Angry Planet - The History of Preparing for Nuclear War

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

Civil Defense! From the dawn of World War II and throughout the 1960s, America had a plan to keep its civilians safe and fit to fight in case of invasion or, god forbid, nuclear armageddon. From duck and cover to the aesthetic of the Fallout video games, American popular culture is enmeshed in the history of its Civil Defense. But what, exactly, is Civil Defense. Where did it come from and do we still practice it today?Here to help with this history is Alex Wellerstein. Wellerstein is a historian of science, secrecy, and nuclear weapons. He lectures on this and more at Stevens Institute of Technology. You may know him as the guy who created the nuke map, a website that allows you to simulate the effect of various nuclear weapons on an interactive map.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. I don't think you get a lot of the anti-nuclear activism and political action that you get in, say, the 1980s, without a generation who have been forced to hide under their desks. You're listening to War College, a week of course. podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts.

Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And filling in for Derek Gannon is me, Kevin O'Dell. Yeah, Derek is off fighting the VA today. We're very sorry, but he will be back next week. Today we're going to be talking about civil defense. From the dawn of World War II and throughout the 1960s, America had a plan to keep its civilians safe and fit to fight in case of invasion or, God forbid, nuclear Armageddon. From duck and cover to the aesthetic of the fallout video games, American popular culture is enmeshed in the history of its civil defense. But what exactly is civil defense? Where did it come from? And how do we practice it today? This is especially important to understand coming as we are about a year from the

false alarm in Hawaii. Here to help us work, here to help us understand this history is Alex Wellerstein. Wellerstein is a historian of science, secrecy, and nuclear weapons. He lectures on this and more at the Stevens Institute of Technology. You may know him as the guy who created the nuke map, a fun website that allows you to simulate the effect of various nuclear weapons on an interactive map. Alex, thank you so much for joining us. Real pleased to be here. Really glad. So I want to start with something real basic, I think, is a good introduction to the topic. And that's the one thing I think everyone knows about civil defense, and that's duck in cover. I think of it as the quickest shorthand to this topic.

So what exactly is Duck &Cover and what do you think its legacy is? So Duck and Cover was a film and a campaign for communication created by the U.S. government by the Federal Civil Defense Administration in the early 1950s. I think it went live in like 1951. And it was designed to help schoolchildren, so relatively young, definitely below high school, understand what they ought to do if a nuclear bomb went off near them. And so this, it's got a little song, it's got a little cartoon turtle, it's pitched at this low audience level, so it's easy to sort of make fun of today.

And for all of these reasons, I think it's stuck in the popular culture. Also, it's got what a lot of people today think of as a sort of absurd message, which is if you hide under your desk, you'll be safe from a nuclear weapon. It's not as absurd as people think it is, but it becomes a way for people to shorthand say, oh, I know what civil defense is. Civil defense is propaganda for children, and it doesn't, work. All right, but what is it really? So if you dig into it, duck and cover is a strategy to mitigate the consequences of a nuclear weapon going off. And it's a strategy that was especially

attuned to the threats that the United States thought the Soviet Union posed to it and to its people in the early 1950s. So these are, this is a time in which the Soviet Union had barely any nuclear arsenal at all. So it's not assuming that every city is going to have 10 nukes on it or something like that, but maybe one or two at most for some big cities. It's also not assuming the weapons are super large at this point. This is before the H-bomb is made and deployed. So these are basically World War II-sized weapons. And it's also not assuming everybody's going to survive, though because it's pitched at children, it doesn't say, hey, a healthy percentage of you will die. That was not seen as a developmentally appropriate message.

So instead, it tries to cast all of this in terms of what you can do. And basically, it's meant to help, if you are right where the bomb goes off, if it goes off right over your head, you're probably not going to survive. Similarly, if you're really far away from the bomb, you probably will survive. Duck and cover is for the areas in between, where you're in an area where you're going to feel a lot of blast overpressure, which is going to knock in windows and maybe make ceilings collapse, and there's a possibility of thermal burns and even fires. For that reason, hiding under your desk is actually great if you're at a certain distance

from the bomb going off. Again, if it goes off right over you, the desk isn't going to help you. But if you're maybe a mile away, and the biggest threat at that distance is glasses is going a break, the ceiling might partially collapse, and if you're outside, your exposed skin might get burned, then tucking into a small ball, ideally underneath something with some rigidity like a desk, is going to help you with that. That's basically what ducking cover sort of logic behind it in a nutshell. And the studies that were done in the 1940s and 1950s and informed it basically said that if you did these kinds of activities, your chance of survival at different distances from the blast goes up by,

of a healthy factor. Pretty close in. It might go up by 10, 20%, going out a bit more, your chances of avoiding becoming injured in some way goes up even more dramatically. So the idea here is, again, not that everybody's going to survive, but you can tweak those rates a little bit by giving people the right information. All right, well, let's broaden this out in scope a little bit and kind of talk about civil defense in general. When did it start? It was kind of born out of the, in the 40s, right, with civilians watching the skies waiting to see if certain planes were going through the air, or is it even older than that?

