Civil Defense: Idea May Be Returning to Vogue in U.S.

To schoolchildren growing up during the 1950s and 1960s, the bells and piercing sirens of air raid drills were familiar sounds. In many classes it was a monthly ritual to crouch amid the water cans and soda crackers in the school’s damp basement bomb shelter.

For many children of the 1970s and 1980s, however, the only reminder of preparations for nuclear attack has been the occasional Emergency Broadcast System radio test, sandwiched between a Bruce Springsteen classic and Madonna’s latest release.

Until recently, the idea that one could--or would want to--survive a nuclear holocaust appealed to a minority of Americans, primarily the survivalists and members of paramilitary groups. Now, however, those who subscribe to a theory of “nuclear survivability” appear to be growing in both number and influence.

Today’s civil defense proponents include Dr. Edward Teller, who was instrumental in developing the first atomic bomb, Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner and Samuel Cohen, known as the father of the neutron bomb. And they may have found an advocate in retired Lt. Gen. Julius W. Becton, newly appointed director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency--a man committed to the 1980 Republican Party platform, which promised “a civil defense next to none.”

After Becton delivers to Congress a new and comprehensive civil defense plan in July, agency insiders say, Americans once again may see the yellow-and-black “fallout shelter” sign on school and office buildings and hear sirens testing community-alert systems each week.

One proposal, announced last week, would require state governments to shoulder a heavy burden of population-protection responsibilities while the FEMA beefs up arrangements for the sheltering of state and local emergency managers and public records.

The $1.5-billion plan would cover the cost of building the first 600 of 3,400 fallout-resistant mobile and stationary emergency command shelters planned for construction between 1988 and 1992. It also would pay for public-education materials, as well as 3.8 million radiation detectors.

“There are currently over 4 million radiological instruments in use, but most of those are so old they’re gradually being cannibalized so that a few can be kept operational,” said Samuel W. Speck, FEMA associate director for state and local programs.

“Surely, there will be a lot of congressmen against this thing,” Speck said, “but that’s a problem this agency has always had.”

According to FEMA sources who requested anonymity, a soon-to-be-released General Accounting Office report says that many states are refusing to use federal funds for activities related to hostile attack, and are diverting them instead to natural-disaster programs.

In California, GAO investigators found that state emergency planning officials submitted to FEMA a report describing preparations for natural disasters and enemy attack, but before the same report went to local officials, they deleted the section on attack protection.

“They’re trying to keep FEMA mollified, and at the same time they’re trying to keep their state Legislature mollified too,” one source said.

In recent years, as FEMA directors have focused on natural-disaster relief, anti-nuclear sentiment has helped persuade Congress to limit or scrap several civil defense “doomsday” programs that includ ed public education, emergency stockpiling of food and medical supplies and population-relocation plans.

“As far as serious civil defense planning goes in this country, there has been none,” former CIA Director William Colby said in a recent interview. “All the public sees are a few faded shelter signs from 20 years ago.”

Dr. Leon Goure, director of Soviet studies at Science Applications Inc., a think tank based in McLean, Va., said that “ . . . the best you could do right now in case of nuclear attack would be to get away from the downtown area and hide in the basement of a supermarket.”

This year, the U.S. government will spend about 55 cents a person--an estimated $130.8 million--on civil defense programs, while the Soviet Union pumps about $12 for each of its citizens--or $3 billion annually--into a program designed to save 88% of the Soviet population in the event of a major nuclear exchange. Switzerland, meanwhile, spends about $33 a person, or $200 million annually, on what is considered the most advanced shelter system in the world.

States Told of Priority

In a demonstration of his determination to beef up U.S. emergency-response planning, Becton already has warned the states to place civil defense on a par with their other emergency programs or forgo FEMA appropriations.

“If some key state or local officials cannot be convinced to support the war-related, as well as the peacetime, priorities of civil defense in some jurisdictions, it may be necessary to re-allocate funds to other jurisdictions where a genuinely all - hazards policy and approach is followed,” Becton said at a meeting of emergency management officials in February.

Reflecting the penny-pinching fever generated by the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law, FEMA has trimmed its current budget request to slightly more than $369 million from a fiscal 1986 budget of about $400 million. Nevertheless, the new spending plan reveals some significant changes that underscore Becton’s drive to fulfill 1981 amendments to the Civil Defense Act requiring activities that do not detract from attack preparedness.

