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

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

Paul S. Boyer

CIVIL DEFENSE

CIVIL DEFENSE has been defined as those activities that are designed or undertaken to minimize the effects upon the civilian population that would result from an enemy attack on the United States; that deal with the immediate postattack emergency conditions; and that effectuate emergency repairs or restoration of vital utilities and facilities destroyed or damaged by such an attack. Modern civil defense dates from World War II, although precedents existed in World War I liberty gardens and scrap drives (termed "civilian" defense activities) under the Council of National Defense. German attacks on England in 1940 caused President Franklin D. Rooevelt to create the Office of Civil Defense (OCD) on 20 May 1941. Despite the energetic directors of the OCD, Fiorello La Guardia and James M. Landis, the elaborate protective aspects of civil defense—air-raid warning systems, wardens, shelters, rescue workers, and fire-fighting activities—were obfuscated by victory gardens, physical-fitness programs, and the rapid diminution of possible air threat to the United States. President Harry S. Truman abolished the OCD on 30 June 1945.

The progress of civil defense in the United States since World War II has been erratic: the military services have been cautious of involvement; the American public has been unprepared to accept the viability of civil defense in an era of nuclear overkill; and the government bureaucracy has been confused and unclear in direction and definition of problems and solutions. Civil defense administration shifted from the U.S. Army (1946–1948) to the National Security Resources Board (1949–1951), the Federal Civil Defense Agency (1951–1958), the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (1958–1961), the Department of Defense (1961–1979), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA; 1979–present). During the Cold War, full-time staff organizations at all government levels—federal, state, and local—were formed and became active in planning fallout shelter utilization, in training civil defense personnel, in educating the general public, and in assisting in the development of a national system of warning and communication. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the thawing of the Cold War, popular interest in civil defense all but disappeared, and FEMA concentrated its efforts on disaster relief. Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, federal officials began to express concern over what they called "homeland security," a collection of efforts designed to prepare for terrorist attacks against the U.S., including those that involved chemical or biological weapons. Following the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, responsibility for those aspects of civil defense related to terrorism passed to the newly created Office of Homeland Security, as popular interest in civil defense and homeland security surged.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grossman, Andrew D. Neither Dead nor Red: Civilian Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War. New York: Routledge, 2001.

McEnaney, Laura. Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Oakes, Guy. The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Vale, Lawrence J. The Limits of Civil Defence in the USA, Switzerland, Britain, and the Soviet Union: The Evolution of Policies Since 1945. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

B. FranklinCooling/f. b.

See alsoDefense, National ; Mobilization ; 9/11 Attack ; Nuclear Weapons ; World Trade Center .

civil defense nonmilitary activities designed to protect civilians and their property from enemy actions in time of war. A civil defense program usually includes measures taken during peace (e.g., building home shelters or air raid warning practice), measures to warn civilians of an impending attack, to protect them during attack, and to save their lives and property after attack. Civil defense grew in proportion to the use of aircraft in modern warfare, becoming significant during World War II, when both sides engaged in the strategic bombing of civilian populations. After World War II the existence of nuclear weapons, the development of long-range bombers and missiles, and the ever-present possibility of war encouraged the establishment of comprehensive civil defense systems. The principal U.S. civil defense agency was established by executive order in 1950, and in 1961 civil defense functions were transferred to the Defense Dept. Opinion in the United States has traditionally been divided over the value of civil defense programs. Opponents of civil defense have maintained that, given the destructiveness of modern weapons, warning and shelter systems are useless and merely encourage war hysteria. Proponents of civil defense have asserted that, since a major danger from a nuclear attack is radioactive fallout, an adequate shelter program can save the lives of a large portion of the population. After the beginnings of a détente with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the 1970s, interest in civil defense in the United States, which peaked at the height of the cold war, began to decline; that decline was furthered by the break up of the Soviet empire. However, most industrialized countries still maintain some form of civil defense.

civ·il de·fense • n. the organization and training of civilians for the protection of lives and property during and after attacks in wartime.

civil defense the organization and training of civilians for the protection of lives and property during and after attacks in wartime.

civil defence, see under appropriate section of major powers.