CIVIL DEFENSE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE

Subways to Armageddon

Louis Ren6 Beres

D eputy Undersecretary of Defense T.K. Jones, speaking of the possibilities of surviving a nuclear

war, prompted no small amount of laughter last year when he said: "Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around . . . . Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It 's the dirt that does i t ." Yet that episode, to bor- row Samuel Beckett's words in Endgame, is "like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more."

Indeed, the increasingly provocative nuclear strategy of the Reagan administration no longer elicits laughter. Despite its unprecedented intimacy with falsehoods, this strategy is now the codified policy of the United States. Built upon a foundation of erroneous calculations and uninformed conjectures, it has spawned a desolate canon of nuclear theology--a detailed set of expectations and requirements that propels us on a journey to the end of misfortune. Among the elements of this canon, none is more dangerous than the "relocation option," also known as crisis relocation planning (CRP).

According to an early official statement from our gov- ernment, this option is "s imply" the temporary reloca- tion of people from high-risk areas to safer areas during periods of international crisis. Here, "high-risk areas" are defined as metropolitan areas having a population of 50,000 or more or areas near major military installations. The safer areas, which would become "host areas" during emergency relocation, are described as the sur- rounding small-town or rural areas. A Defense Civil Pre- paredness Agency (DCPA) publication explained:

Your Federal Government and many State and local governments are currently planning for the orderly relocation of people in time of an inter- national crisis. These plans call for (1) allocating people from high-risk areas to go to appropriate low-risk host areas for reception and care, and for (2) developing and improvising fallout protection in the host areas.

Programs for CRP are now under the auspices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Ac- cording to a document released by FEMA in February

1981, U.S. Crisis Relocation Planning, "This program [CRP] could enable survival of roughly 80% of the U.S. population in a heavy attack." With this assumption as a starting point, President Reagan has proposed a $4.2 bil- lion, seven-year civil defense program that includes plans to relocate two-thirds of the U.S. population.

A natural complement to the developing nuclear-war- fighting strategy of deterrence embraced by the United States, Reagan's relocation plan is founded upon the Carter administration's Presidential Directive 41 (PD 41) but has significant variations. With its release of Na- tional Security Decision Directive 26 (NSDD 26) in March 1982, the Reagan administration went far beyond PD 41 with respect to the scope and substance of U.S. civil defense. In contrast to PD 41, NSDD 26 represents a clear commitment to a national policy of making nu- clear war more "thinkable" and calls for "the survival of a substantial portion of the American people in the event of a nuclear attack." The Reagan directive envi- sions "survival" in a "protracted" nuclear war. Ac- cording to Louis O. Guiffrida, FEMA director, on Oc- tober 9, 1981: "The other thing this Administration has categorically rejected is the short-war, mutually assured destruction, It'll all be over in 20 minutes so why the hell mess around spending dollars on it [mentality]. We're trying to inject long-war mentality."

This "long-war mentality," of course, flows from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's recent de- fense-guidance statement that "the United States' nu- clear capabilities must prevail even under the condition of a prolonged war." Rejecting the informed under- standing that survival is impossible and that relocation is the reductio ad absurdum of a provocative nuclear strategy, this mentality fosters a condition of collective denial that actually makes nuclear war much more likely. Just as the denial of death by individual human beings can occasion behavior that impairs good health, so might the Reagan administration impair the prospects for American survival by insulating itself from reasonable fears of megadeath. Although it is true that the fear of death must be tempered both in individual and in national drives, lest it cause paralysis, to deny the effects of such fear altogether is to make extinction more imminent.

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These facts notwithstanding, the Reagan plan for relo- cation continues undisturbed, centering on a FEMA- directed evacuation of 150 million Americans from about 400 "high-risk" areas to about 2,000 "safer , " host areas. Since such evacuation would require at least one week to implement, it is essential that the Soviet Union play by American strategic rules. Should a nuclear war arise too soon or too late, relocation could result in a heightened incidence of death and injury.

Seemingly undeterred by the problematic nature of CRP, the government of the United States has even taken steps to ensure that relocation need not imply serious dis- comfort. Hence, a detailed set of instructions and a checklist for supplies have been provided, urging inter alia the secure transport of sanitary napkins, credit cards, and stocks and bonds. Moreover, relocation allegedly could be accomplished without serious strain upon nor- mally functioning moral imperatives, since firearms, narcotics, and alcoholic beverages would be prohibited in the postapocalypse world.

