This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (16 page)

In April and June 1952, the number of national UFO sightings had risen noticeably after articles about UFOs appeared in
Life
,
Time
, and
Look
. On the morning of July 1, a ground observer volunteer in Boston reported a UFO headed in a southwesterly direction. That afternoon, a George Washington University physics professor contacted the Air Force to report a “dull, gray, smoky-colored” object hovering above Northwest Washington for almost ten minutes. He wasn’t the only one who spotted the object; the city’s newspapers received hundreds of calls. By mid-month, 20 sightings a day across the country were being reported to the Air Force. In New Jersey and Massachusetts, for example, ground observer spotters called their Filter Centers to report unidentifiable lights in the night sky. So many sightings came from the Washington area that staff for Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s UFO investigation unit, took notice. A scientist who had studied the Air Force’s UFO reports predicted, “[W]ithin the next few days, they’re [the sightings] going to blow up and you’re going to have the granddaddy of all UFO sightings. The sighting will occur in Washington or New York, probably Washington.”
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Just days later came the mysterious sightings at National Airport. On July 29, the Filter Center at White Plains, New York, reported an increase in UFO sightings from its 139 posts on 24-hour duty.
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After the Air Force pointed to temperature inversions as the source of the lights, how
ever, the number of sightings began to drop off.
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Understanding the Failure

Alert America and Operation Skywatch boosted civil defense but briefly. Still unimpressed with the DCD, Congress appropriated just $160,000 for the fiscal year 1953 (the request was $800,000), forcing layoffs of several staffers. Fondahl was beside himself. How could he convince residents to volunteer when Congress refused to grant adequate funding? He pointed to Operation Skywatch. If civil defense was unimportant, why would the Air Force ask ground observer posts to go on 24-hour duty? According to Fondahl, the
Soviet Union had started a “hate America” campaign, and the Kremlin wouldn’t push 200 million Soviets into a “frenzy of hate simply for the perverse fun of it,” yet Congress continued to treat the DCD like so much bureaucratic frippery.
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The cuts had immediate negative effects. Chief Warden Max Schwartz reported wardens quitting one after the other. Many cited Congress’s lack of support as the reason, while inactivity frustrated the remaining wardens, leading to more resignations. They had no meeting space, none of the 65 area wardens had permanent headquarters, and they lacked basic equip
ment, even helmets. The Speakers’ Bureau and the indoctrination courses suspended activity until October 1952. Constant turnover in the District’s Civil Defense Advisory Council left it moribund by the year’s end. No wonder Fondahl told the Board of Commissioners that Washington’s civil defense was “practically at a standstill for lack of funds.”
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Fondahl had said such words before, and he would utter them again. The course of civil defense in the District was beginning to read like a script. A crisis erupts, the Soviets testing an atomic bomb, for example, or war breaking out in Korea. Suddenly the nation’s seat of government seems terribly vulnerable. Somber calls for its defense by civilian volunteers echo on the House and Senate floors, in editorials, at neighborhood meetings. A leader is found, an organization formed. The leader, tireless and dedicated, hires a staff and finds a handful of volunteers; they, in turn, drum up recruits. Scant are the resources, the accomplishments modest, but still they labor on, even when an uncaring Congress slashes their budget. The skies are sporadi
cally watched for Soviet planes, a few sections of town are surveyed for shelter space. Drills are held, first aid training given. But as the crisis fades, interest in civil defense falls off; recruitment and training lag. The active few implore the disinterested rest to “pull their heads from the sand” and get involved (YOU are civil defense), for in the age of the atom, eternal vigilance is the price of survival and recovery. Aided by publicity and high-profile exhibits, civil defense ranks start to grow, but then Congress strikes anew. Millions for Raven Rock and the White House shelter, but only a pittance for the locals’ own defense. Devotion turns to discouragement, and one by one, the volunteers begin quitting. But then, somewhere, another crisis erupts . . .

Why did civil defense in Washington fail? If the struggle is now familiar, this question still remains. In our “script,” Congress appears as the villain, but the failure of civil defense in Washington had many sources. Some mirrored the national reasons for civil defense’s failure, others remained unique to Washington; some reasons were obvious, others less so. Many parties shared the responsibility for civil defense’s overall failure: the President, the FCDA and the national security state, the District government and DCD, residents themselves, and yes, Congress. So great were the obstacles that the District’s civil defense program had little chance of meeting its goals. That seems ironic. Shouldn’t civil defense have been most likely to succeed at the seat of government?

John Fondahl said Washingtonians could be divided into three categories: those who doubted there would be an attack, those who believed nothing could be done to survive an attack, and those who considered civil defense the government’s responsibility.
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He was right, but he overlooked a fourth category: those who didn’t want to think about an attack. Like other Americans, Washingtonians had to grapple with the psychological challenges of contem
plating a nuclear holocaust and the deaths of millions, including themselves. Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton once suggested that no matter how difficult it is to imagine death, to do so “clarifies our existential situation and helps us lib
erate ourselves” from the chimera that is civil defense. Like the existentialist who must embrace meaninglessness in order to find freedom, atomic age humans must envision “nuclear futurelessness” in order to recognize prevention as the sole means of preservation.
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For Washingtonians and Americans who reached this level of understanding, civil defense stood as part of the problem, not the solution. But how many accepted this reasoning? To understand atomic apathy, perhaps we should look to another side of existentialism. If, as philosopher Martin Heidegger contended, most persons evade contemplation of their mortality by immersing themselves in the exigencies of daily life, then how likely was it they would imagine their own annihilation, that of the species too, in an atomic war,
and
join civil defense programs?

