This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (7 page)

In order to resolve these problems, in November the NSRB issued a corollary report entitled “Security for the Nation’s Capital—Emergency Plan.” Assuming that “the increased tension in international affairs may result in termination of peace at any time,” the report urged the Defense Department to immediately select military units for dispersal, suggested the Federal Works Agency find alternate locations for Congress, and asked the Bureau of the Budget to determine which civilian agencies could be decentralized. The plan also proposed the speedy construction of “underground structures with necessary transportation and communication facilities.” Hill hoped this two-step plan would complement the first report, but it only added to the confusion. For example, “Security for the Nation’s Capital” had said Budget should select civilian and military agencies to disperse, but the “Emergency Plan” said Defense should oversee the military’s dispersal.
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Nevertheless Hill fired off the “Emergency Plan” to Truman, who had fed some crow to political prognosticators by beating Thomas Dewey in the election.

It was one of Hill’s last actions as chairman of the NSRB. Annoyed by his impolitic ways, Truman forced Hill to resign in December and appointed his
trusted aide John R. Steelman, an Arkansan with a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina. For the last two years, Steelman had worked as a liaison to Congress; legislators seeking favors from the President first had to see Steelman. Unlike Hill, Steelman understood that the President wanted the NSRB to limit itself to planning tasks without taking on their implementation.
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However, Hill’s work wasn’t all in vain. In January 1949, Steelman approved the recommendations of “Security for the Nation’s Capital.”
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In light of the report’s many flaws, which the “Emergency Plan” had only exacerbated, this approval meant little, and NSRB staff knew it. Throughout January they kept the secretarial pool busy typing up criticisms, especially about the “Emergency Plan.” It “relates primarily to proposed
planning
activities rather than to the
results
of planning,” wrote one staff member (emphasis in original).
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Enter Tracy Augur. He first cut through the NSRB’s clutter, separating long-term and short-term dispersal into two distinct planning threads. Augur then decided to draft a plan to build rudimentary but serviceable office structures at dispersed sites just over the District’s borders. Should war come, reasoned Augur, the government could rapidly erect the buildings and relocate essential personnel. Next he turned his attention to a long-term dispersal blueprint that not only meshed with the short-term plan, but also fulfilled his vision of creating cluster cities. Unlike the NSRB, he worked closely with the National Capital Park and Planning Commission (hereafter Park Commission). Since its authority included “preparing, developing and maintaining a comprehensive, consistent and coordinated plan for the National Capital and its environs,” the Park Commission obviously had a big stake in dispersal.
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Augur also benefited from fortuitous timing. His completion of the short-term plan coincided with news of the Soviet Union’s atomic test, and he submitted the long-term plan one month before the Korean War started. These two events dramatically affirmed the warnings of dispersal advocates. If Congress had acted on Augur’s visions, then Washington and the region would have changed drastically during the 1950s.
If
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Imagining the Emergency Capital

Augur began working on the emergency dispersal plan during the summer of 1949.
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Poring over maps of the Washington area in search of building sites, he lingered on 1,800 undeveloped, government-owned acres near Greenbelt, Maryland, approximately 13 miles northeast of downtown Washington. He knew this land well.

Greenbelt was a planned community, the brainchild of New Deal panjan
drum Rexford Tugwell. In 1935, Tugwell had designated rural land bordering the Beltsville National Agricultural Research Center in Prince Georges County as the site for a model community to be built by the federal government’s Resettlement Administration. Tugwell foresaw benefits such as a pastoral setting close to an urban center, low-cost housing for working families, and
construction jobs for unemployed men. The Resettlement Administration drafted plans for additional “greenbelt” communities but only built two more, Greendale, Wisconsin, and Greenhills, Ohio. Construction in Greenbelt began in October 1935. Within two years, an intact town with 885 row houses, community hall, and library had risen amid gently rolling woods and pastures. The Resettlement Administration also paved streets, poured sidewalks, and installed utilities. And it excluded African Americans— only white families with annual incomes below $2,000 could lease the government-owned homes.