What about the logistical problems of evacuation? How should we behave to avoid serious traffic distur- bances? Again, no problem! All difficulties have been foreseen by the DCPA, and the remedies carefully ar- ticulated: " I f you get caught in a traffic jam, turn off your engine, remain in your car, listen for official in- structions, and be patient. Do not get off of the line to find an alternate route. All routes will be crowded." In Plattsburgh, New York, the authorities have devised a "model" evacuation plan that builds upon the insights of the federal program. In the event of imminent nuclear war, the city's police department will assign two patrol- men to direct traffic at the comer of Broad and Cornelia. Dismissing the idea of using school crossing guards (be- cause the task would be too difficult for them), the au- thorities approved a plan to use civil defense volunteers, leaving the police to cover car accidents and fights be- tween individuals. After all, it was concluded, faced with the prospect of a nuclear war, "People will be emo- tional."

A Permanent Encounter with Death

With such contingency plans, the relevant agencies of government in the United States have dissolved the line between fantasy and sober assessment. Rather than build upon the understanding that a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union would rend the fabric of American society, our leaders have chosen to spread the news that even nu- clear war could be tolerated. Ignoring that even the small Hiroshima bomb inflicted so enduring a level of destruc- tion that survivors have experienced what Robert Jay Lifton calls " a permanent encounter with death," these leaders have chosen to defend the reasonableness of ex- panded civil defense measures.

It is wrong to encourage public faith in an inherently nonviable civil defense establishment. It is also contrary to our survival needs. The Reagan administration, with

its ideas to evacuate "high-risk" metropolitan areas be- fore any threatened nuclear missile attack, and by its claims that a well-coordinated plan for recovery would quickly transfuse normalcy into the veins of a nuclearly devastated body politic, reveals an almost unimaginable misunderstanding (or a deliberate distortion) of what the postwar environment would be like.

To anyone who has known or studied the effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is ap- parent that a superpower nuclear war would bring far more than death. According to Lifton, "The ultimate threat posed by nuclear weapons is not only death but meaninglessness: an unknown death by an unimaginable weapon. War with such weapons is no longer heroic; death from such weapons is without valor." Such meaninglessness would be accentuated by the impair- ment of symbolic immortality, the process by which human beings ordinarily feel that they can live on in posterity. Since the occasion of nuclear war would repre- sent an assault on the very idea of posterity for millions (perhaps billions) of people, death would take place without rebirth, and the continuity of life would give way to authentic feelings of disintegration, separation, and stasis.

In fact, since the current global stockpile of nuclear weapons could kill all life on earth in a fashion that would make impossible any further reproduction of liv- ing cells, it might even be appropriate to distinguish the use of such weapons from what we ordinarily mean by war. According to the distinguished philosopher John Somerville:

The nuclear weapon can thus destroy not only all of nature, but even the natural relation of death to life, for what we have always previously known as death is of course the recycling and recombining of cells capable of carrying on life in other forms. Killing the cell itself thus kills not only life but life-giving death. This means that nuclear death is qualitatively worse than normal death, and that nu- clear war is qualitatively worse than previous war, and should therefore have a new name which more precisely connotes the new thing. That is why l proposed "omnicide."

For any New Yorker who has known the traffic of his city and the cynicism of his fellow urbanites, the claim that an effective and orderly evacuation of Manhattan could take place during a crisis would produce sidesplit- ting laughter. This claim is material for political cabaret, for cutting satire, not the stuff of intelligent public pol- icy. When it is joined with "relocation checklists" that are founded on assumptions of postattack normalcy, it descends to a level of absurdity beside, which the plays of Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, and Gen6t appear manifestly orthodox.

As with any other comic routine, New York City is a good place to begin. To develop an evacuation plan for the Big Apple, SRI International (formerly the Stanford

Research Institute) in September 1978 issued Crisis Re- location of the Population at Risk in the New York Met- ropolitan Area. The plan, a transportation study based on computer models, presents a scheme for evacuating the population of New York in 3.3 days. It proposes that road travel be regulated so that each car contains a mini- mum of 3.1 persons plus luggage. Cars with fewer occu- pants would be required to stop and reorganize into car pools or wait until the end of the evacuation period. It is also assumed that all 2 million cars will have full fuel tanks and that no cars will break down en route.

What about the 4.81 million persons without access to automobiles? According to the SRI study, they are to be relocated by air, water, rail, or bus--an effort that will require the use of 50 percent of the nation' s inventory of Boeing 747s and 75 percent of the DC-10s and L-101 Is, assuming twenty hours per day of plane use with 20 per- cent overloading. Access to risk-area airports in the New York City area is to be largely by subway.

During the next few months and perhaps years, it must become widely understood that relocation is nothing more than the natural extension of a misconceived nu- clear strategy. Rather than improve deterrence by dem- onstrating this country's nuclear-war preparedness (a demonstration that the Soviets seem no longer to need), plans for crisis relocation will intensify Soviet fears of an American first-strike. Such fears, of course, have al- ready been heightened by the expanded American devel- opment of counterforce weapon systems, by the planned deployment of a new generation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in selected NATO countries, by ad- ministration rejection of a genuine nuclear" freeze," and by the American refusal to parallel Soviet renunciation of "first use" of nuclear weapons.

Even if it could be assumed that large-scale U.S. ci- vilian evacuation plans were workable, and that a gov- ernment-directed civilian exodus several days before a nuclear war would not degenerate into chaos, a Soviet nuclear attack could still doom virtually every American. According to Irwin Redlener, M.D., who has studied CRP for Physicians for Social Responsibility, civil de- fense calculations by American authorities are "based on little hard data." CRP, says Redlener in the Summer 1981 PSR Newsletter, ignores the many important differ- ences that exist between a city being evacuated in the face of a hurricane and one being flattened by a nuclear bomb. The scheme, he argues, rests entirely on highly questionable analogies:

CRP makes the basic assumption that a warning time of one week is essential to effect any reason- able degree of evacuation and protection. This dis- counts any possibility of a surprise attack. The elimination of a presumptive attack scenario makes little sense even to traditional military planners.

CRP requires the evacuated families to shovel piles of dirt around the buildings to which they are assigned in order to make them "radiation safe"

CIVIL DEFENSE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE / 9

but doesn't speak to how this might be ac- complished during the winter months in a northern climate. Even in the national "model" areas (such as Plattsburgh, New York) where it has been rather fully developed, there is no real provision for the management of hospitalized patients in the target sites or for the redirection of essential services such as food supply.

Finally, evacuating U.S. counterforce and other target sites carries the distinct possibility of pro- voking the war it claims it will protect us from. How would an adversary interpret such an evacua- tion? Could this mean the U.S. was preparing to deploy its first-strike weapons? If so, would not the Soviets feel the need to strike first? Such consid- erations are logical, lethal, and apparently disre- garded by current civil defense planners.

Another authoritative assessment of the relocation op- tion has been offered inNuclear Weapons, a recent report of the secretary general of the United Nations. According to this assessment, which is remarkable only for its de- liberate attempt at diplomatic understatement:

Evacuation of population from areas expected to come under attack has to be planned very carefully in advance. Apart from transportation and housing of evacuees, this planning must include at least short-term provisions for the relocated population. Information and instructions to the general public would have to be issued in advance. Even if in- structions were available, however, the execution of an evacuation would probably be accompanied by confusion and panic. Large-scale evacuation is, therefore, in most cases, no attractive option.

To start an evacuation too early would mean an unnecessary disruption of everyday activities; to start too late would worsen the prospects for those evacuated as their vulnerability would be highest during the transfer phase. The very fact that an evacuation had started might even precipitate the attack, and there is also the possibility of targeting the relocated population. These constraints are valid in any type of war, but in a nuclear war they would be more severe. In addition, there is the particular problem of radioactive fallout, as avail- able radiation shielding can generally be expected to be inferior in rural areas. Furthermore, the loca- tion of serious fallout areas cannot be predicted in advance.

We see, then, that the promise of relocation is illus- ory, substituting gibberish for what is known. By making its assertions with brazen disregard for what has been re- vealed by the scientific and medical communities, this gibberish seeks--by immense clamor, by vast rhythmic repetition--to make relocation palatable. Before this situation can be reversed, our government's strategic planners will have to abandon their models of circular

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sophistry in favor of acceptable patterns of reasoning. In- stead of presenting arguments that are nothing more than the product of sheer artifice, advanced again and again with the stereotyped monotony of schizophrenic dreams, the Reagan administration must open its mind to ways of understanding not yet its own.

