If it ever did? Or if there was ever any point in the first place?
I’ve just watched one of the TED lectures on youtube titled, ‘How to survive a nuclear attack’, the lecturer takes the usual sneering tone towards the concept of civil defense, mocking the old ‘Duck and Cover’ cartoons, dispersal plans and bomb shelters.
Personally I think thats rather unfair, regarding Duck and Cover, no it wouldn’t help if an atomic bomb detonated directly above your school, but it would help protect against flash, heat, blast and debris effects from a detonation some distance away, which is what it was meant to do. Same with dispersal and fallout shelters, at least in the early stages when Soviet nuclear warheads were few, hard to deliver and inaccurate.
By 1985 however there were 65’000 warheads worldwide a significent percentage of which were targeted at the US and with much more effective and reliable means of delivery.
So at what point did the balance change from civil defence being worth a try to it being completely pointless? In my personal opinion there does seem to be an attitude of ‘if its not completely effective to save everyone its not worth doing at all’. In a cost/benefit analysis there was probably a tipping point as to whether the expense of sheltering the civilian population was worth it.
Feel free to consider civil defense in other countries as well, I live in Northern Ireland myself, which wouldn’t have been heavily targeted but the UK as a whole had probably a higher density of nuclear targets anywhere outside of the Inner German Border area.
I’d go with ‘it never did’. It’s never pointless to prepare plans and to go over at least rudimentary things with the public in the event of an emergency. I suppose one could say it turned out to be pointless, as we didn’t have a war…but I don’t think preparation is ever pointless. IMHO, we don’t prepare for emergencies enough…at every level.
I’d have to see the lecture, but a lot of people misunderstand what the ‘duck and cover’ thing was really about or for. If you are in the drop zone all the ducking and covering isn’t going to do anything for you…you are dead. If you are outside of the blast zone, however, it might save your life or your sight…or some nasty burns. I’m unsure what dispersal plans would be mocked…again, that seems like it’s something that planners should be doing and involving the public at least at the highest levels. If anything ever DID happen, people who don’t know what to do are going to panic and probably it will lead to more deaths. This is for nuclear weapons as well as high strength hurricanes or myriad other disasters. Bomb shelters? Individual ones might be a bit over the top, but, then again being prepared is always a good thing. Turned out we didn’t need them for a nuclear war during the Cold War, but it’s not like they couldn’t be used for other emergencies. I guess to me this is sort of like mocking someone who has insurance on their house and never needing it. I mean, you paid all that money for years…decades…and never even needed it?? You fool!!!
I suspect that in practical terms, there was a world of difference between a fleet of Soviet TU-95 Bear bombers flying over the pole to drop fission warheads and thousands of ICBM warheads coming in nearly simultaneously on ballistic trajectories bearing high yield fusion warheads.
In the first case, there was every chance that a significant proportion of bombers would be shot down by US and Canadian interceptors, and the ones that did get through would probably be dropping relatively low yield fission warheads. Stuff like “Duck and Cover” makes a lot of sense in that context; while the bombs were (and are) staggeringly destructive, they’re an order of magnitude or two smaller than the thermonuclear weapons later mounted on ICBMs.
So a single bomber making it through NORAD’s defenses and dropping a 20 kiloton warhead on Kansas City a few hours later is a LOT more survivable with Civil Defense techniques than a SS-7 with a 3 megaton warhead coming in with 30 minutes warning from launch to detonation. Multiply that by the number of possible targets, and you get an overwhelming kind of attack and destruction that wasn’t the case in the bomber days.
The government did still put money into civil defense, but it was more in the context of telling people how to survive, not in terms of creating fallout shelters, having duck and cover drills, evacuations, and the like. Essentially they accepted that overwhelming casualties and a great degree of governmental/civil authority collapse was inevitable in the ICBM era.
You don’t do disaster planning based on just the worst case scenario. Certainly, you factor that in, but if you basically have the attitude of ‘well, if they send everything then everyone is fucked…so why bother?’ you won’t be prepared for a disaster that isn’t that bad. Nor will anyone else be prepared. The ‘duck and cover’ things became a running joke, but that’s because people didn’t understand what they were actually drilling for there…and they basically took your attitude that the worst case was the only case. There was always the possibility that a nuclear attack could happen that wasn’t full on, however, or simply that you can’t cover every city equally and folks are bound to be in a place where if they ducked and covered they could potentially avoid death or severe injury.
Like I said, I don’t think disaster planning and preparation are ever a waste or pointless. Frankly, from my experience we don’t do enough of it, especially at the local government level.
I’m not saying it was, or is pointless. I was saying that at a certain time during the MAD era, the expectation in terms of nuclear war WAS an all-out exchange, else MAD was pointless. And if that happened, there wasn’t much you could do about it in terms of civil defense, so they quit worrying about it so much.
That said, stuff like natural disaster preparedness is always relevant, and AFAIK wasn’t neglected any more during the Cold War than at any other time.
