOT IMAGINE THE LOCAL SHELTER NEARBY THAT WAS IN THE BANK VAULT HAD A GENERATOR AND A SUPPLY OF CANNED FOOD TO SUPPLEMENT THE CIVIL DEFENSE BISCUIT AND WATER DIET. THE STORY IS A GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA PIECE USING A YOUNG HIGH SCHOOL GIRL THAT KEEPS A JOURNAL AND ACTS AS THE SHELTERS DOCTOR. THE CAST OF CHARACTERS INCLUDES A TOKEN AFRICAN AMERICAN AND REALLY TRIES TO COME ACROSS AS HIP EVEN DOWN TO THE END WHERE THE DRUNK DRIFTER WHO IS A FOLK STAR PLAYS A HOMEMADE GUITAR AND ENTERTAINS THE SHELTER WITH A FOLK SONG ON THEIR SEVENTH DAY IN CAPTIVITY.THE SHELTER RESIDENTS ENDURE THE NEWS OF ENEMY ATOMIC BOMBS VAPORIZING THE LOCAL TOWN THAT SUPPLIED POWER AND THE TOWN WHERE THE YOUNG GIRLS FATHER A DOCTOR WORKED AT THE HOSPITAL THERE.WHILE THE BOMBS ARE DROPPING THE SHELTER RESIDENTS DRINK ALOT OF ORANGE DRINK AND WHEN NEWS COMES FROM THE GOVERNMENT IT COMES FROM THE STATE GOVENOR WHO GETS CUT OFF BEFORE HE CAN SAY ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE COUNTRY HAS BEEN ATTACKED WITH ATOMIC WEAPONS. ITS A GREAT PROPAGANDA PIECE AND A HALF HOUR IN LENGTH, KICK BACK AND ENJOY IT!

Public Shelter Living begins with shelter manager Bob and his assistant, a chirpy blonde, counting people coming into a public Fallout Shelter to avoid the off-camera atomic attack. The thirty-minute black and white movie concerns the challenges of living in a shelter "for as long as we have to." At one point Shelter Manager Bob tells everyone "That it won't be any picnic in here. There's going to be a certain amount of discomfort for all of us." He then urges his captive audience to "sit down, remain calm and continue filling out those forms that were handed to you."

Beatnik malcontent "Mr. McCann" is having none of it. The primary lesson of the film seems to be targeted at potential shelter managers: Don't let stoned beatniks wander into your shelter after the big one drops. You might live to regret it! 

(1957/1962) SECRET FALLOUT SHELTER FOUND IN ARCH OF BROOKLYN BRIDGE STOCKED FOR WAR

Inside the Brooklyn Bridge, a Whiff of the Cold War

For decades it waited in secret inside the masonry foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a damp, dirty and darkened vault near the East River shoreline of Lower Manhattan: a stockpile of provisions that would allow for basic survival if New York City were devastated by a nuclear attack.

Enlarge This Image

John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Metal water drums that could be converted to commodes, found stockpiled last week at the Brooklyn Bridge

John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Watertight canisters of crackers.

Enlarge This Image

John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Judith E. Bergtraum, first deputy commissioner of the Department of Transportation, examines a room containing cold war artifacts.

City workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the cold-war-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers — an estimated 352,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.
To step inside the vault — a dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes — is to be vividly reminded of the anxieties that dominated American life during the military rivalry with the Soviet Union, an era when air-raid sirens and fallout shelters were standard elements of the grade-school curriculum.
Several historians said yesterday that the find was exceptional, in part because many of the cardboard boxes of supplies were ink-stamped with two especially significant years in cold-war history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.
"Civil defense agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country during the 1950's and stocking them with supplies of food and water and whatnot," said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian atYale and a pre-eminent scholar of the cold war.
"Most of those have been dismantled; the crackers got moldy a very long time ago. It's kind of unusual to find one fully intact — one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don't know of a recent example of that."
The Department of Transportation, which controls the bridge, has moved to secure the site while figuring out to do with the trove of supplies.
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been contacted to handle the drugs, which include bottles of Dextran, used to treat or prevent shock.
City workers commonly find coins or bottles when repaving streets, fixing water mains or probing sewer drains, said the transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall. "We find stuff all the time, but what's sort of eerie about this is that this is a bridge that thousands of people go over each day," she said. "They walk over it, cars go over it, and this stuff was just sitting there."
The room is within one of the arched masonry structures under the main entrance ramp to the bridge, not far from the Manhattan anchorage. Three city officials gave a brief tour of the room yesterday — taking care to step gingerly over broken glass and fallen wooden boards — on the condition that the precise location not be disclosed, for security reasons.
The most numerous items are the boxes of Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Crackers. Printed in block letters, on each canister, was information about the number of pounds (6.75), the number of crackers per pound (62) and the minimum number of crackers per can (419).
Joseph M. Vaccaro, a carpentry supervisor at the Transportation Department, estimated that there were 140 boxes of crackers — each with six cans, for a total of some 352,000 crackers.
The officials would not open any of the supplies because of safety concerns over germs, but Mr. Vaccaro said that one of the canisters had broken open, and inside it, workers found the crackers intact in wax-paper wrapping.
Nearby were several dozen boxes with sealed bottles of Dextran, made by Wyeth Laboratories in Philadelphia. More mysterious were about 50 metal drums, made by United States Steel in Camden, N.J. According to the label, each was intended to hold 17.5 gallons and to be converted, if necessary, for "reuse as a commode." They are now empty.
For the officials who gave the tour, the discovery set off some strong memories. Judith E. Bergtraum, the department's first deputy commissioner, recalled air-raid drills — "first it was under the desk and then it was in the hall" — at Public School 165 in Queens. Russell Holcomb, a deputy chief bridge engineer, remembered watching Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the United Nations in 1960 on television.
Several of the boxes in the room have labels from the Office of Civil Defense, a unit of the Pentagon that coordinated domestic preparedness in the early 1960's. State and local governments often appointed their own civil-defense coordinators, said Graham T. Allison, a former assistant secretary of defense who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Dr. Allison acknowledged that fallout shelters would probably have been ineffective in the event of nuclear war but that the precautions were comforting.
"At least people would think they were doing something, even if it didn't have any effect," he said.
In 1950, the city's Office of Civil Defense, the predecessor to today's Office of Emergency Management, was formed to prepare for a possible atomic attack. In 1951, during the Korean War, floodlights and barbed-wire barriers were set up on and around the city's bridges, and bridge operators were organized into defense batteries, as part of an overall civil-defense strategy aimed at deterring sabotage.
Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who served from 1954 to 1965, appointed several civil-defense advisers. In 1959, a federal report concluded that two hydrogen bombs dropped near the Brooklyn Bridge would kill at least 6.1 million people.

Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian at Columbia University and a former president of the New-York Historical Society, said he was curious about how the stockpile got there. "Is this a secret cache of supplies the city was trying to put together, without warning the community of a serious threat?" he asked.
"What surprises me," he added, "is that we have all these little nooks — that in this huge city with people crawling everywhere, we can find rooms still filled with stuff, 50 years after the fact."

(1961) AMERICAN HISTORY OF 1960 NUCLEAR ATTACK PLANNING IN THE KENNEDY WHITE HOUSE AND BEYOND

MY FIRST READ OF THE FIRST INSTALLMENT OF Mr ELLSBERGS "THE AMERICAN DOOMSDAY MACHINE" WAS CHILLING I INSTANTLY KNEW I HAD TO SHARE THIS VERY SECRETIVE LOOK INTO THE COLDWAR NUCLEAR BATTLE PLAN, AND THE KNOWLEDGE OUR LEADERS HAD ON THE DEATHS WORLDWIDE FROM OUR FIGHT WITH THE SOVIET UNION. WOULD IT REALLY BE WORTH IT?
THIS AMERICAN HISTORY IS PART OF EVERYTHING THAT MAKES THIS BLOG AND BRINGS IT ALL IN TO PERSPECTIVE. 

This is the first installment of my personal memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.” This online book, being published on Truthdig and other sites, will recount highlights of my six years of research and consulting for the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises. It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy, which followed the intervening 11 years of my preoccupation with the Vietnam War. Subsequent installments will appear on Truthdig and here.]
 

