Civil Defense

Living with the Bomb

Two legacies of World War II—the creation of long-range delivery systems and nuclear weapons—would force Americans for the first time to contemplate the possible destruction of their own cities by an enemy. Beginning in 1950, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) would produce films, pamphlets, and posters that emphasized civilian vulnerability to enemy attack. By 1953 the Soviet Union possessed the hydrogen bomb, a weapon with exponentially greater destructive force than the atomic bombs that had laid waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The power and crudity of these weapons further blurred traditional distinctions between military targets and civilian populations, and put the American home on the front lines. Writing in Science News Letter in 1955, Howard Simons proclaimed that “terrifying weapons have moved the foxhole, bunker and emergency ration from the infantryman's front-line to everybody's backyard. ‘Dig or die,’ and ‘duck and cover,’ apply not only to G. I.'s some 10,000 miles away, [Page 121]but are realities for the politician, the housewife, the worker and the schoolboy” (Rose, 5).

A 1955 underground bomb shelter designed and made by Walter Kidde Nuclear Laboratories of Garden City, Long Island. (From the collections of the Library of Congress)

Faced with the nearly insoluble problem of protecting American cities from nuclear attack, the Eisenhower administration adopted the civil defense policy of evacuating American urban residents to the countryside during times of nuclear peril. As FCDA chief Val Peterson so eloquently put it, “the best way to be alive when an atomic bomb goes off in your neighborhood is not to be there” (Rose, 4). The problems with evacuation were obvious from the beginning, and included the difficulty of clearing out any large city in a short time, and feeding and housing huge urban populations once they had been relocated. The evacuation strategy received a further blow after the “Bravo” hydrogen bomb test of 1954 spread unexpectedly high levels of radioactive fallout over a 7,000-square-mile area.

During the 1950s, groups that studied the problem of protecting the civilian population from radioactive fallout all recommended a national fallout shelter system in the $20 billion to $30 billion range. Still, Eisenhower clung to the evacuation policy, not only because evacuation was cheap and fallout shelters were not, but also because he feared that an elaborate shelter system would be a step toward a “fortress America” or even a “garrison state” (Rose, 90). Eisenhower was also convinced that his overall nuclear strategy—the buildup of nuclear forces that could deliver “massive retaliation” against any enemy attack—would serve as a deterrent and obviate the need for elaborate civil defense preparations.

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