“Our review of civil defense objectives, policies and programs will be designed to strictly enforce this proviso,” Becton has vowed. The funds requested for the FEMA would support:

--Development and updating of emergency radiation-protection plans for 500 cities nationwide.

--Inspection of some 60,000 fallout and emergency shelters in 100 communities.

--Increased research into and development of devices to detect and measure radiation.

--Nuclear-attack protection for 10 radio transmitters and 10 emergency-communications operating centers.

--Development of three classified training programs for radiological control teams.

Becton’s proposal would represent the first step toward a stronger civil defense, Stephen Mayerhofer, president of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Defense Assn., said in an interview.

“Most people have a tendency to think of themselves as ground zero, the exact spot where a nuclear detonation would occur,” Mayerhofer says, “when, in fact, most of the kinds of deaths these people will be facing will be due to severe burns, flying glass, radiation poisoning, starvation, disease and buildings falling in on them.”

In stark contrast to that view, the anti-nuclear group Physicians for Social Responsibility has called civil defense planning “a waste of time and money.” The group’s 30,000 members believe that a nuclear war would wreak “utter and complete destruction,” said H. Jack Geiger, president of the organization.

Survival Estimate 60 Million

Dr. Gerald Looney of La Canada, Calif., president of the pro-civil defense Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, disagrees. He estimates that more than 60 million Americans would survive a nuclear attack “even if every bomb in the world went off.”

And Nancy Greene, Southern California coordinator of the American Civil Defense Assn., blames the vocal opponents of nuclear arms for “perpetuating the lie that a nuclear war spells ultimate destruction.”

“Radiation doesn’t penetrate more than three meters below the ground and it doesn’t turn corners, so with some protection, you have a pretty good chance of survival,” said Greene, who was a defense analyst for the late Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.) and is the wife of actor Lorne Greene.

Terrorism Defense Seen

Greene said that fallout shelters, population relocation planning and modern radiation detection equipment may also protect the populace from terrorism or a nuclear reactor accident such as the recent one in the Soviet Union.

Interest in civil defense peaked in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy asked Congress for $695 million for an ambitious program and declared that “postponement of practical measures to shield our people from fallout radiation cannot be justified.”

Shift in Public Opinion

But a surge of criticism prompted the legislators to cut $620 million in shelter programs and related civil defense activities out of the plan, and civil defense began a quarter-century slide into obscurity.

In 1982, Gallup polls indicated that 50% of Americans favored increasing government spending on civil defense, and 59% disapproved of the idea of dismantling civil defense programs already in effect.

Impact of ‘Day After’

But it was not until late 1983, after the televising of “The Day After”--a movie about the aftermath of a fictional nuclear attack--that the FEMA began stocking public-information fliers on civil defense. According to FEMA analyst C. Wayne Blanchard, after the movie sparked widespread public interest and debate, the agency hurriedly put together two bulletins and a booklet.

Today, FEMA distributes 20,000 copies of the booklet, “In Time of Emergency,” to state and local planning officials every month, and also fills a rising number of private requests, Peg Maloy of the agency said.

In addition, membership in pro-civil defense organizations has been growing steadily. The American Civil Defense Assn., the nation’s largest such group, has expanded into a vocal organization and its magazine, Journal of Civil Defense, has a paid circulation of more than 3,000 civil defense professionals and private citizens.

Radio Equipment Obsolete

At the state level, where officials depend on federal funds to purchase and maintain equipment, John Crandall, Iowa’s disaster services director, lamented a lack of federal support: “We have large areas of Iowa that are not covered by warning sirens. We rely on federal emergency radio systems that, quite frankly, just don’t work because they are so old we can’t find crystals to replace the ones that burn out.”

John Byrne, Colorado’s chief of emergency services, said: “Clearly, we do not have the kind of national preparedness we need. We have the ability to evacuate populations, but cannot support them once they’ve been evacuated.”

California disaster chief William Medigovich says that the state will continue to concentrate on conventional disaster planning, trying to “keep up with Mother Nature,” while his New York counterpart, Donald DeVito, says that a move toward strengthening nuclear-attack protection is “wasting resources on esoteric plans that have no basis in reality.”

In a particularly blunt assessment, John Lewis, planning chief of the District of Columbia’s Office of Emergency Preparedness, said: “We are out of the shelter business. As a matter of fact, the shelters are destocked, and we really don’t have any true shelters left in the District of Columbia.”

Lewis could be wrong, however.

Some civil defense proponents note that what is believed to be one of the safest blast and fallout shelters in the United States is being built just a few miles from the White House--under the new Soviet Embassy.