# At what point did Civil Defense in the USA during the Cold War become pointless? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 23, 2017, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550 "2017-02-23T14:04:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/41 "2017-02-27T15:47:11Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > Are you not forgetting the sheer size of the USA? Even if every American city were nuked, Lower Bumfuck in Kansas is likely to be entirely unscathed, at least in the short term. I expect that the Amish would be much in demand to teach the older ways. No, I’m not forgetting the sheer size of the US. I don’t think you’re getting what the complete destruction of infrastructure means. Sure, Lower Bumfuck, Kansas is going to be completely unscathed in the short term, if you don’t count the radioactive fallout. They must also be a pretty backwards, backwater part of the US if they don’t have any of those newfangled inventions like electricity, indoor running water, indoor toilets, heating, air conditioning or any of those gasoline powered vehicles. It lacking all of these before the bombs drop is the only way it is going to come off ‘unscathed’ in the short term, because all of those are going to be gone right after the bomb drops. I’m sure the Amish with their devotion to non-violence are going to thoroughly enjoy their brief visit from the English when they stop by - I believe I mentioned something about masses of armed, starving refugees earlier. I’m not sure what all of this has to do with the price of tea in China though; do you imagine Lower Bumfuck, Kansas with its lack of electricity, toilets, and metal horseless wagons is going to come and save the day for America in a post-nuclear holocaust? Or that the Amish keep enough food stockpiled to feed all of Lancaster County for a year while they teach them the older ways? God help them when the armed, starving refugees from the suburbs of Harrisburg, Reading, Philadelphia, etc. start showing up. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/42 "2017-02-27T16:16:43Z")
Is there a list available of where Civil Defense bomb shelters are/were? ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/43 "2017-02-27T16:27:46Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > do you imagine Lower Bumfuck, Kansas with its lack of electricity, toilets, and metal horseless wagons is going to come and save the day for America in a post-nuclear holocaust? Such towns managed perfectly well before the advent of mechanisation, electricity, and so on. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/44 "2017-02-27T16:34:33Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Is there a list available of where Civil Defense bomb shelters are/were? As far as I know there isn’t a consolidated map for the whole country. But if you Google ‘map of civil defense bomb shelter locations \’ you can get some links that show older ones that have been decommissioned or some that are still in use. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/45 "2017-02-27T16:40:29Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > Such towns managed perfectly well before the advent of mechanisation, electricity, and so on. But most if not all are completely dependent today on technology that wouldn’t be functional anymore. Even small towns are dependent on logistical systems and electrical systems (as well as information systems) that would completely break down in the event of a full-scale nuclear war. By and large, even areas that might be only slightly affected by fallout would still find it very difficult to survive intact. The Amish would be fucked, of course, because of where they mainly are…no way would they survive the destruction of basically all of the major cities surrounding them. I think you are making an assumption that because in the past people survived well without ‘mechanisation, electricity, and so on’ that they could simply go back to that. Eventually, that might be the case (almost certainly there will be survivors who get through both the short and medium term issues)…but not in the short term, and there wouldn’t be lots of survivors to rebuild the US from such rural survivors. ---
**Author:** ![Atomic\_Alex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atomic_alex/32/175_2.png) [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/46 "2017-02-27T17:33:56Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > Whether they choose to kill themselves or not isn’t really the point and is a rather moot question: they are going to die anyway. Mass starvation and disease don’t care about your will to survive. It isn’t a question of people’s unwillingness to adapt to a 17th century lifestyle that is going to cause them to die. You seem to be pretty invested in this for some reason given the intensity of your responses. I don’t believe everyone would die and a willingness to survive really would count for a lot, it always does. > [@Dissonance](#): > > In a full-scale exchange, the US, Canada, all of Europe, the USSR, both Chinas, Japan, Australia and the Koreas would all have had nearly every major population center destroyed. Add to that most likely any US military base on foreign soil would be hit, so goodbye Panama City, Subic Bay, etc. The nations least directly effected by the exchange would be in Africa and South America, the very same nations with the least ability to send relief aid to normal act of god disasters, much less the apocalyptic nuclear conflagration that we’re talking about which would have destroyed every major population center and effectively destroyed the countries hit as nations in any sense or form. > > Even if you want to question nuclear winter, aside from the nuclear fallout, the economic fallout of those nations in Africa and South America would be devastating with the sudden and complete vaporization of most of the world’s economic market. Given their extremely limited ability to even send any kind of ‘help’ that would be remotely meaningful in the first place, now factor in that they’ve got huge additional problems of their own, _why would they bother even trying to send aid to the First World which has just blown itself up_ when such aid would be utterly insignificant and beyond their abilities even before said nuclear exchange occurred? In the short term perhaps, in the medium to long term the reshuffling of the international order would lead to who knows which nations or groups of nations rising to power and which would be able and willing to render aid, if for no other reason than to carve off chunks of the former first world nations for themselves. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/47 "2017-02-27T17:38:13Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > Whether they choose to kill themselves or not isn’t really the point and is a rather moot question: they are going to die anyway. Mass starvation and disease don’t care about your will to survive. It isn’t a question of people’s unwillingness to adapt to a 17th century lifestyle that is going to cause them to die. > In a full-scale exchange, the US, Canada, all of Europe, the USSR, both Chinas, Japan, Australia and the Koreas would all have had nearly every major population center destroyed. Only under the extremely unlikely occurrence of a “full-scale exchange”. This is like saying Californians shouldnt bother with earthquake preparedness , since a Richter 10.5 will kill us all anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/48 "2017-02-27T18:54:07Z")
The “likelihood” of a full-scale exchange is speculative. In many tabletop exercises, attempts to minimize the nuclear exchange fall apart and things tend to escalate. It may well be that a full-scale exchange is _likelier_ than a partial one. At least once, this idea saved us a good deal of trouble (see: [Stanislav Petrov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov)). In regards to the OP, are we sure duck-and-cover civil defense was ever really aimed at preserving lives in an exchange? It’s always felt to me more like a bit of social engineering, designed as much to “keep the scare on” and keep the Cold War dollars rolling, as it was to save lives in a nuclear war. _The Red Menace is imminent! The missile gap must be filled!_ ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/49 "2017-02-27T20:31:56Z")
> [@Atomic\_Alex](#): > > You seem to be pretty invested in this for some reason given the intensity of your responses. > > I don’t believe everyone would die and a willingness to survive really would count for a lot, it always does. Where, exactly, did I say everyone would die? The only thing I’m invested in is reality. The reality is that the tens of millions killed instantly in the US in a strategic exchange are going to be followed by tens of millions more dying from radiation poisoning, then by tens of millions more from starvation and endemic outbreaks of diseases that modern societal structure, infrastructure, sanitation and medicine prevent from occurring such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. This reality doesn’t care how strong your “willingness to survive” is, whatever that means, and is going to count for exactly jack shit. One may as well try to use one’s “willingness to survive” to stay alive by deflecting the blast, heat and radiation of a nuclear fireball with it. > [@Atomic\_Alex](#): > > In the short term perhaps, in the medium to long term the reshuffling of the international order would lead to who knows which nations or groups of nations rising to power and which would be able and willing to render aid, if for no other reason than to carve off chunks of the former first world nations for themselves. That’s hugely moving the goalpost; you’re now talking about politics and nature abhorring a vacuum and nations staking their claims on the wreckage long after the mass die offs, not about outside aid coming to the rescue with emergency aid to keep the survivors alive. > [@DrDeth](#): > > Only under the extremely unlikely occurrence of a “full-scale exchange”. This is like saying Californians shouldnt bother with earthquake preparedness , since a Richter 10.5 will kill us all anyway. I’ve been responding to comments that have already assumed a full-scale exchange has occurred, reducing society to a 17th century lifestyle. ---
**Author:** ![Atomic\_Alex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atomic_alex/32/175_2.png) [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/50 "2017-02-27T20:49:42Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > Where, exactly, did I say everyone would die? The only thing I’m invested in is reality. The reality is that the tens of millions killed instantly in the US in a strategic exchange are going to be followed by tens of millions more dying from radiation poisoning, then by tens of millions more from starvation and endemic outbreaks of diseases that modern societal structure, infrastructure, sanitation and medicine prevent from occurring such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. This reality doesn’t care how strong your “willingness to survive” is, whatever that means, and is going to count for exactly jack shit. One may as well try to use one’s “willingness to survive” to stay alive by deflecting the blast, heat and radiation of a nuclear fireball with it. > > That’s hugely moving the goalpost; you’re now talking about politics and nature abhorring a vacuum and nations staking their claims on the wreckage long after the mass die offs, not about outside aid coming to the rescue with emergency aid to keep the survivors alive. I _thought_ I was having an interesting discussion involving various hypothetical situations, as indeed most of the responses in this thread have been, you appear to want to have an argument, I’m not interested in talking to someone with such an aggressive and rude attitude. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/51 "2017-02-27T20:53:47Z")
Dissonance, you’re conflating two different things; 1) The ability to survive and 2) the will to survive. “Will to survive” won’t protect someone from circumstances outside of their control, but it may propel them to take all available measures to maximize the factors that are in their control. Someone who wants to live, may cultivate a farm in an area relatively unaffected by fallout, or at least try to migrate to a better place. Someone who doesn’t want to live, might just put a gun to their head and end it. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/52 "2017-02-27T21:33:21Z")
For those accustomed to thinking of fallout as something that will create permanent “death zones” lasting centuries, it’s surprising just how quickly fallout decays to non-lethal levels. The ability to stay for two-four weeks in a shielded shelter breathing filtered air would protect almost everyone not in a directly targeted urban area. Many areas would receive much less fallout than that. The Reagan administration was ridiculed for suggesting that nuclear war might be less apocalyptic than presumed, but speaking strictly in terms of surviving immediate fallout, they had a point. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2017, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/53 "2017-02-27T21:36:49Z")
