Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

The FCDA had argued for years that people could survive a nuclear attack by seeking some form of shelter. An animated character, Bert the Turtle, urged America’s schoolchildren to “duck and cover”—to hide under classroom tables or desks as soon as they saw the flash of an atomic bomb. And a widely distributed civil defense pamphlet, “Survival Under Atomic Attack,” provided useful and encouraging household tips:

YOUR CHANCES OF SURVIVING AN ATOMIC ATTACK ARE BETTER THAN YOU MAY HAVE THOUGHT…. EVEN A LITTLE MATERIAL GIVES PROTECTION FROM FLASH BURNS, SO BE SURE TO DRESS PROPERLY…. WE KNOW MORE ABOUT RADIOACTIVITY THAN WE DO ABOUT COLDS…. KEEP A FLASHLIGHT HANDY…. AVOID GETTING WET AFTER UNDERWATER BURSTS…. BE CAREFUL NOT TO TRACK RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS INTO THE HOUSE….

The destructive power of the hydrogen bomb forced civil defense planners to alter their recommendations. Suburban families were advised to remain in underground shelters, windowless basements, or backyard trenches for four or five days after a thermonuclear blast. Urban families were told to leave their homes when an attack seemed likely. Eisenhower’s plans for an interstate highway system were justified by the need to evacuate American cities during wartime. Val Peterson called for concrete pipelines to be laid alongside the new roads, so that refugees could sleep inside them and avoid fallout. “Duck and cover,” one journalist noted, was being replaced by a new civil defense catchphrase: “Run for the hills.”

Hoping to boost morale and demonstrate that a nuclear war would not mean the end of the world, the FCDA staged Operation Alert 1955 during June of that year. It was the largest civil defense drill in the nation’s history. During a mock attack, sixty-one cities were struck by nuclear weapons, ranging in yield from 20 kilotons to 5 megatons. As air-raid sirens warned that Soviet bombers were approaching, fifteen thousand federal employees were evacuated from Washington, D.C. The president and members of his Cabinet were driven to secret locations and remained there for three days. Throughout the United States, families climbed into shelters or rehearsed their escape routes. In New York City, everyone was cleared from the streets and kept indoors for ten minutes, bracing for the arrival of a Soviet hydrogen bomb — whose ground zero, for some reason, would be the corner of North 7th Street and Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Administration officials called Operation Alert a great success. The secretary of the Treasury, George M. Humphrey, said that the exercise demonstrated the United States would “be able to take it” and “recover surprisingly rapidly.” Out of a U.S. population of about 165 million, only 8.2 million people would be killed and 6.6 million wounded — and more than half of those casualties would be in New York City. If everybody took the right precautions, Val Peterson assured reporters, “we might — ideally — escape without losing any lives from fallout.”

In a public statement, Eisenhower said the drill had brought him “great encouragement.” But at a Cabinet meeting, he summed up his feelings in one word: “staggering.” On the first day of Operation Alert, the president had declared martial law, transferring power from the state governments to half a dozen Army field commands. The casualty figures released to the press vastly understated the likely impact of a thermonuclear war. A new word had entered the lexicon of nuclear war planning: megadeath. It was a unit of measurement. One megadeath equaled one million fatalities — and the nation was bound to suffer a great many megadeaths during a thermonuclear war. On January 23, 1956, President Eisenhower recorded in his diary the results of a top secret study on what would really happen after a Soviet attack:

The United States experienced practically total economic collapse, which could not be restored to any kind of operative conditions under six months to a year…. Members of the Federal government were wiped out and a new government had to be improvised by the states…. It was calculated that something on the order of 65 % of the population would require some sort of medical care, and in most instances, no opportunity whatsoever to get it….