Civil Defense

Civil Defense, the protection of American citizens from foreign attack, became a governmental objective in 1941, as World War II began, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia to head the U.S. Office of Civil Defense.After the war, the Cold War and the nuclear arms race led Washington to explore ways of safeguarding citizens from nuclear attack. The Federal Civil Defense Administration, created by President Harry S. Truman in 1951, pursued a variety of approaches, including population dispersal. For example, the government urged military contractors to locate factories in remote areas less vulnerable to an urban‐based attack. The Truman administration also supported a shelter program until the costs began to appear prohibitive. The administration then began cajoling citizens to “Duck and Cover”—drop to their knees and cover their heads—in an atomic attack. With the development of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration promoted a policy of emergency evacuation, changing the orientation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists commented, “from ‘Duck and Cover’ to ‘Run like Hell.’ ”

As scientists reported deadly radioactive fallout from hydrogen bomb tests in the mid‐1950s, policy‐makers offered a new rationale for shelters: protection not from a nuclear blast, but from fallout. Shelter building flourished in the later Eisenhower and early Kennedy years. The Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, established in 1958, distributed free copies of Family Fallout Shelter, a booklet offering protection advice. Some experts advocated deep underground shelters accommodating up to a thousand people. Others proposed more modest basement or backyard shelters. Civil‐defense preoccupations peaked in the early 1960s. As the confrontation between President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev over Berlin reached a crisis level, Kennedy urged Americans to build fallout shelters and asked Congress for an additional $208 million for an expanded shelter program. Interest waned as the confrontation passed, however, and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis prompted sober reflections on both sides. The 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty prohibiting atmospheric nuclear tests minimized the fallout danger, further reducing concern with civil defense. Interest increased in the early 1980s, however, as fears of nuclear holocaust revived and the Ronald Reagan administration promoted a “crisis relocation” program of population dispersal if nuclear war seemed imminent. In the 1990s, as the Cold War ended and the threat of full‐scale nuclear war diminished, civil‐defense planning shifted to the hazards of isolated missile attacks or chemical‐biological assaults from rogue states or terrorist groups.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 suddenly pushed civil defense to the top of the national agenda. Airport security, immigration checks, and surveillance of suspicious persons were intensified and a new cabinet‐level Department of Homeland Security assumed major responsibility for defense against terrorism.
See also Federal Government, Executive Branch, Other Departments: Department of Homeland Security; Nuclear Arms Control Treaties; Nuclear Weapons; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

Allan M. Winkler , A Forty‐Year History of Civil Defense, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 40.6 (June–July 1984).
Allan M. Winkler , Life under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom, 1993.

Allan M. Winkler

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer