Prepare for survival; Fallout shelter policies

It was a proof of where are we today regarding civil fines. Well in my judgment civil defense if you are considering it as being a protection against a hydrogen bomb is largely money down the drain. I it would be almost totally worthless in case of an attack. The National Association of educational broadcasters presents prepare for survival a radio sounding board for facts and opinions on civil defense. We don't have several of the fans because in order to have a civil defense against the hydrogen bomb you must have a shelter system according to our subcommittee which has that studied the matter for more than two years. Our best estimates are that a shelter system which would defend 100 million people would cost about seventeen and a half billions of dollars. Now under the present at the present time under the present circumstances the national debt. We

don't even dare bring our bill to the flour. And yet there are 42 billions of dollars that are spent each year annually on defense. On the day that we are attacked by a hydrogen bomb will be money down the drain also. It will not be banned. The only defense would be an intelligent civil defense system and the only intelligent one is a shelter system. What do you think will happen to you if you bring this on the floor no more. We would be terribly defeated. Is there a chance that in the future you can bring the city have any hopes for delays. It's possible that in the future we could bring such a bill to the floor. But before you have this moment arrive you will have to have a president who agrees that a civil defense system is necessary and a shelter system. I think that one of the most interesting things that has been done in the United States by any governor Democrat that I may

be is the fact that Governor Rockefeller pointed out that he thought the state of New York should start developing a shelter system for their citizens. And I had gone around. Oh well you gonna run to. Oh cinema. Why you gonna run on that. Want to hide the rocks rocks. Large rocks are melting and Lord said be a boy. Depending on the amount of warning time given for an enemy attack. Local civil

defense officials acting on the advice of the Federal Office of Civil and defense mobilization would order their populations to either evacuate the cities or if the expected time to the attack were less than an hour they would order the people to take shelter immediately. On that day it would really be a choice of whether to run or to hide. The previous program in the series don't with the first choice civil defense evacuation policy. This program will present the first part of the shelter choice. The civil defense fallout shelter policies and on the next program blast shelter policies will be discussed. These interviews have been edited with the consent of the speakers and are presented here in their original subject context. A charter member of the Joint Committee on atomic energy and chairman of the congressional subcommittee investigating civil defense Rep. Chuck Hollyfield of California is regarded as one of the best informed people on civil

defense and as director of the Federal Office of Civil and defense mobilization. Governor Leo a Hawick is certainly the person most qualified to discuss the federal government's official position on civil defense policy matters. Here then our representative Hollyfield and Gov. Hoyer asking the question is our producer. I think that shelters are the key to a civil defense program of any worth whatsoever. It is not necessarily the only thing it is only one of the things that are involved. But it is the key without shelter. You cannot protect the people from radiation without shelter you cannot protect food supplies and medical supplies from radiation and thermal damage. And therefore I say it is the key. You start with the shelter program and then you build into your shelter program adequate supplies of food and and medicine and other lifesaving supplies and they will be placed there and

they secure a position and from that point you can work toward recovery after the war is over. Would you like to see a massive nationwide shelter program. That's what we have today. Now the only difference there are some proponents that say that the federal government has to finance these. Well back in the 20s and all we found out that it was necessary to have sanitation in every home running water sewer disposal plants etc. that was essential for the protection of health. Federal government didn't go in and give you sanitation or sewer system. This is the nuclear age. No home today is modern without a fallout shelter. No home is modern. We urge every citizen to do it. It's his responsibility and I'm happy to report thousands of people are doing it. Many homebuilders throughout the country recognize that they want to build modern shelters so they incorporate fallout shelters as they build.

