Civil Defense

Civil Defense. Even after the advent of nuclear weapons, the civil defense program did not begin in earnest in the United States until 1951, reaching an initial peak of federal interest in the early 1960s, and a second peak in the early 1980s. In both periods, a nuclear civil defense program, whenever it moved beyond mere rhetoric to be seriously supported by high federal officials, immediately elicited general hostility, set the scientific and political elite to arguing in public, and energized peace groups into successful action to discredit the program and return it to its usual marginal status in American life.

President Truman resisted significant funding for civil defense, preferring to save money for weapons, but the beginning of the Korean War and the Soviet Union's development of an atomic bomb led to the creation of the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) in 1951. Congress continually cut FCDA funding requests by at least half. The agency concentrated on producing propaganda, which it termed “educational material.” A flood of booklets, films, television shows, and media stories sought to convince the American public they could survive a nuclear attack with minor preparations. Meanwhile, many public schools initiated atomic air‐raid drills, teaching children to “Duck and Cover!” in case of nuclear war.

In the Eisenhower era, a series of nuclear bomb tests, in both the Pacific and the American West, dramatized the danger of blast and radioactive fallout. The creation of the H‐bomb convinced many Americans that civil defense was useless. The FCDA shifted from a shelter program to a policy of evacuation of the cities, which was met with public ridicule. From 1955 to 1962, national air‐raid drills called “Operation Alert” were held each year in dozens of major cities. These drills set off major protests nationwide, especially in New York City, where between 1955 and 1961 thousands of people participated in well‐organized civil disobedience efforts to discredit civil defense as a solution to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Several large cities refused to participate in Operation Alert drills, and millions of citizens simply ignored them. In 1958, President Eisenhower, who fully understood the horrific effect of nuclear exchange, ignored a call for a hugely expensive civil defense program issued by his FCDA director and supported by Cold War conservatives. He cut civil defense funds and shut down the FCDA. Despite lack of government financial support, a brief shelter craze occurred in the late fifties and early sixties, largely stimulated by the press and construction firms.

Presidential support for civil defense peaked in the Kennedy administration. Partly because of Kennedy's desire for a “macho” stand, but mostly because of his rivalry with Nelson Rockefeller—a strong supporter of civil defense and Kennedy's expected rival in the election of 1964—Kennedy transferred responsibility for civil defense to the Pentagon and called for an expanded shelter program. Congress appropriated the largest amount ever, $208 million in 1961, for marking and stocking existing shelter spaces such as basements and subways. Unnerved by the dissent and public excitement, Kennedy downplayed civil defense in 1962, especially after Governor Rockefeller's civil defense program was defeated in New York State. The growing peace movement argued effectively that civil defense offered no protection against nuclear missiles and fueled the arms race and the threat of nuclear war. Critics of civil defense also noted the chief function of civil defense propaganda—to legitimate both deterrence policy and the hugely expensive underground shelters reserved for the political, military, and economic elite.

After the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, civil defense all but disappeared, not to be resurrected until 1979 when President Carter, apparently motivated by a false report that the USSR was building a large civil defense program, combined all civil defense actions, including protection against natural disasters, into a new organization called the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In the 1980s, during the Reagan years, high federal officials again called for a large civil defense program that would sponsor a mass evacuation of people into rural areas if war seemed imminent. As in the early 1960s, the plan quickly faded in the wake of massive public resistance.
[See also Nuclear Strategy; Peace and Antiwar Movements; Propaganda and Public Relations, Government.]

Bibliography

Robert Scheer , With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, 1982.
Thomas J. Kerr , Civil Defense in the U.S.: Bandaid for a Holocaust?, 1983.
Paul Boyer , By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1985.
Elaine May , Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 1986.
Allan M. Winkler , Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom, 1993.
Dee Garrison , ‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage’: The Civil Defense Protest Movement in New York City, 1955–1961, in Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, 1994.
Guy Oakes , The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture, 1994.

Dee Garrison