U.S. Nuclear War Planning for a Hundred  Holocausts

 

by Ellsberg.Net on September 13, 2009

[This is the first installment of my personal memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.” This online book, being published on Truthdig and other sites, will recount highlights of my six years of research and consulting for the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises. It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy, which followed the intervening 11 years of my preoccupation with the Vietnam War. Subsequent installments will appear on Truthdig and here.]

One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth, not—so far as I knew then—all humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere.

What I was handed, in a White House office, was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive”; under that, “For the President’s Eyes Only.”

The “Eyes Only” designation meant that, in principle, it was to be seen and read only by the person to whom it was explicitly addressed, in this case the president. In practice this usually meant that it would be seen by one or more secretaries and assistants as well: a handful of people, sometimes somewhat more, instead of the scores to hundreds who would normally see copies of a “Top Secret—Sensitive” document.

Later, working in the Pentagon as the special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense, I often found myself reading copies of cables and memos marked “Eyes Only” for someone, though I was not that addressee, nor for that matter was my boss. And already by the time I read this one, as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, it was routine for me to read “Top Secret” documents. But I had never before seen one marked “For the President’s Eyes Only,” and I never did again.

The deputy assistant to the president for national security, my friend and colleague Bob Komer, showed it to me. A cover sheet identified it as the answer to a question President John F. Kennedy had addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a week earlier. Komer showed it to me because I had drafted the question, which Komer had sent in the president’s name.
The question to the JCS was: “If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”
Their answer was in the form of a graph (see representation below). The vertical axis was the number of deaths, in millions. The horizontal axis was time, indicated in months. The graph was a straight line, starting at time zero on the horizontal—on the vertical axis, the number of immediate deaths expected within hours of our attack—and slanting upward to a maximum at six months, an arbitrary cutoff for the deaths that would accumulate over time from initial injuries and from fallout radiation.
The lowest number, at the left of the graph, was 275 million deaths. The number at the right-hand side, at six months, was 325 million.

That same morning, with Komer’s approval, I drafted another question to be sent to the Joint Chiefs over the president’s signature, asking for a total breakdown of global deaths from our own attacks, to include not only the whole Sino-Soviet bloc but all other countries that would be affected by fallout. Again their answer was prompt. Komer showed it to me about a week later, this time in the form of a table with explanatory footnotes.
In sum, 100 million more deaths, roughly, were predicted in East Europe. There might be an additional 100 million from fallout in West Europe, depending on which way the wind blew (a matter, largely, of the season). Regardless of season, still another 100 million deaths, at least, were predicted from fallout in the mostly neutral countries adjacent to the Soviet bloc or China: Finland, Austria, Afghanistan, India, Japan and others. Finland, for example, would be wiped out by fallout from U.S. ground-burst explosions on the Soviet submarine pens at Leningrad. (The total number of “casualties”—injured as well as killed—had not been requested and was not estimated; nor were casualties from any Soviet retaliatory strikes.)
The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

*  *  *

I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to.
But I knew what it dealt with was all too real. I had seen some of the smaller bombs myself, H-bombs with an explosive yield of 1.1 megatons each—equivalent to 1.1 million tons of high explosive, each bomb half the total explosive power of all the bombs of World War II combined. I saw them slung under single-pilot F-100 fighter-bombers on alert at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, ready to take off on 10 minutes’ notice. On one occasion I had laid my hand on one of these, not yet loaded on a plane. On a cool day, the smooth metallic surface of the bomb was warm from the radiation within: a bodylike warmth.
I was in Okinawa in the fall of 1959 as part of a task force organized by the Office of Naval Research, which was there to study and improve nuclear command and control for the commander in chief of the Pacific Command (CINCPAC), Adm. Harry D. Felt. I was on loan from the RAND Corp., which I had joined as a full-time employee in June 1959 after a previous summer there as a consultant. This particular study took us to every command post in the Pacific that year and the next—from Oahu to Guam, Tokyo, Taiwan and the command ship of the Seventh Fleet—with license from Adm. Felt to “talk to anyone, see anything” in the field of nuclear command and control.
At Kadena, the pilots weren’t in the planes on alert or in the hut on the alert strip; they were allowed to be elsewhere, at the post exchange or in their quarters, because each was accompanied at all times by his individual jeep and driver to return him in minutes to the strip when an alert was sounded. They practiced the alert at least once a day. The officer in charge told our research group that we could choose the time for that day’s rehearsal. When our leader said “OK, now,” the klaxons sounded all over the area and jeeps appeared almost instantly on all the roads leading to the strip, rushing around curves, pilots leaping out as they reached the strip and scrambling into the cockpits, still tightening their helmets and gear. Engines started in 10 planes, almost simultaneously. Ten minutes.
These were tactical fighter-bombers, with limited range. There were more than a thousand of them, armed with H-bombs, in range of Russia and China on strips like this or on aircraft carriers surrounding the Sino-Soviet bloc (as we still thought of it in 1961, though China and the Soviets had actually split apart a couple of years before that). Each of them could devastate a large city with one bomb. For a larger metropolitan area, it might take two. Yet the Strategic Air Command (SAC), which did not command these planes (they were under the control of theater commanders), regarded these tactical theater forces as so vulnerable, unreliable and insignificant as a factor in all-out nuclear war that SAC planners had not even included them in their calculations of the outcome of attacks in a general war until that year.
Before 1961, planners at SAC headquarters took into consideration only attacks by the heavy bombers, intermediate-range ballistic missiles and ICBMs commanded by SAC, along with Polaris submarine-launched missiles. In the bomb bays of the SAC planes were thermonuclear bombs much larger than those I saw in Okinawa. Many were from five to 20 megatons in yield. Each 20-megaton bomb—1,000 times the yield of the fission bomb that destroyed Nagasaki—was the equivalent of 20 million tons of TNT, or 10 times the total tonnage the U.S. dropped in World War II. Some 500 bombs in the arsenal each had the explosive power of 25 megatons. Each of these warheads had more power than all the bombs and shells exploded in all the wars of human history.
These intercontinental bombers and missiles had come to be stationed almost entirely in the continental U.S., though they might be deployed to forward bases outside it in a crisis. A small force of B-52s was constantly airborne. Many of the rest were on alert. I had seen a classified film of an incredible maneuver in which a column of B-58s—smaller than B-52s but still intercontinental heavy bombers—taxied down a runway and then took off simultaneously, rather than one at a time. The point—as at Kadena and elsewhere—was to get in the air and away from the field as fast as possible, on warning of an imminent attack, before an enemy missile might arrive. In the time it would normally have taken for a single plane to take off, a squadron of planes would be airborne, on its way to assigned targets.
In the film these heavy bombers, each as big as an airliner, sped up in tandem as they raced down the airstrip, one behind the other so close that if one had slackened its pace for an instant the plane behind, with its full fuel load and its multiple thermonuclear weapons, would have rammed into its tail. Then they lifted together, like a flock of birds startled by a gunshot. It was an astonishing sight; it was beautiful.