The official policy of civil defense authorities on both the federal and the state and local level is the promotion of what is called The Family fallout shelter. Mr. Robert Corps be director of the office of civil effects tests for the Atomic Energy Commission will describe it. The family fallout shelter and they has issued in a pamphlet of the Office of Civil Defense mobilization is certainly a step in the right direction. This is about as inexpensive a modification as one could expect to make to a basement and unquestionably it would increase a great deal of the protection to a family that used it. And across the nation would save the lives of many many thousands of people. It is well to think of it as a minimal shelter and therefore I would urge and encourage one to think about doing more if possible. The shelter itself is

constructed of 8 inches solid concrete block and lends itself general aid to a do it yourself approach. This would also result in minimal cost to the home owner. Of course this brings up also the question as to how much a person's insurance a person can afford and when we're talking about protecting against nuclear facts. Many people can't find it feasible to do a great deal more than others. But if the direction is clear anything a person does to improve the probability of his family or himself not being hurt or killed is in the right direction and each one can do then what he can afford. Depending upon how much he values the life of him sad family and himself. Economic feasibility and general acceptance of the

threat of a possible nuclear attack. How about the fellow child of the SS.. The $200 One is that adequate or is it the most that you can expect people to get out a quick wave against attack patterns that we've had. We find that it affords adequate protection from these effects that I previously ventured. Particularly people that have basements exhibits a sexually good whether as little as a hundred fifty to three hundred dollars you can provide an adequate fallout shelter. And as you know there is available to every American this family fallout shelter pamphlet. And I would urge everyone listening to this program to see their local civil defense office obtain one or write to box hope shelter Battle Creek Michigan. Say that again box home shelter Battle Creek

Michigan and these plans and designs would be sent to them. They're not only for basements but they're also for construction of shelters. I would side the home or adjoining a home or even a community shelter. If you speak from a technical standpoint I think shelters can be built for the nation far easily for $200 per person. If you are talking about the probability of the people building their own shelters I will say without any reservation that this will not be done. They have been encouraged to do this for several years and I guarantee you that there is not a thousand shelters in the United States today that have been built by the people themselves. How many people so far do you estimate have built these fallout shelters. That's difficult to say but I would say that certainly sours ns of them

are now constructed and thousands are being built each week throughout the country. Just recently I came back from Salt Lake City there I saw many fallout shelters I was brushing counting Michigan last fall right out the rural areas saw along with your governor of Michigan many fallout shelters in the rural areas. And I am pleased to report that the farmer has a great deal of ingenuity. He makes a great deal out of what he already has and converts it into a shelter. I saw an abandoned cistern on one farm in Michigan that was converted into a fallout shelter costing one thousand dollars and 75 cents. I saw fruit room that was converted into a fallout shelter that cost him about twenty five or thirty five dollars for the materials he did the work. This is one of the most difficult things to survey and I'll tell you why. The people who have constructed fallout shelters in their home. I'm very

reluctant to advertise the fact. We know people who who have told us about the shelters shown us pictures always though they admonish as never to reveal the location of the fact that they have them. There are two reasons for this one the people don't want to be considered oddballs by the neighbors and secondly and want to pluck some of them don't want the neighbors to know they have them because they've taken the time to prepare them and bill them when they don't want a lot of guests. The man just beaking was Washington D.C. civil defense director Mr. George Roderick's next Dr. Elizee Johnson director of the Johns Hopkins University Operations Research Office continues his discussion of a survey of public opinion on civil defense conducted by his office in Washington and Montgomery County Maryland. When we asked them Well how much would you be willing to spend in a shelter. Since we're talking about shelters primarily state and.

Most are in agreement with what they said to the previous question. We're very much interested in building a shelter. Back then the evidence for that is good that they haven't done so. About 30 percent said Well they'd be willing to spend a hundred dollars to build a shelter. For the family and but only 10 percent or longer spend $200 I didn't explore beyond that but it's clear that if you go up to $500 you don't have much of a chance of getting people in the United States at the present time to spend very much more than they want to $200 for a shelter for the whole family. And as we know that's something that's quite difficult if you're going to have a shelter outside of a basement. And that's what you need if you're concerned with

fire. This is important because if you have a basement shelter. In a house that catches on fire and I don't mean our stomps firestorm in the center of a city but just a suburban house. Then if you're not cooked in that fryer you'll be killed by Capra monoxide just as happened in the case of how the citizens of Hamburg Germany during World walk to arm the Japanese in Tokyo. Most of the people there and these very heavily bombed cities were not killed by blast or the explosives they were killed by Cap'n monoxide poisoning in basements fellas. What about the fire has of the from a basement shelter and of.