The question is – just what ARE you trying to protect people from?
as noted, the “Duck and Cover” wouldn’t be terribly useful if you were right under the point of detonation – a point made very well by the film Atomic Café, which took old films and TV footage and cut them together without any narration or commentary to make their points. In this case, they showed people covering up at an outdoor picnic, followed by This footage of trees being bent over by the blast:
What makes it damning is that these shots aren’t right under the bomb – they’re some distance away (although exactly how far away is rarely stated).
All the above are fission bomb results. In an age of hydrogen bombs, with their orders of magnitude greater output, the blast radius is significantly larger. a Hiroshima-type blast has a “moderate damage” blast radius of about 2 miles, with light damage out to about 3.5 miles For a hydrogen bomb, the fireball alone is comparable to the moderate damage zone, with destructive effects going much farther out. An H-bomb in Boston will damage my home many miles away.
So if you’re many miles away from the blast, I could see it having a useful effect. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that this is a case of “fighting the last war”. Some of the suggestions seem to arise from protecting yourself from the effects of a smaller fission bomb blast, rather than a fusion bomb. The book and film When the Wind Blows not only makes this point, but also has the main characters getting into paper bags to ameliorate the effects of the blast. This derives from an observation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that people wearing clothes with color printed patterns on them got burned in the shape of those patterns because the ink absorbed more heat and radiation than the rest of the cloth. Covering up with unpatterned paper was supposed to eliminate this. I suspect that, in a modern atomic war, this would be a pointless bit of advice.
The thing that I found a bit ludicrous about the duck and cover drills I saw in the news was how out of the blue the bomb attacks tended to be. You are sitting normally in school being taught about Lewis and Clark, and then suddenly FLASH World War 3 has started. I would think that there would have been air raid sirens blaring and civil defense announcements going on over the news, stories of other targets being hit etc.
The notion that civil defense is useless is based off of the assumption that
Nuclear war will be an all-out exchange; nothing in between;
That such a war will be so devastating that civil defense cannot make a difference. Even in a devastated America, such things as having drinking water, food, and a place of shelter are important.
Yes, warheads are lower yield than they used to be, because accuracy has improved they don’t need to have the same high yield if a lower yield with higher accuracy can accomplish the same goals.
Anyway, “duck and cover” is always sound advice, and it’s stupid that we mock it. “LOLOLOL IF YOU DUCK IN GROUND ZERO IT DOES NOTHING”, yeah, no shit. But what if you’re 4 miles from ground zero with a 250KT explosion? Then your biggest immediate dangers are going to be burns on your skin from the flash, and flying glass from the overpressure. In which case “duck and cover” is entirely sensible advice. Yes, duck and cover isn’t going to save everyone, but it increases the amount of savable people that would be saved. And because of the nature of explosions trailing off with the cube of the distance, there are going to be larger mostly survivable areas where survival depends on your circumstances (like being able to duck and cover) rather than ground zero where you have no chance.
Nuclear war has never been as devastating as people think it is. The idea of “we have enough nukes to blow the whole world up 7 times” is bullshit. And actually, as the number of warheads increased, the percentage of the population that was likely to die in the initial attack actually went down. Both sides targeted cities when their weapons were inaccurate enough that it’s all you could reliably hit. But as we developed more sophisticated and accurate delivery methods, targeting went away from deliberately targeting population centers and towards specific targets. Now, a lot of those targets would be things like a critical rail junction in the middle of a major city - but fewer and fewer nukes were tasked with deliberately attacking population centers. And as weapons transitioned into smaller yield fusion bombs mostly set to airburst, the amount of fallout we’d be dealing with would’ve gone down over time too.
IIRC, the US never thought it’d lose more than 50 or 60 million people in the initial strikes, worst case scenario. Obviously that’s horrific, but what about the other 100+ million people? Would they die to the subsequent firestorms, to fallout, to starvation? That’s where civil defense steps in. An effective civil defense program could save millions or tens of millions of lives even after the worst case scenario. The people who mock it don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t understand the realistic effects of nuclear war.
From my admittedly layperson reading on the subject thats been my understanding, which makes me suspect that the lecturer in the TED video doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. He seems to make an, in my opinion, unwarranted divide between gobal nuclear warfare as being utterly unsurvivable and advise on what to do to survive a terrorist attack by a single nuclear device. He even makes the comment that there are still enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world seven times over.
I suspect that for some people the rationale goes that if we accept or admit that even all out thermonuclear war is potentially survivable then that makes it more acceptable, which makes it more likely to happen, therefore we’re better not telling the truth and letting the ordinary wo/man in the street believe it would destroy the entire world.
btw I watched ‘By Dawn’s Early Light’ at an impressionable age and I think thats what started my interest in the subject, still one of my favourite movies!
#/media/File:Hiroshima-nagasaki-atomic-bomb-ww2-incredible-pictures-history-images-photos-001.jpeg){kind=spacer}