The planned targets for the whole force included, along with military sites, every city in the Soviet Union and China.
On carriers, smaller, tactical bombers would be boosted on takeoff by a catapult, a kind of large slingshot. But since the general nuclear war plan, as I knew, called for takeoff around the world of as many U.S. planes and missiles as were ready at the time of the execute order—as near-simultaneously as possible—to attack targets that were all assigned in prior planning, the preparations contemplated one overall, inflexible global attack as if all the vehicles, with more than 3,000 warheads, were launched by a single catapult. A sling made for Goliath.
The rigidity of the single, coordinated plan—which by 1961 included tactical bombers—in what was termed the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, meant that its underlying “strategy” amounted to nothing more than a vast trucking operation to transport thermonuclear warheads to Soviet and Chinese cities and military sites. The latter were the great majority of targets, since all the cities could be destroyed by a small fraction of the attacking vehicles.
One of the principal expected effects of this plan—partly intended, partly (in allied, neutral and “satellite” countries) unavoidable “collateral damage”—was summarized on the piece of paper I held that day in the spring of 1961: the extermination of over half a billion people.
(In fact, this was certainly a vast underestimate of the fatalities. Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, has revealed in “Whole World on Fire” (Cornell, 2004) the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs have—throughout the nuclear era, to the present day—deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire. They have done so on the grounds that these effects are harder to predict than the effects of blast or fallout on which their estimates of fatalities are exclusively based. Yet the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons are known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war! Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks would surely have been double the figure on the summary I held in my hand—a billion people or more.)
The declared intent of this planning deployment and rehearsal was to deter Soviet aggression. I knew by this time something that was rarely made clear to the American public, that what was to be deterred by all this was not only nuclear attacks by the Soviets but conventional, non-nuclear Soviet aggression, in Europe in particular. In both cases, the story went, it was all designed to prevent such Soviet attacks from ever taking place. This global machine had been constructed in hopes that it would never be set in motion: or, as it was often put, so that it would never be used. The official motto of SAC, on display at all its bases, was “Peace Is Our Profession.”
Deterring Soviet non-nuclear aggression in Europe—say, a military occupation of West Berlin—depended ultimately on a presidential commitment to direct, if necessary, a U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. SAC’s profession would shift near-instantaneously from Peace to War. The Strategic Air Command trained daily, and effectively, to be ready to carry out that order. The American commitment to defend NATO (with Berlin its most vulnerable element) by nuclear threats, and if necessary by strategic first-strike nuclear attacks, effectively passed the trigger for such U.S. attacks to the Soviets.
The real possibility that the Soviets might pull that trigger lay at the heart of all our nuclear planning and preparations. It was understood that although deterrence was the principal objective of our nuclear posture, it was not foolproof. It might fail. That applied both to deterrence of nuclear attack and to deterrence of a conventional Soviet attack in Europe. In either case, it was not impossible that the Soviets would attack despite our threats and our best efforts to dissuade them.
What to do then was a matter of highly classified discussion over the years. But on this question the official top-secret plans approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower were unequivocal: the demolition of the Sino-Soviet bloc.
A striking and highly secret characteristic of the existing plans was that they called for essentially the same strategic response and targeting list for each of three quite distinct ways in which general war might come about. The first, and most likely in the judgment of the JCS, was a U.S. nuclear first strike as an escalation of conflict between U.S. and Soviet conventional forces, perhaps originating in conflict over Berlin or an uprising in East Europe. Second was U.S. pre-emption of an imminent Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S., or as I’d heard it described in the Pentagon, “striking second first.” Third—and least likely in the eyes of the JCS—was a retaliatory response to a successful Soviet surprise attack.
Although the size of the U.S. force available for attack would be different in each of these cases, the Eisenhower-approved plans called for the same target list—which included 151 “urban-industrial targets,” i.e. cities, along with military targets—to be attacked under all conditions.