The Maryland town took its name from a centuries-old English planning concept known as the greenbelt, a swath of open, natural space encircling a community. The designer of Greenbelt’s namesake was none other than Augur, who hoped to surround each greenbelt community with half-mile wide rings of trees and fields. These buffers ideally directed residents’ atten
tion and movement inward so that shopping, socializing, and recreation took place within the town. The greenbelt, he said, “should be wide enough and open enough in character that persons crossing it by automobile will distinctly realize that they have left one community and entered another.” Street designs and sidewalks further encouraged the community bonds prized by Augur and his fellow planners. (None of the three towns kept their belts, however; subsequent development erased them.)
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Through dispersal, Augur now had a chance to revisit Greenbelt. The undeveloped acreage encircling the town offered attractive sites for govern
ment buildings and campuses, but he needed to act quickly. In May 1949, Truman signed legislation authorizing the sale of the three communities; Greenbelt residents had already formed a homeowners’ corporation.
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Fortunately Augur had the cooperation of the Public Housing Administration, which delayed sale of Greenbelt’s undeveloped acres.
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Along with Public Housing official James Wadsworth and John Nolen, Jr., director of planning for the Park Commission, Augur pinpointed several sites suitable for wartime federal offices. Area A included more than 300 acres abutting the planned route of the Baltimore–Washington Parkway. Drawbacks included hilly terrain, lack of water and sewer mains, and distance from rail lines. Area B was the largest site, more than 1,100 acres just west of the Parkway route. It too offered good road access, but the National Park Service and the Park Commission hoped to create a regional park there. Area C encompassed some 400 acres between the Greenbelt public high school and the town’s western boundary.
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Augur soon realized these sites couldn’t absorb all of the projected growth of a wartime government. Budget estimated executive branch employment in Washington would swell to 289,000 if an emergency arose before January 1, 1952. (As of December 1948, the executive branch employed approximately 180,000 persons.) According to Budget, 16,000 of the new positions could be accommodated through intensified use of buildings within eight miles of the zero milestone marker. (An unremarkable block of stone located just south of the White House, the marker stands in the center of the District’s
original boundaries; dispersal planners frequently used it as a theoretical ground zero.) Most of the remaining 93,000 positions, reasoned Augur, could be placed in new, temporary buildings dispersed along a 6 to 20 mile ring around the milestone marker. Thus “the problem boils down to one of finding sites on which groups of temporary buildings can be erected rapidly in the event of an early declaration of emergency.” Such sites ideally would already belong to the government and have highway access, water and sewer mains, and utilities. But there was a hitch, a big one—the military’s emergency plans. Budget’s estimate of new emergency positions included 77,000 military personnel. According to Augur, if the military relocated that personnel to its own bases and buildings, then he only had to find sites for the new civil positions.
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That was a big “if,” but he counted on the military taking care of itself.

By September, Augur, Nolen, and Wadsworth had studied more than 20 sites in Maryland and Virginia. Consideration of topography, highway access, utilities, and distance from developed areas pared the list down to 11. They deemed five sites “generally satisfactory” for construction of wartime tempos for civil executive agencies: Greenbelt Area C; Suitland and Oxon Hill, Md.; and Springfield and Annandale, Va. All were at least six miles from the zero milestone marker; one, Springfield, lay 11 miles away. The federal government owned the Greenbelt and Suitland sites, the others were privately owned. Augur’s report offered vivid details, recommendations for development, and balanced analysis of each site’s merits.

Imagine
. . . one mile southeast of the District Line, seven air miles from the zero milestone marker, clusters of two- and three-story office buildings in Suitland, halfway between Andrews Air Force Base and the Naval Gun Factory. From the District, the site is reached via the Eleventh Street Bridge and the Suitland Parkway. The flat-roofed buildings are long and narrow, lacking ornamentation, but are fully serviced by water and sewer mains, electricity, and telephone lines. Inside, 5,000 federal employees carry out the administrative work of a government at war. Nearby, the Navy’s Hydrographic Office and the Bureau of the Census also bustle with activity. Delivery trucks pull up, the clatter of typewriters carries from open office doors.

