Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1961. július-december (10. évfolyam, 28-52. szám)

1961-11-23 / 47. szám

Thursday, Nov. 23. 1961

1 (Zz mile radius): crater 300 ft, deep

2 <4-miIc radius): total destruction, including deep

shelters

3 (6-mile radius): brick buildings, basement shelters

destroyed

4 (10-mile radius): frame buildings destroyed; ordinary shelters useless

5 (15 mile radius): damage from flying objects

6 (25-mile radius): 2-min. exposure to radiation

fatal: danger of death by fire

7 (30-mile radius), edge of fire storm; winds up to

200 mile per houi.

Note: Map does not showT secondary, but dangerous 12,000 square mile radiation belt.

íesearch companies in the Boston area, it would cost at least $15 billion; it would have to be fired in about a nine-to-one ratio for every incoming missile; and the fallout from an interception on the West Coast or inland (or in the East, if the enemy picked the right weather), would do about as much damage as if the missile had arrived, since fallout is most difficult long-range problem. Also, a surprise attack might give no warning — an enemy could lob missiles from submarines to the coastal cities and as far as 1,500 miles inland.

Furthermore, if a ten-megaton warhead is intercepted just inland (and warning time even on trans- ocean strikes is not sufficient for interception very for out) at an altitude say of 30 m., the burst on a clear day would set all combustibles afire over an area of 5,000 square miles, thus roasting and suffocating everyone in a non-cumbustible shelter.

ALL I have said concerns just how protective CD can be, even if it were much better than the current basis for optimism and rugged resolution. One must also ask, furthermore,, how CD can keep a small strike from turning into a big one.

Consider especially an accidental firing,, or an ambiguous explosion from unknown sources, perhaps caused by an Nth country, or even some unaccountable signals in our BMEWS equipment. To press the button in such cases would be to bring on holocaust needlessly. Does CD help avoid this? To the contrary, it increases the likelihood that the button will be pressed—at home by making us less hesitant (and hesitation is the all-important damping mechanism, since in delay reason may operate). But more important, by making our attack potential more credible it increases the likelihood that an accidental launching on our part, or an ambiguous signal on enemy- radar screens, will cause them to press the button. One reason why we did not launch retaliation on Oct. 5, 1960, when our BMEWS radar mistook moon echoes for missiles, was that a Canadian Air Marshal (Sle- mon), who was in charge of NORAD that day, asked one of our officers, “Where is Khruschev?” “In New York City” was the reply. It seemed inconceivable that the Soviets would launch an attack with Khrushchev in New York. Had the Soviet Premier been conducting his business from a blast shelter somewhere, an attack would have been more credible, and the ambiguous data added up differently. This will work the same way in the other direction.

JUST as dangerous as accident is the increasing belligerence of our NATO allies and some other quasi- nuclear powers. CD would reduce fatalities in the first area hit, were that here; but wouldn’t it diminish the likelihood of reflection, double-checking and confirmation? Credibility has a strong count against it here, the more so as one rupposes the chief danger of war to be not premeditated aggression but accident and the consequent panic.

Unfortunately, these are the matters of which officials, planners and commentators speak in abstract terms. But so they must: the dry and distant tone of their discussions, usually mixed with some very reasonable-sounding strategic considerations and some glorious phrases about freedom, resolve and vigor, are necessary both for the listener and the

AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ

speaker. Credibility, like mystic faith, depends on darkness and incense. Let in a little light—a few facts, a critical attitude, a realization of just what is being gambled, a frank discussion of the stakes— and the mood may be broken. Those who have spent any time with the facts know better than to say that a better world lies beyond war, so they either keep their mouths shut or numble the ritual. Their abstractglorious tone is becoming the familiar sign of organized, sanctioned and subsidized bad faith.

I would oversimplify if I were to imply that this charge of bad faith applies across the board. There are humane and decent men among the proponents of civil defense, and certainly some pro arguments are hard to answer. Personally I would not try to talk anyone out of building a shelter; I would only warn him how little can be expected of it and how much trouble it might cause him. It could save his life if he is lucky, and he might be! What, after all, can one demand of a private citizen in a nontarget locality, or a responsible local official, given the trend of international affairs beyond their control? On that level the choise may be simply personal (or commuhal), and perhaps it is necessary to distinguish between two levels of advocacy: local, or private responsibility

and national policy.

Yet there is leakage, and, to speak personally again, my own rejection of CD on the private level is based in part on the sense I have of participating even

Chicago

IF THE COUNTRY survives civil defense, the summer and fall of 1961 will be remembered as the time the agency officials put their family fallout-shelter program on a man-to-God basis.

God was summoned by the new director of the civil-defense agency, Frank B. Ellis, a Louisiana politician. He addressed a conference of the National Association of County Officials in Chicago in mid- August urging px-ivate construction of fallout shelters. Building them is “the Christian thing to do, the Godlike thing.”

“It is just as much a sin to commit suicide by indirection as it is to put a gun up to your head and pull the trigger,” he continued. Building a family fallout shelter, he said, is “just the same* as not committing suicide.”

"Revival for Survival” is Ellis’ slogan for breathing life into the family fallout-shelter idea. In past years people paid little attention, ignoring the distressed cries of civil-defense zealots who blamed apathy for the failure of the plan.

