Armageddon Insurance by Geist Edward M.;

Author:Geist, Edward M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

Estimated effectiveness of OCD fallout shelter system. Computer models indicated that the fallout shelter system sought by the Kennedy administration could save tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise die of radiation poisoning, but that a larger fraction of the population in immediate target areas would inevitably perish from the blast and fire. Adapted from Office of Civil Defense, Personal and Family Survival (1966).

Declassified Department of Defense documents reveal the extent to which McNamara concurred with this optimistic assessment of the community fallout shelter program. In a December 1964 memorandum for president Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara reiterated his belief that fallout shelters would make a good investment. Proposing an annual expenditure of just over $1 billion for civil defense, he argued that “for a budget level of $5.2 billion, a complete fallout shelter system would be the most effective component of a balanced damage limiting program against large attacks.” Furthermore, “at none of the budget levels examined would it pay to spend less for fallout protection.” On this basis McNamara urged investment in fallout shelters rather than missile defense, which analysis indicated would save few American lives in comparison with its massive cost. McNamara, however, had no illusions that civil defense could prevent the deaths of a large percentage of the American population in a nuclear war. Even taking into account the possibilities of missile defense and additional offensive forces to destroy Soviet missiles before launch, “there is no defense program which we could expect with confidence to reduce the fatalities to a level much below 30–40 million even if the Soviets delayed their attack on our cities, or much below 60–75 million if they attack our cities on the first strike.”74 According to their Department of Defense backers, fallout shelters could neither preserve “the American way of life” nor prevent the annihilation of America’s urban dwellers—but they could indeed serve as the “insurance” called for by President Kennedy.

The fallout shelter program was founded on plausible, albeit counterintuitive, assumptions about what the adversary would do. The Kennedy administration designed it based on intelligence projections of what the USSR’s strategic nuclear forces would look like at the end of the decade.75 At the time, Western analysts believed that the Soviet Union would build a force totaling only several hundred ICBMs, but that those missiles would carry very large thermonuclear warheads with yields of tens of megatons. They furthermore guessed that Soviet war planners would detonate these weapons on the surface to create immense fallout areas. Government officials acknowledged that basically nothing could be done for cities struck by such attacks, yet they confounded contemporary observers by developing fallout shelters even in cities such as Washington that were obviously Soviet targets.

They had a sensible statistical justification for this seemingly obtuse step. Because of the limited number of anticipated Soviet missiles and the unreliability of early ICBMs (which failed in almost half of launch tests), some targeted cities would escape direct attack owing to sheer luck—but those cities would be impossible to identify in advance.

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