Eleven miles southwest of the zero milestone marker, similar buildings are scattered on a site in Fairfax County, Va., near the town of Springfield. The Henry G. Shirley Highway provides access to the District, and to the south, the highway connects to U.S. Route 1. Cul-de-sacs and curving streets lined with new homes border the site’s western edge. A developer was construct
ing these residences when the federal government suddenly began clearing copses and grading farm fields to build offices. About four miles north, in Annandale, there are more office buildings, also built on fields close to residential development, with buffers of open land or highway separating the homes from the office buildings.

In Prince Georges County, Md., students at Oxon Hill High School learn geometry and run hurdles one-half mile south of yet another of the
government’s campuses. Drivers reach the site, seven miles from the zero milestone marker, by taking South Capitol Street and the new bridge over the Anacostia; at the District Line, South Capitol becomes Indian Head Road, leading directly to the buildings. Land was acquired from private owners, and the structures are interspersed between residential developments and a few farms.

West of Greenbelt lies a fifth site, 100 acres of wooded, sloping land cleared and graded to make room for hastily constructed office buildings. Greenbelt residents had hoped to develop the area as an industrial park, but the federal government’s emergency plans took priority. Just to the east is Lake Greenbelt; to the north, the Department of Agriculture’s research center.
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Ironically, Augur hoped this construction would never happen. The federal government, he wrote, should build these structures only “in the event of a war emergency prior to the completion and implementation of the long-range Master [Dispersal] Plan.”
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But even if armed conflict spurred short-term dispersal, a few tempos couldn’t transform the capital and region into model cluster cities; a long-term plan was required. Just before Augur turned his full attention to this work, America’s loss of its atomic monopoly rendered abstract concerns about a future “war emergency” into powerful fears.

During the Labor Day weekend, a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane flying nearly 20,000 feet above the North Pacific detected abnormal levels of radiation in the atmosphere. Additional flights were hurriedly ordered, more data collected. For the next two weeks, the Air Force and the AEC scrutinized hundreds of samples before confirming their hypothesis: the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb on August 29.
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Receiving the news with equa
nimity, Truman informed his Cabinet on September 23. Outside the meeting room’s closed doors, his press secretary handed a statement to reporters, who stampeded to the nearest telephones to call their editors. The President assured Americans that the government had long anticipated this day, but his anodyne assurance masked the now-shattered assumption that the Soviet Union was months, even years, away from detonating an atomic weapon. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson provided behind-the-scenes support for Truman by scolding reporters, “I warn you, don’t overplay this.”
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Apparently that message didn’t reach the Capitol, where civil defense and the security of the nation’s capital suddenly became urgent matters. Second-term Congressman John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) chided the President, telling him, “it is shocking to find that so little progress has been made in this vital field [civil defense].” In the House, Robert Hale (R-Maine) introduced a resolution authorizing Congress to study protective measures for the presi
dent, Congress, and “other essential Government personnel in the event of war or sudden attack,” and James Trimble (D-Ark.) drafted a constitutional amendment to allow ranking military officers to name an interim chief
executive should both the president and vice president die. (Trimble’s bill, which went nowhere, would have superceded the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.)
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Wright Patman (D-Tex.) even wanted to move the seat of gov
ernment west of the Mississippi River, and not just because he feared a Soviet bomb could destroy Washington. “The District of Columbia is an overgrown whistle stop,” he complained, a “muggy marshland [turned] into a swollen metropolis teeming with automobiles that drag along at a snail’s pace during rush hours.” In the Senate, Brien McMahon (D-Conn.) announced that the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which he chaired, would hold closed-door hearings on what the federal government was doing to protect civilians in case of atomic war. Sen. Alexander Wiley (R-Wisc.) even proposed fitting out train cars to serve as a mobile capital.
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