View from the Bunker: Stock Up

And remember, we got past it before

by Kenneth D. Rose

There was an eerie, throwback quality to the detailed suggestions reissued by the Department of Homeland Security last February on how Americans should prepare for a possible terrorist attack.

The recommendations included designating a room where a family could take refuge and stocking it with food and water to last at least three days. Blankets, flashlights, radios, and spare batteries should be on hand, and the enclosure sealed with plastic sheeting and duct tape. " We see information on citizen preparedness as prudent planning," department spokesman Gordon Johndroe said at a special briefing. " It's appropriate for citizens to be informed about how to respond to a terrorist attack, much as people have prepared for years to be ready for tornadoes, hurricanes, or floods."

Johndroe might have added nuclear attack. His briefing was reminiscent of the bad old days of the Cold War. In those days, " safe rooms" or " panic rooms" were called fallout shelters. While they were built to ward off radioactive fallout rather than gas or biological attack, the shelters' ultimate purpose of protecting the American family from an unforeseen, catastrophic attack was the same. One bus advertisement from that era sported a large mushroom cloud against a red skyline and said, " Protect yourself from FALLOUT."

Federal officials today, like their counterparts of the 1950s and '60s, must consider how to inform the public without, at the same time, doing more harm than good. The Department of Homeland Security may argue that its periodic alerts are serving the citizenry, but there is also a degree of bureaucratic posterior covering at work as well. After all, if an attack occurs and the public has not been warned, then Homeland Security will be criticized for failing to do its job. Better to play it safe by issuing the occasional alert. The problem with this strategy lies in its potential to induce anxiety, even panic, among the public. Later, a different problem can emerge. If alerts come and go without any attacks taking place, the public may become jaded — and skeptical that any attack will ever take place.

From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, the Federal Civil Defense Administration held annual "Operation Alert" exercises in which it simulated nuclear attacks on American cities in order to test civil defense preparedness and " educate the public." This education process included splashing headlines across newspapers proclaiming nuclear destruction. In 1956, Buffalo residents read an account of two nuclear bombs hitting their city under a headline that proclaimed, " 125,000 Known Dead, Downtown in Ruins," while in Grand Rapids, Michigan, there was equally dismaying news: " 16,200 Die as H-Bomb Levels Grand Rapids." Then Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson worried that such tactics might " scare a lot of people without purpose."

Homeland Security officials might argue that their terror alerts, unlike the Operation Alerts of the Cold War, are " real" rather than mere exercises. But the government's reluctance to provide enough detailed evidence to support a heightened state of security (other than citing " sources" with " specific, credible" information), as well as its vagueness about likely targets or the most likely kind of attack, imparts a spectral quality to these Homeland Security edicts that appears no less " unreal" than fears of nuclear attack during the Cold War.

There is much else about our own era that is reminiscent of the Cold War, including the Bush administration's apparent conviction that providing protection from attack is a personal, as much as a governmental, responsibility. In the summer of 1961, President John F. Kennedy faced a problem perhaps more daunting than what President Bush must grapple with today. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was threatening to cut off Western access to Berlin, and Kennedy had to decide if the United States would risk nuclear war to defend the city. In a tense July 25 speech, Kennedy said, "We do not want to fight — but we have fought before." To underline his determination, he asked for a $3.2 billion increase in military spending and $207 million to identify and mark space in existing structures " that could be used for fallout shelters in case of attack." In the meantime, individual citizens were encouraged to make their own preparations against nuclear war.

But shelters were never built in the numbers predicted. Many Americans believed that it was the government's obligation, and not their own, to provide protection from nuclear attack. The late Representative Chet Holifield (D-California), one of the champions of a national shelter system, claimed the idea of getting people to build their own shelters is like building " an army or a navy or an air force by advising each one to buy himself a jet plane." There was also the cost. Most experts recommended spending a minimum of $2,500 for a shelter — a considerable outlay in 1961 when the median family income was $5,300. The fallout shelter issue created turmoil on every level: rich versus poor, suburbs versus city, neighbor versus neighbor. And because most shelters were designed only to protect the inhabitants from radioactive fallout, and provided no blast and heat protection, many believed that shelter owners were simply building their own tombs in advance. These were all solid reasons not to build, but a more intangible negative factor was that Americans did not relish the image of themselves burrowing into the ground to save their hides and questioned what would be left to live for in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

As Washingtonians in 2003 lay in supplies of plastic sheeting and duct tape, it is instructive to see how their counterparts responded 40 years ago to the Cuban missile crisis. Then, attack by the enemy would have meant not the deaths of thousands, but the deaths of millions (not to mention incalculable long-term damage to the planet). Officials in Washington believed that 58 American cities with a combined population of 92 million were within range of the missiles in Cuba. As Americans besieged the government for civil defense information, they were appalled to discover that the modest public shelter program initiated by the Kennedy administration was far from being a reality.

Americans weathered this and other Cold War crises, and, during the course of 45 years, got " used to" the threat of nuclear attack. After all, the possibility of nuclear holocaust is not something one can keep constantly in mind and retain one's sanity. Although the government eventually put signs on many existing buildings and stuck some supplies in their basements, these structures were not designed to withstand nuclear attack and were of dubious value. Americans by and large rejected the idea of security at any price, showing little enthusiasm for either building private home shelters or creating a multibillion-dollar public shelter system.

In this way, Americans were wiser than their leaders and understood that nuclear attack, like terrorist attack, is sudden and unpredictable, and that there is little an ordinary individual can do to prepare for such a possibility. This is a liberating idea, not a pessimistic one. And the notion that a life lived in fear is not worth living has never been more relevant. Today, we must reach the same accommodation with the war on terrorism that our fellow Americans reached with the Cold War: We can take prudent steps to protect ourselves and our families, but we must not allow ourselves to become obsessed with our own safety. We must not lock ourselves away. Instead, we must get on with our lives and walk in the sun.

About the author

Kenneth D. Rose is a professor of history at California State University, Chico. He is the author of One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York University Press, 2001).

This is an edited version of his article originally printed in its entirety in the Feb. 16, 2003, issue of The Washington Post. To read the complete article as it appeared in the Post, go to the Meriam Library's Research Station and access the article through Lexis-Nexis. Used with permission of The Washington Post.

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