Well of course in that instance you have to be very careful that it's built strong enough to withhold your house. We of course advocate that you have concrete or steel above you or any other products such as Clay. You have to get mass weight and all that of course is fire resistant. The thing that's attractive about basement shelters as a protection against fallout is that they're cheap. You can build up a good basement sheller using our CDM approved designs for as low as $50 $50 $100 or $200 500 depending on how much you want to put in and these will be excellent against fall and they're no good against far. Are the fire that are the damage from fire.

Just to be sure that no one will misunderstand me. I should like to make it clear that I am not an advocate of taking your chances and writing out a nuclear attack in the basement of a brick house or in an austere fallout shelter. All that I recommend reliance on improvised shelters in preference to well designed well constructed ones. If you ask me how good a shelter you should build I should answer if you'd asked me how good a house. The answer is the best that you can afford. And if you live near an important strategic target and by near I mean something in the order of 10 miles I think you would be well advised to give some attention on protection from blast effects and from thermal radiation. You of course get some protection against these effects from a good fallout shelter but it should be a good shelter which will not collapse or disintegrate when the blast arrives. If the walls of your shelter collapse the heavy shielding on the building is going to honest is going to come down. Parts of the walls may also become missiles and because of the scattered medical personnel and medical supplies post attack we want to be careful about inviting injure is which we're accustomed

to having easily handled in a peacetime situation by emergency medical care. Probably the most vociferous critique of civil defense in Congress is Sen. Steven M. Young of Ohio. Then hear their program now seems to be they're giving up this idea of evacuation because it seems so silly. Now there are there are adopting another program which is not only equally silly but is very dangerous to our people at the shelter. They are they enlisted a well-known Governor Nelson Rockefeller to a believing that the shelter program was a pretty good thing so we we could call him these things Rockefellers hideaways But here's here's what they're this. If for a homeowner to build a shelter in his basement. And stock it with food you know he'll do a little

good. The car the contractor who builds that will make money and that to get into circulation. If the homeowner stock set with food for two weeks then the corner grocery will make some money selling groceries. But honestly very seriously indeed by atomic attack. A shelter in a basement could well prove a fire trap. In an urban center and result in much added loss of life. And by the way not one civil defense official in my state of Ohio although he sat there and now advocating. Shelters not one has a shelter in his back yard or in his basement arguing the futility of a fallout shelter program. Is Dr Linus Pauling Nobel Prize winning chemist and professor at the California Institute of Technology.

Now what you know what where you with our situation be changed. If we were to spend 20 billion dollars. As has been suggested by the Rams Corporation our 100 billion dollars which has also been suggested far a system of shelters. Well you know Governor Rockefeller of New York State has proposed a vow to New York State to build a shelter in Albany far 600 m far take key personnel of New York State at a cost of four million dollars. This is $6000 per person. This would be over 100 billion dollars if similar shelters were to be built for everybody. I am afraid that even expensive shelters of the SAARC would be of little value if the shelter were in the city near the site of a hit by a 20 megaton bomb. For one

thing people who have gone to the. Basement of a building or a house in this region would find that they house or building had collapsed above them. Of course right underneath the bomb there will be a hole in the ground. A mile wide and three hundred feet deep. Shelters are built very deep so that far in a region of a square mile underneath the site of the bomb blast doesn't make much difference what has been done. Some little distance out however the buildings out for 10 miles the buildings would be expected to collapse into the cellar and people might well be trapped into whatever sort of shelter they are young. There is also another difficulty a great fire storm will break out at Hiroshima. When the little bomb exploded smashing the city over an area 2 miles wide a firestorm raged for six hours. You know a great city