If mere apathy wei'e involved, the shelter campaign should be a smash. Apathy is a pushover to an advertiser who is determined to move his mouthwash, deodorant or soap. The tested, infallible advertising pressures are applicable directly to the family fallout-shelter drive. There is an appeal to individual initiative. To the shovel, Dad! Every man a bricklayer! Save now by choosing an economy miodel! No money down! Easy paymehts! Friendly credit!

The most effective sales pi-essure is fear, of which there is an abundance in the nuclear age. Your children will perish unless you build them fallout protection. Do it now! There is no time to waste! And the clincher: it’s the “Godlike thing” to do.

In the ordinai-y market place, this combination should move anybody. How can a father be so callous as to go to his office on Monday morning without blisters on his hands, when he should have spent the weekend fortifying Ms back yai'd?

No, apathy isn't enough to account for the enormous resistance to this selling campaign, which has everything. The fault is in the program. The family fallout-shelter pitchmen are trying to force a basic moral decision on an individual basis. No one much cares to make a basic moral decision, especially when al he has to go on is the word of a few civil-defense politicians who have done little to inspire confidence.

It is natural, after all, to suspect the objectivity of civil-defense authorities when one considers the career of Ellis predecessor as chief of the federal civil- defense agency. This was Leo A. Hoegh, a former Governor of Iowa, who was in charge of civil defense when the government issued the still-current family fallout-shelter pamphlet. What’ is Mr. Hoegh doing now? He is here in Chicago as executive vice president of the Living Shelters Division of the Wonder Building Corporation. He sells preformed metal fallout shelters.

The decision .to build a fallout shelter privately

there in a repugnant policy and contributing to a dangerous mood. We fortunately have the right to claim private lives, but can we believe it? Not if our personal actions encourage others and the accumulated result is perhaps to reduce casualties from. 30 to 50 per cent, but at the same time by contributing to the despair, delusion and generalized belligerency of our own population and to the insencurity of the enemy, to inci'ease the likelihood of the attack Our actions will help shape the policy.

MEANWHILE, the policy is shaping us. We want it believed that we will smash our opponent for misdemeanors and not count the cost. But if we begin to examine the cost—-the cost of attack, and the cost of credibility it' elf—it would appear that there is only one way to make such a claim truly credible; to prove beyond doubt ’that America does not stand for respect for life, man’s dignity, humane community, liberty in any meaningful sense, or political integrity and decency. When we have proved that to all including ourselves, then we shall know that our weapons system is really credible and will pi'obably deter. We shall know that America is as safe a place to live as any on earth—safe, that is, from attack. But how many of us will choose to live here?- How many rather, will leave at any sacrifice, just as we now see men whom we congratulate leaving the Soviet world because they have lost respect for it and faith in it: because life there has become, for them, living death?

Is this the credibility we are now trying to achieve? I am afraid so. Just as the President must blind himself and us to retain the mood of credibility, so m,ust the State of Nevada make credible by awful means its threat against Southern California, and so must the citizens of Bakersfield theirs to Los Angeles, and so must neighbor to neighbor evei-ywhere.

How they will do this I am not sure; but the process is under way, and if it is completed we shall have achieved not just credibility, but all that goes with it.

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goes beyond the question of whether or not to defend oneself. It demands that each man decide whether he is pi-epared to go into voluntary solitary confinement.

The nature of the decision required has emerged gradually over the weeks from a number of related, events.

On September 15, Life told its millions of readers “How You Can Suiwive Fallout.” As supporting evidence, the magazine reproduced, with modification.«, drawings published in June, 1959, by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. Since the original work had encountered monumental indifference, the reprinted material seamed new to the public and its interest was reflected in the press.

THROUGH the years, the wire services have carried stories about shelters, usually cleai'ly labeied as promotion sflint: sponsored by shelter salesmen. Each had an angle, such as what it is to spend a honeymoon underground. But shelter stories this fall had. less levity.

The Associated Press reported from. Caledonia, N, Y., that one Hugo Maria Kellner, a doctor of philosophy who served in the Nazi Army, built an elaborate fallout and bomb shelter in the hills south of Rochester. It will protect his family only. A picture with the itory showed Kellner standing at the doorway of the shelter holding an Enfield rifle. He was quoted as prepared to use the rifle to keep outsiders from entering. Hollywood columnist Mike Connolly described a Palm Springs, California, shelter built by Kvatt Von Dehn, former husband of Ginny Sims. Thi' is “a push-button operation with air conditioning, living room, play room, two bedrooms, three TV sets, four radios, a wellstocked larder and an underground swimming pool.”

From these, and similar stories, the public learned that those saved will include rich Nazi Army, vete- rans and ex-husbands of former movie stars. The inevitable suspicion i that the family fallout-shelter program is for the solvent, while the poor presumably will see God.

ABOUT the time E’lis was bringing his version of the Christian viewpoint on family fallout shelters to Chicago, a related matter came to the attention of the local city and county authorities. In this area, it appeared, building-permit regulations practically prohibited fallout-shelter construction. So, with considerable fanfare, the code wei'e quickly amended. Both city and county now give permits free.

But the public couldn’t have cared less. In the- f’rit. fnrUr.flve rtnv« under the new regulations, the city issued exactly five shelter permits and the county passed out two.

Chicago has 500 000 buildings, most of them stuffed v/ith people. Officialdom admitted it wa' baffled George L. Ramsey, the Chicago Building Commissioner. said:

“I can’t understand it. First, all this hubbub about- h w thousands of no "Pie want t,a build shelters to protect their families, but couldn't because of certain

II. THE RELUCTANT MOLES — by John Kay Adams