The circumstances of war initiation, by determining the size of the force, would influence only the amount of coverage of the target list. Initial attacks would be as massive and as nearly simultaneous in arrival as possible. Attacks by all nonalert forces would follow as quickly as they could be launched. No forces would deliberately be held in reserve: an arrangement perhaps unique in the history of war planning.
And in all three cases, all large cities of both the Soviet Union and China (even if China had no part in the crisis or hostilities triggering execution of this plan) were high on the list for initial, simultaneous missile attacks, and for subsequent coverage by bombers—along with the highest-priority Soviet missile sites, air bases, air defenses and command centers.
In the White House in January 1961 I had informed the newly arrived assistant to the president for national security, McGeorge Bundy, of a number of little-known facts and problems. (How I came to this knowledge will be recounted later in this series.) One of these was the focus on U.S. first-strike plans in American preparations for any conflict with the Soviet Union involving forces above the level of a brigade. Another was Eisenhower’s approval of operational planning to destroy an “optimum mix” of population targets along with military sites no matter how the conflict had originated.
A third subject in my briefing was the variety of ways in which the strategic forces might be triggered “by accident”: by false alarm, miscalculation, miscommunication, or actions not directly authorized by the president or perhaps by any high-level commander. (Exploring these possibilities in the field had been my special mission in the CINCPAC task force, and later as a RAND specialist in nuclear weapons “command and control.”)
The last point in particular caught Bundy’s attention. I reported what I had learned in the Pacific, one of the most sensitive secrets in the system: that to forestall the possibility that our retaliatory response might be paralyzed either by a Soviet attack on Washington or by presidential incapacity, President Eisenhower had as of 1958 secretly delegated to theater commanders the authority to launch nuclear operations in a crisis, either in the event of the physical unavailability of the president—Eisenhower himself had suffered both a stroke and a heart attack in office—or if communications with Washington were cut off.
I had further learned that CINCPAC, Adm. Felt, had likewise delegated that authority downward in his command, under like conditions. That put many fingers on the button if communications went out between Washington and Hawaii, or Hawaii and the Western Pacific. In those years such an outage occurred for each of these links, on average, once a day. Thus this arrangement magnified greatly the possibilities listed above for “inadvertent, accidental” nuclear war, especially when outages occurred during a potential nuclear crisis such as the Taiwan Straits (Quemoy) confrontation of 1958. (The response of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to this information will be addressed in my next installment.)
The combined message of these reports was that our overall system for strategic response had the character of a giant thermonuclear mousetrap on a hair trigger. For a wide variety of provocative circumstances—definitely not requiring and most not involving either Soviet-initiated nuclear attacks or imminent expectation of them—it was set inflexibly to annihilate a large fraction of the civilian population of the Soviet Union and China, and of many allies and neutrals.
My one-on-one briefing of Bundy in his first weeks in office—arranged by Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs—was in part the reason I was in a position to draft questions for the White House soon after. As it happened, I had drafted the question about estimated deaths from execution of the general war plans in the belief that the JCS did not know an answer to it. Officers I worked with in the planning staff of the Air Force were convinced that no one, either in the Joint Staff or the Air Staff, had ever calculated the overall human consequences of carrying out their plans. That encouraged me to ask the JCS in the name of a higher authority for an estimate, in the expectation they would be embarrassed by having to admit they could not answer it promptly.
The authority I had in mind initially was the secretary of defense. (Although funding for RAND, including my salary, came mainly from the Air Force at that time, I was in effect on loan to the Office of the Secretary of Defense for much of 1961.) But as I’ve said, the question was picked up by the White House and sent in the president’s name. I had deliberately limited it, initially, to effects in the Soviet Union and China alone, instead of worldwide or in the Sino-Soviet bloc. That was to keep the Joint Staff from disguising its lack of any estimates at all by pleading a need for time to calculate casualties, say, in Albania, or the Southern Hemisphere.
Alternatively, I expected the Joint Staff to improvise an estimate which could easily be exposed, to its embarrassment, as unrealistically low. The point of eliciting either of these expected responses was to gain bargaining power for the secretary of defense in a bureaucratic effort (discussed later) to change the JCS plans in the direction of guidance I had drafted for the secretary earlier that month.
But my expectations were wrong. The Joint Chiefs were embarrassed neither by the question nor by their answer. That was the surprise, along with the answer itself. The implications, as I saw them, were literally existential, bearing on the nature and future of our species.
I myself at that time was neither a pacifist nor a critic of the explicit logic of deterrence or its legitimacy. On the contrary, I had been urgently working with my colleagues to assure a survivable U.S. capability to threaten clearly unacceptable damage to the Soviet Union in response to the most successful possible Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S. But planned slaughter of 600 million civilians—10 times the total death count in World War II, a hundred times the scale of the Holocaust? That aimed-for accomplishment exposed a dizzying irrationality, madness, insanity, at the heart and soul of our nuclear planning and apparatus.
I said earlier that I saw that day how the northern civilized world would end. I might have thought instead how it could end or might do so, but that wasn’t the conclusion I drew then. The chart I held in my hand that spring morning said to me that any confidence—worse, it seemed, any realistic hope—that the alert forces on either side might never be used was ill-founded