over which Well for example Los Angeles where there are many framed buildings frame houses. These framed buildings would be ignited and dust out to a distance 25 miles from the point of the bomb blast. There would be set up a great fire which would rage for days. All of the oxygen in the air would be used up by the combustion of the combustible materials and the people who were underneath would suffocate from lack of oxygen unless they had a shelter that had a large independent supply of oxygen. Then of course they would have the problem of breathing air that was not contaminated with radioactive materials for a longer period of time and of protecting themselves against the radioactivity even weeks later when they came to the surface. Now in the country side we can ask would it not be possible to protect many people by

building fallout shelters and I believe that it would. I think that if there were to be a great nuclear attack of the sort that I would consider realistic involving several hundred twenty megaton bombs exploded over the United States there there would still be the possibility of saving tens of millions of people with a system of fallout shelters. First we would have to write off the city dwellers the people in metropolitan districts in the RAND Corporation. The studies that have been reported by Mr Hermann Khan to considerable length in his articles and in his testimony before the congressional subcommittee. The assumption was made of that. Population say the urban population about half of the people in the United States would just have to be

written off in a great nuclear attack. But that population be the rural population might be saved to a considerable extent. I think that if shelters were to be built and the country. And if they were to be built in such a way that the people who live in the country were able to get to them in case of nuclear war. If these shelters provided food and drink canned air perhaps far a considerable period of them a rather large fraction of the rural population could be saved by such a system of shelters. The scientists of the RAND Corporation believe that if with such a system of shelters we were to save half of the people who live in the country which would be a quarter of the people who live in the United States. Then they would be able

young town there are 20 or 30 years to rebuild to the United States back to approximately its present state. Even though most of our industrial. Plants are our industrial developments are in the cities and would have been destroyed. They would have to start from scratch. They would have a handicap of having their food radioactive and of having their lives shortened by an estimated 11 years on the average because of the high incidence of cancer and the aging effect of the radiation that they would be subjected to. Nevertheless there is the possibility that in a few years 20 30 years they could rebuild the United States. I don't think that this is an attractive prospect it seems to me that it is so lacking in attractiveness that we would be wise to abandon the effort to save a few

million or tens of millions of American people by the expenditure of many billions of dollars and instead to concentrate on the saving of the lives of all American peoples people by eliminating rar. Ideas similar to those of Dr. Poling are discussed by Mr. Donald key executive director for the National Committee for a sane nuclear policy with a picture of what actually would occur in a nuclear attack I do not think has been widely publicized to the American people I think they have little visual idea of what's involved in a nuclear war. Actually what a home built civil defense shelter program involves is a recognition that our entire urban population will be written off in a nuclear attack because the only value of fallout shelters will be to those people who live

far outside of the urban areas and will be subject only to Fallout carried by the winds from such blasts in other words and they will not be subject to what are called the primary effects of such an attack. What are we preparing for now a maximum civil defense which would protect as many people as possible no matter what the cost or. Something less than that. Now we're preparing for the maximum. I don't write off one American citizen. My objective by law and my personal dedication is to protect the life and property of every American citizen. Now we recognize that the military has an important part to play there to keep as many bombers from hitting us in as many missiles from hitting us but they cannot all be stuffed. So we know some are going to come in

and it's for that reason we urge every citizen to find out through this means through other means contacting local civil defense offices state offices. What are the basic elements. What am I supposed to do. I've told you that these are the things we want to do and if everyone does it and we have a nuclear attack our casualties would be at the minimum. But more important if everyone is thoroughly prepared. That I'm confident no enemy would ever attack us. The. Lord said Lord Lord said cinema and the stars. When you go away you gonna run to.

Prepare for survival is a radio sounding board for facts and opinion. Civil defense written and produced by Richard chick and directed by Alan Murdock next week a continuation of civil defense shelter policy recording editor at Dream music by Dan Logan prepare for survival is recorded by Wayne State University Radio in Detroit for the National Association of educational broadcasters under a grant from the National Educational Television and Radio Center. This is the Radio Network.