The Propensity for Rhetoric

Can the administration begin to understand how much it is lost in its own gibberish? One reason for an affirma- tive answer comes immediately to mind. The need to avoid nuclear war, only a few years ago just a tic of con- sciousness, is now a conscious, irreversible gesture. Having reached that point in human evolution where our species maintains a perspective on its own gigantic fail- ures, we can now exploit that perspective to escape the predatory embrace of collective disintegration.

Sapere Aude! "Dare to Know!" This motto for the Enlightenment offered by Immanuel Kant has acquired a special meaning in the repudiation of current plans for crisis relocation. Having taken civilization seriously, an enlarged body of thinking individuals already stands be- fore the purveyors of strategic myth, countering their unintelligible exhibitions of effrontery with prudence and understanding.

America has been thinking against itself. To survive into the future, it will require a new consciousness--one tuned to ever-higher pitches of strategic refinement. To avoid further contamination by the superstitions of those who urge expanding programs of civil defense, Ameri- ca must resist confronting the apocalypse as healer. Its sole ambition must be to keep abreast of, and prevent, the "incurable disease."

A thermonuclear war, wrote Andrei Sakharov in Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, "can- not be considered a continuation of politics by other means . . . . It would mean universal suicide." Rather than continue to portray relocation as an ordinary politi- cal option in the face of nuclear war, the United States must begin to hew to a sane paradigm of strategic think- ing--one that is based upon the absolute rejection of nu- clear-warfighting as a rational instrument of national policy. At a time when the classical system of world politics is undergoing profound metamorphosis, our leaders must learn to replace the dying forms of Machtpolitik with a sober awareness of what is possible.

In The Plague Albert Camus tells us: "At the begin- ning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric . . . . It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth--in other words, to silence." So long as we continue to stand in the ruins of thought--ruins created by the rhetoric of new genera- tions of strategic planners and their patrons in govern- ment--we will be unable to avoid the more tangible ruins of atomic warfare. Without a full awareness of the ef- fects of nuclear war and the potentially fatal synergism of crisis relocation, we will continue to stand outside the

arena of mortality, unable to picture ourselves as vic- tims.

We must come to understand that formulations of liv- able postapocalypse worlds are both nonsense and dangerous. This is so because they interfere with the es- sential task of cultivating "end of the world" imagery--which must precede a durable peace. Pursued by a terrorless evil, Americans must spark a confronta- tion with those who would substitute gobbledygook for truth. Only then can there be a plausible paradigm of nu- clear war that puts an end to numbingly false hopes and hopelessly empty promises. Only then can we begin to take the first feeble but critical steps back to life, steps based not on illusions of immortality but on a summon- ing forth, and mastery, of visions of total annihilation.

Fear is an indispensable corrective to self-deception. Crisis relocation, founded upon a denial of our collective mortality, is dangerous to peace. By encouraging such denial, CRP obstructs our few remaining hopes for av- oiding nuclear war. To reverse this condition, the Rea- gan administration must learn to move beyond that rarefied brand of "realism" that gives direction to present-day strategic policy. Instead of sanitized analyses of nuclear conflict, our leaders must begin to acknowledge that the fantasies of the infernal are already part of our history and that the genocidal reflexes of the twentieth century are a clear presentiment of approaching omnicide. []

READINGS SUGGESTED BY THE AUTHOR: Adams, Ruth, and Cullen, Susan, eds. The Final Epidemic:

Physicians and Scienttsts on Nuclear War. Chicago: Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, 1981.

Beres, Louis Renr. Mimtcking Sisyphus: America's Countervailing Nuclear Strategy. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1983.

Committee for the Compdat]on of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs m Hlrosh]ma and Nagasaki. The Phystcal, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Defense Civil Preparedness Agency. Protection m the Nuclear Age. Washington: U.S. Department of Defense, 1977.

Katz, Arthur M. Life after Nuclear War. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1981.

Llfton, Robert Jay, and Olson, Eric. Living and Dying. New York: Praeger, 1974.

Secretary General of the United States. Nuclear Weapons. Brookline, Mass.: Autumn Press, 1980.

Somervdle, John. "Philosophy of Peace Today: Preventive Eschatology." Peace Research 12 (April 1980).

Louts Rend Beres is professor of political science and mter- nattonal law at Purdue Untversity. The author of many works on nuclear strategy and nuclear war, he lS the author most re- cently of Mimicking Sisyphus: America's Countervailing Nu- clear Strategy. The New York Times described Beres' s work as "one of five leadmg philosophical underpmnings" of the worldwide movement against nuclear war