I would think that the “skill/brains to survive” would do you better than the “will to survive”. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2017, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/54 "2017-02-28T14:43:33Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > Dissonance, you’re conflating two different things; 1) The ability to survive and 2) the will to survive. > > “Will to survive” won’t protect someone from circumstances outside of their control, but it may propel them to take all available measures to maximize the factors that are in their control. > > Someone who wants to live, may cultivate a farm in an area relatively unaffected by fallout, or at least try to migrate to a better place. Someone who doesn’t want to live, might just put a gun to their head and end it. I’m not conflating anything, “will to survive” doesn’t grant one knowledge of subsistence farming, or the knowledge of where a better area to migrate is, or more importantly the food to live off of while migrating to said unknown place on foot. As I’ve said, lack of a willingness to live a 17th century lifestyle isn’t what’s going to be killing people, and whether they kill themselves or die of disease or starvation is a moot point; they are going to die either way. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2017, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/55 "2017-03-16T17:13:53Z")
Slight zombie, but most posters are failing to understand \*\*Dissonance \*\* when he says that people are screwed. It is not that people will not be able to adjust to a 17th century (BC) existence, its that infrastructure that supported that type of existence, _no longer exits_ today and the people who survive have no knowledge how to recreate let alone use that infrastructure. To take an example. For millennia humans used horses and other beasts for transport and work. They have now largely been replaced by mechanized vehicles in most of the world. If Alien Space Bats make all of the world’s motor vehicles disappear, do you think we would be able to shift to using animals again? Obviously not, we no longer breed animals in that number, nor does the average man and woman have any knowledge in how to employ them. This does not even consider the systems which exist today which are predicated on things like motor vehicles to be workable. We can easily have population centers far from food producing regions today, because we can easily support them. If all trucks disappear, its not like you can say “ok, lets use an Ox Cart” and Oxen Carts based transport cannot carry anywhere remotely comparable food volume, nearly as far or fast. For a real world example, look at Iraq. The birthplace of civilization. For the first 4.5 millennium of human written history, one of the centers of the world. After the Mongols destroyed the areas infrastructure they did not devolve top an earlier level of existence. Large parts of the place became uninhabitable and remained so even till today. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2017, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/56 "2017-03-20T21:01:28Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > Such towns managed perfectly well before the advent of mechanisation, electricity, and so on. I imagine it’s a lot easier to dig an outhouse when you don’t have radiation sickness. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2017, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/57 "2017-03-21T00:37:00Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > We can easily have population centers far from food producing regions today, because we can easily support them. If all trucks disappear, its not like you can say “ok, lets use an Ox Cart” and Oxen Carts based transport cannot carry anywhere remotely comparable food volume, nearly as far or fast. Are you not forgetting that there will not be the need - at least in the short term - for sophisticated logistics? BTW ox-cart based transport was more than sufficient to feed ancient Rome’s population of a million or more. Granted humans breed fast, but livestock breeds faster. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2017, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/58 "2017-03-21T23:56:10Z")
It was _always_ pointless. What were you supposed to do - the sirens would go off, you’d go huddle in the school basement for a couple of weeks until the fallout blew away, come back out, and … what then? ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2017, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/59 "2017-03-22T04:17:18Z")
> [@Buck\_Godot](#): > > 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. I don’t think a nuclear attack would have been “out of the blue”, at least in the way I believe you are portraying it. I think that sort of unnoticed sneak attack was theoretically barely possible but 99.9% of the time an incoming ICBM and/or bomber attack would definitely have been detected by the military. The only question was: how accurately and how quickly would that detection get passed along to Joe and Jane Six-pack. And that’s what the whole Cold War era Civil Defense was about–passing along information from the military to the civilian population as effectively as possible. Unless there was a total breakdown in the system or… [CT alert!] …for wherever reason the government chose not to pass along the information… [/CT alert!] …the first sign of an attack, to paraphrase Condi Rice, would NOT have been a mushroom cloud. There almost certainly WOULD have been “air raid sirens blaring and civil defense announcements going on over the news, stories of other targets being hit”. One question implicitly contained in this thread is: but how much good would that really have done? ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2017, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550/60 "2017-03-22T06:14:43Z")
> [@joema](#): > > He then mocked the “duck and cover” and Civil Defense measures, implying this was naively conceived and intended to magically protect people against a direct nuclear strike on their location. He used the term “delusional”. I think the “duck and cover” type measure can also be thought of as something of a psyops mission but directed toward your own citizenry instead of against the enemy. There was a shitload of anxiety about nuclear war back then. If duck and cover and other Civil Defense efforts could help relieve the anxiety of Americans even a little then that’s worth something. After all, the bombs never fell so perhaps the greatest victory of those CD measures was just to alliterative the panic to some extent. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-point-did-civil-defense-in-the-usa-during-the-cold-war-become-pointless/780550.md?page=4)