The Americans who had built this machine, knowing, it turned out, that it would kill more than half a billion people if it were turned on—and who were unabashed in reporting this to the president—humans like that would not fail to pull the switch if ordered to do so by a president, or, as I mentioned above and will discuss in the next installment, possibly by a superior other than the president.
And the presidents themselves? A few months earlier, Dwight Eisenhower had secretly endorsed the blueprints of this multi-genocide machine. He had furthermore demanded largely for budgetary reasons that there be no other plan for fighting Russians. He had approved this single strategic operational plan despite reportedly being, for reasons I now understood, privately appalled by its implications. And the Joint Chiefs had responded so promptly to his successor’s question about the human impact of our planned attacks because they clearly assumed that John Kennedy would not, in response, order them to resign or be dishonorably discharged, or order the machine to be dismantled. (In that, it turned out, they were right.)
Surely neither of these presidents actually desired ever to order the execution of these plans, nor would any likely successor want to take such an action. But they must have been aware, or should have been, of the dangers of allowing such a system to exist. They should have reflected on, and trembled before, the array of contingencies—accidents, false alarms, outages of communications, Soviet actions misinterpreted by lower commanders, unauthorized action—that might release pent-up forces beyond their control; and on possible developments that could lead them personally to escalate or launch a pre-emptive attack.
Eisenhower had chosen to accept these risks. To impose them on humanity, and all other forms of life. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to my direct knowledge did likewise. So did Richard Nixon. To bring this story up to the present, there is much evidence—and none to the contrary—that the same has been true of every subsequent president.
Two more aspects of their gambles were not known to me in 1961. Later accounts in this series will reveal that in the Quemoy crisis three years earlier and the Cuban missile crisis one year later—and to lesser extent in a couple of dozen other episodes—these risks came secretly closer to being realized than almost anyone recognizes to this day.
Moreover, the scale of the potential catastrophe was and remains vastly greater than I or the JCS or any presidents imagined over the next 20 years. Not until 1982-83 did new calculations—recently confirmed—reveal that hemispheric and possibly global clouds of smoke and soot from the burning cities attacked by U.S. or Russian forces would block out sunlight for a prolonged period, lowering temperature drastically during spring and summer, freezing lakes and rivers and destroying crops worldwide. This “nuclear winter” could extinguish many forms of life and starve to death billions of humans.
Yet the “option” of massive attacks on cities (or, euphemistically, upon industrial and military targets within or near cities) almost surely remains one among many planned alternatives, ready as ever to be carried out, within the strategic repertoire of U.S. and Russian plans and force readiness: this, a quarter-century after the discovery of the nuclear winter phenomenon.
The U.S. and Russia currently each have about 10,000 warheads, over 2,000 of them operationally deployed. (Each has several thousand in reserve status—not covered in recent negotiations—and an additional 5,000 or so awaiting dismantlement). Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev have agreed to lower the operational warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675 by the year 2012. But the explosion of 1,000 warheads together by the U.S. and Russia could trigger a full-scale nuclear winter. And recent studies show the possibility of ecological catastrophe from smoke effects on the ozone layer after a very much smaller exchange, such as could occur between India and Pakistan.
A 2007 peer-reviewed study concluded that “the estimated quantities of smoke generated by attacks totaling little more than one megaton of nuclear explosives [two countries launching 50 Hiroshima-size bombs each] could lead to global climate anomalies exceeding any changes experienced in recorded history. The current global arsenal is about 5000 megatons.” A December 2008 study in Physics Today estimates that “the direct effects of using the 2012 arsenals [1,700 to 2,200 Russian and American warheads each] would lead to hundreds of millions of fatalities. The indirect effects [long-term, from smoke] would likely eliminate the majority of the human population.”
It is the long-neglected duty of the American Congress to test these scientific findings against the realities of our secret war plans. It is Congress’ responsibility to investigate the nature of the planned targets for the reduced operational forces proposed by Obama and Medvedev—1,500 to 1,675—or some lower but still huge number like 1,000, and the foreseeable human and environmental consequences of destroying those targets with the attacks currently programmed.
The questions to be addressed initially are simple: “How many cities would burn under our various preplanned ‘options’? How many humans would die from these various attacks—from blast, fire, fallout, smoke, soot and ozone depletion—in the target country, in its regional neighbors, in America, and worldwide?”
And these, less simple: “For each of these possible attack options and exchanges, what is the likely, and the range of possible, impact on the regional and global environment? Which of our options, if any, threaten to produce regional or worldwide nuclear winter? Do we—or does any state—have a right to possess such an ‘option’? Should a U.S. or Russian president have the authority—or the power, as each now has—to order attacks that might have the global effects described above?”
Our representatives in Congress should—for the first time—take on responsibility for learning about and influencing the possible human and environmental consequences of carrying out our operational nuclear war plans. But past experience makes clear that Senate or House members will not hold real investigative hearings, using committee subpoena powers, to penetrate the curtains of secrecy around these matters without a new level of pressure from American citizens. (To join some worthy efforts—which have not heretofore, in my judgment, focused sufficiently on congressional investigation or war planning—see here, here and here.