To save civilization there was no other choice, according to civil defense supporters. Lewis Mumford had his doubts. In a brilliant essay, Mumford, better known for his architectural criticism, imagined four global situations involving atomic weapons. In the first three, nations use atomic bombs against one another, killing tens of millions, even pushing
homo sapiens
to the brink of extinction. In the fourth, there is no atomic warfare, but would “the Atomic Golden Age” commence? Within 100 years, the specter of destruction drains the population from cities (dispersal triumphant), forcing the federal government to assume massive municipal debts. Banks and insur
ance companies are nationalized, free enterprise falters, power concentrates in the military. A subterranean world is carved out, complete with factories, dormitories, and a transcontinental subway. When some reject life under
ground, the government strips them of social welfare; when that fails to staunch the exodus, the “new pioneers” are shot as deserters. So enormous are the weapons stockpiles, so great the fear, that “no country as yet dares make a wholesale atomic attack. Peace reigns: the rigid peace of death.”
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However far-fetched this final scenario seemed, one so grim it made Orwell appear tame, Mumford’s point was that fear of atomic annihilation could be just as destructive as the actual bombs. (All we have to fear is fear itself?) Without even the detonation of one bomb, civilization destroys itself. And yet it cannot die. The human race becomes Kierkegaard’s desperate man
writ large
, caught fast in the sickness unto death, the condition of interminable despair: “To be delivered from the sickness of death is an impossibility, for the sickness and its torment—and death—consist in not being able to die.”
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Such was the dilemma of civil defense in the atomic age. To volunteer, people needed to accept the possibility of their own death, fear it, and yet
believe they could secure their survival. In promoting fear
and
faith, however, the FCDA and DCD unleashed forces they couldn’t easily master. Some might find acceptance of the fear liberating, as Lifton wanted, and see right through civil defense’s dubious premises. Others, agreeing with Mumford, might believe the fear was just as pernicious as the threat. And the rest might react in the simplest possible way: ignore the fear, refuse the faith, and go on living their lives. The vast majority in America and Washington chose daily life. Historian Paul Boyer: “Awesome in prospect, the atomic threat was simply less immediate than one’s job, one’s family, the cost of living.”
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In 1946, the Social Science Research Council studied the public’s attitudes toward atomic weapons. The Council found several contradictions, even nonchalance. Few Americans didn’t know of the bomb’s awesome destructive power, yet its threat didn’t “greatly preoccupy them”; despite scientific doubt that defense against atomic weapons was possible, more than a third believed the United States would devise a viable defense before other nations developed atomic bombs; the same people who thought other nations wanted (and would soon have) atomic bombs also believed the American atomic monopoly promoted world peace. That same year, the Washington-based Federation of Atomic Scientists, seeking to educate Americans about atomic weapons and to build support for international control of atomic energy, discovered that doomsday scenarios seized their audiences’ attention.
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The Council knew, however, the limits of such an approach. To emphasize the bombs’ terrible power actually created “a kind of psychological refuge” in which people reasoned no nation or leader would dare use such weapons. Yet respondents claiming to be unworried by the bomb still acknowledged the danger of the bomb. Reasons offered for the lack of concern sounded very much like responses to any other problem. People shouldn’t worry about something they cannot change; people were too caught up in their own lives; it was someone else’s concern:

I know the bomb can wipe out cities, but I let the government worry about it. To me, it is just like if you were living in a country where there were

earthquakes. What good would it do you to go to bed every night worrying

whether there would be an earthquake?

I got everything I need. From the morning, when I get up, I pick apples and I

get a dollar a bushel. So why should I worry about the bomb
?
You cannot be killed any deader by an atomic bomb than you can by a bullet . . .
^4
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Although the Korean War prompted Washingtonians to rethink their disbe
lief, once the fears faded, so did the interest. Sure enough, when China and the United States began discussing ceasefire terms in July 1951, city residents stopped trickling into the DCD recruitment office. One of Fondahl’s aides remarked: “The city seems to be permeated with indifference and apathy.”
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Educational efforts did little to end the apathy. “Have you heard or read anything about what a person ought to do for his own or his family’s safety if
there were an atomic bomb attack?” asked researchers in a University of Michigan study for the FCDA. In 1950, 62 percent of the interviewees said yes, and they proved it by stating something specific about civil defense; in 1951, 85 percent said yes. However, when asked what was their city’s most important problem, 34 percent picked “Checking up on Communists” while only 25 percent believed their city should prepare for an attack. McCarthy, it appeared, was a better publicist than civil defense directors. (And 17 percent said “Breaking up dope rings” was their hometown’s biggest problem.)
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To crack through the indifference, the FCDA set up Alert America. As seen, Washingtonians attended the exhibit in droves, yet most didn’t take the cru
cial step from awareness to activity. Alert America’s hold on the imagination seemed limited to the exhibit space and duration. As soon as attendees exited the Departmental Auditorium, once the convoy packed up and left town, the duties and diversions of daily life exerted their primacy; the psychological path of least resistance beckoned. Easier to ignore the horror of atomic anni
hilation than to imagine it, better to believe it would never happen than to worry it would. Millard Caldwell called it “atomic ostrichism.”
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Americans were ducking, but they weren’t covering.

The apathy also derived from an unrealistic faith in the armed services’ ability to defend the United States. In 1950, 48 percent of the subjects in the Michigan study believed the military could prevent heavy damage to, or even protect completely, America’s cities. One year later, that figure had risen to 68 percent. These results greatly troubled Caldwell, who recognized that Americans with an “almost blind faith” in the armed forces were unlikely to volunteer for civil defense.
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Caldwell believed that forthright statements would dispel that false assumption. Of 100 attacking Soviet planes, 70 will drop their atomic bombs on American cities, he told one audience.
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Alert America emphasized the home front’s vulnerability, and Truman, whose support for civil defense could never be taken for granted, said in January 1952, “[W]e have no right to feel safe militarily or on the homefront.”
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