Bottom Line: Are We Toast?

Listen, o my children, and I shall tell you of a time when we feared not gang bullets that fly by day, nor naughty TV shows that air by night.

Heck, no. What had us sweating in our Dr. Dentons was the nightmare global weenie roast: of being exploded like microwave popcorn, charbroiled in our beds like a marshmallow over a campfire, vaporized into a thin pink mist. In short, nuked.

So we schooled our ears for air raid sirens louder than Super Bowl halftime shows. We learned the under-the-desk crouch against the atomic fireball hotter than a thousand suns.

We dug fallout shelters from Mar-A-Lago, the Buckingham Palace of Miami, to the subdivisions of the San Fernando Valley, to the Bel-Air estate that Barbara Stanwyck shared with husband Robert Taylor, who squealed on Commies in the movies and wanted them all sent back to Rooshia.

Virtually every McDonald’s of that era installed a fallout shelter. (“Billions Served, Thousands Saved,” the signs might have read.)

Then it came to pass that Gorbachev turned out to be an OK guy, the Iron Curtain fell faster than the curtain at Minsky’s during a vice raid, the only people the Reds ever nuked were at Chernobyl, and we found ourselves stuck with peace, survival candy suffused with red dye no. 2, and 30 years’ worth of doomsday architecture.

Better than swords into plowshares, we turned bomb shelters into wine cellars (except, of course, for McDonald’s) and went about the business of readying ourselves for other disasters.

Here we are at 1996. Heard about that tiff between Taiwan and mainland China? Some scut-level Chinese officials remarked that the U.S. wouldn’t “dare defend Taiwan because they’d rain nuclear bombs on Los Angeles.”

So reported Winston Lord on C-SPAN. Mr. Lord is assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, a State Department stalwart to whom such saber rattling is “unhelpful-type rhetoric.”

Cut the diplomacy, Mr. Lord. Are we toast? Ground zero? Will L.A. be creme brulee?

*

Doesn’t it always happen--as soon as you throw something away, you need it again.

Those sirens that screamed at 10 a.m. the last Friday of every month? Mothballed in 1985. The Orwellian black and yellow triangle inside a circle, the Civil Defense emblem? Stolen, fallen off, in some places replaced by the slashed circles of “No Smoking” signs.

As a boy, Bob Canfield rode his bike to Birmingham High, past the Nike missile emplacements at Victory and Balboa. When the jets scrambled on alert out of Van Nuys Airport, the kids goggled as the missiles rose from the ground.

Today Canfield is the city’s emergency preparedness coordinator. His office is on the 12th floor but his domain is four stories underground, a true bomb shelter, with hair-balanced steel doors and huge bolts that slide home with a satisfying matinee “snick.”

Here, where the fallout decontamination shower is now a closet, is the city’s Emergency Operations Center. Priorities change as risks change. If the city were building an EOC today, he says, it would build it above ground, with “base isolators” against earthquakes.

It’s only by happenstance and assiduous pack rat inclinations that his county government counterpart, Constance Perett, still can put her hands on the final fallout shelter list the state ever prepared: Halloween 1989.

Six federal disasters in three years have rather absorbed the county’s attention and money. “We’re not really in the nuclear blast business,” Perett says.

Who is any more? Some shelter sites haven’t been reconnoitered since a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The shelter list is a nostalgia tour of vanished places: Security Pacific Banks, the downtown Robinsons, a Whittier mushroom grower, a Westinghouse factory in Compton, Bellflower Bank in Bellflower, all rated by “protection factors” one through four, like nuclear sunscreen.

The Panorama City General Motors plant, the one that closed in 1992, is on the list. Nine years ago, in a team-training exercise, GM posed a moral quandary to its workers: Here is a list of 10 people--pregnant woman, priest, scientist, black radical, and such. Your fallout shelter can only accommodate six. Which six do you choose?

*

The truly scary aspect is not defunct fallout shelters. It is the remark attributed to a high-level Chinese official, that “American leaders care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan.”

What? Is Time magazine still banned in Beijing? Don’t the Chinese know “American leaders” would swap L.A. in a New York minute? Our leaders probably visit Taiwan more often than they visit L.A. If China sent an ultimatum, Congress would conveniently mislay it until Century City was charcoal briquettes.

I can hear Congress calling China’s bluff now, tabulating: O.J., Heidi, all that earthquake aid . . . or Quemoy and Matsu? Where do we sign?

What may spare us is 54 electoral votes, an excellent whipping boy for the GOP--Hollywood--and a first-class ATM for the Democrats--Hollywood.