This is not a responsibility only for Americans and their representatives. The stakeholders directly threatened by the possibility, however unlikely, that Americans and Russians might launch a major fraction of their presently deployed nuclear forces against each other comprise all the citizens of every state on Earth.

Every parliament in the world has an urgent need to know what its constituents have to expect—in the way of homicidal and environmental damage—from a U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange: or for that matter, from an India-Pakistan exchange. These assemblies have a stake in discovering—and changing—the societal and ecological impact of the existent contingency war plans of every nuclear weapons state, the U.S. and Russia above all but the others as well. What is needed is a worldwide movement. Fortunately there are several efforts to join (see here, here, here, here and here), in keeping with President Obama’s declared goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.

I felt sure in 1961 that the existent potential for moral and physical catastrophe—our government’s readiness to commit multi-genocidal extermination on a hemispheric scale by nuclear blast and fallout (no one knew yet of the global danger of ecocide and mass extinctions from smoke and ozone depletion)—was not only a product of aberrant Americans or a peculiarly American phenomenon. I was right. A few years later, after the Soviets were humiliated by the Cuban missile crisis and Nikita Khrushchev was ousted, the Kremlin set out to imitate our destructive capacity in every detail and surpass it when possible.

To be sure, Americans, and U.S. Air Force planners in particular, were the only people in the world who believed that they had won a war by bombing, and, particularly in Japan, by bombing civilians. In World War II and for years afterward, there were only two air forces in the world, the British and American, that could so much as hope to do that.

But the nuclear era put that demonic temptation—to deter, defeat or punish an adversary on the basis of an operational capability to annihilate most of its population—eventually within the reach of a great many nations. By the spring of ’61, four states (soon to be five, now nine) had, at great expense, bought themselves that capability. Humans just like these American planners—and presidents—were surely at work in every nuclear weapons state producing plans like these for nuclear attacks on cities.

I knew personally many of the American planners, though apparently—from the fatality chart—not quite as well as I had thought. What was frightening was precisely that I knew they were not evil, in any ordinary, or extraordinary, sense. They were ordinary Americans, capable, conscientious and patriotic. I was sure they were not different, surely not worse, than the people in Russia who were doing the same work, or the people who would sit at the same desks in later U.S. administrations. I liked most of the planners and analysts I knew. Not only the physicists at RAND who designed bombs and the economists who speculated on strategy (like me), but the colonels who worked on these very plans, whom I consulted with during the workday and drank beer with in the evenings.

That chart set me the problem, which I have worked on for nearly half a century, of understanding my fellow humans—us, I don’t separate myself—in the light of this real potential for self-destruction of our species and of most others. Looking not only at the last eight years but at the steady failure in the two decades since the ending of the Cold War to reverse course or to eliminate this potential, it is hard for me to avoid concluding that this potential is more likely than not to be realized in the long run.

Are further proliferation and—what I have focused on here—the persistence of superpower nuclear arsenals that threaten global catastrophe a near-certainty? Is it too late to eliminate these dangers, in time? Some dark days I think so, as I did that morning in the White House. Most of the time I don’t, or I would not have tried as I have and still do to eliminate them, and I would not be using my time to begin this account of them.

The story does get worse; see, for example, my next installment, “How Many Fingers on the Buttons?” The more one learns about the hidden history of the nuclear era—this is the cumulative message of this ongoing series—the more miraculous it seems that the doomsday machines which we and the Russians have built and maintained have not yet triggered each other. At the same time, the clearer it becomes that we could and that we must dismantle