It depends where you want to draw the line for beginning, but you can say that World War II is the most direct experience, though there are even some precursors earlier than that, especially in Europe. Civil defense is basically the idea that, along with your more like military, active defense, civilians have a role to play in their own survival and war. And this is especially important once worse are targeting cities and civilians, which of course in World War II, the United States and the Allies targeted many Axis cities that way. But in turn, especially in Europe, were targeted by the axis as well. The U.S. basically had some forms of, say, looking for bombers and things like that.

But we were essentially protected by the oceans on either side of us. So there were not extensive attacks against American cities. The total number of attacks against Americans at all on the home front is very minor. It's things like Japanese balloon bombs, a couple of them killed some Boy Scouts and things like that, which is not great, but it's not like the scale that was happening in either London or Hamburg, much less Tokyo or things like this. When we start to move into the Cold War, this is when Americans, for the first time an American official, start to say, oh my, we might actually be targeted. If you're talking about long-range bombers, if you're talking about, and this is still a future threat at that point, if you're talking about

long-range missiles or even missiles that could be fired from submarines or any of these kind of future technologies, which people are already starting to think about after World War II, then you start having to say, well, what can we do to prevent that? We can't necessarily kill all the bombers, so they do try to do that. They have bomber defense. We can't necessarily shoot down all the missiles, that they do look into that as well. In an attack, though, if people have some warning, they can potentially go into bunkers and shelters. And even if they don't have any warning, there's often a few seconds, maybe even a few minutes, where the choices they make might determine in the end how many people survive, how many people are injured, how many people die.

And that in turn will have a big effect on whether or not you can easily recover from this kind of attack. So this becomes a big push not basically long after the Soviets first test a nuclear weapon in 1949, and it becomes a bigger thrust as the technology changes through the 1950s and through the 1960s. So would it be fair to say that, at least for the United States, that the Cold War represented sort of a golden age of civil defense? If there was a golden age for civil defense, the 1950s are it. And even that for a civil defense standpoint is not really that golden of an age. It's only golden in the sense that they had some funding to do some of this work.

And that continued up through the early 60s. But even then, the civil defense people never really got the level of funding commitment that they thought was necessary if they were actually going to be good at their jobs. And so you can say, yeah, they got to be able to put up those fallout shelter signs in the 60s. They made Duck and Cover in the 50s and they made a bunch of pamphlets. But if you open up the sort of books in the civil defense world that they were producing, you'd see them saying, oh, we're barely scraping by here. We're barely accomplishing anything. If we wanted to really save lives, we'd need 100 times more funding.

And the U.S. wasn't willing to do that. So if there ever was a golden age of civil defense, yeah, early Cold War. but the U.S. was never really that great at embracing civil defense. The Soviet Union, and we could talk about that if you're interested, the Soviet Union was much more interested in investing in it. They didn't necessarily get more for their money, but the U.S. civil defense always sat sort of awkwardly in this place where the U.S. population didn't like it because it felt like you were preparing to die. And then the military and policy makers would rather have spent the money on other things, like more bombs. Well, I think both of those are interesting topics,

both how they wanted to do more in the United States and why the Soviet Union invested more. What sorts of programs did these civil defense people want to enact that they could never get the funding for? What sorts of, like, what further did they want to do? If you were trying to say make Americans urban areas more survivable against a nuclear attack, there's pretty straightforward things you could do, but they're expensive. So for example, public blast shelters rated to a very high level, for example, and then the means to get to them, right? So they'd have to have them all over the place, and they'd have to be easy to get into and things like that. That's the kind of proposal that a hardcore civil defense person in the

1950s would say, look, if you want any chance of this city surviving, some percentage of it, you need to move stuff underground. That's the only way to do it. We want a world that's adapted to this threat. And they got a little bit of that. There were things like some public shelters in some major cities like Washington, D.C. There were even some experiments in doing things, like what if we built an entire school system underground? So there's a school in New Mexico that was built underground for civil defense purposes. What does that do to the students? What does that do? There's a lot of questions that they wanted to ask. But this is the kind of radical direction of that. And that's more like what the Soviets did. They built more systems for, say, public bunkers,

public shelters. And you can't just build the bunker. You have to keep food in it. You have to keep water in it. It has to have supplies. And people have to know what? what they're doing and how to get to it and where it is and all that kind of stuff. So that's like sort of the civil defense dream that they had. They didn't get anything like that. I mean, they got a few public shelters here and there, but nothing close to significant for the bulk of the American population. What they ended up getting instead were basically publicity campaigns.

And one of my rules of thumb is if you're in the government and your goal is to modify people's behavior or something and the only budget you have is for like making. a poster and a pamphlet, then you're not really that important. Nobody really cares because we all know that posters and pamphlets don't work that well by themselves, usually. And so they got to make a lot of posters, pamphlets, even little films and things like that. But those are very cheap. These are basically communication campaigns. And they got some money to look into, could existing basements be repurposed as fallout shelters. And that's what most of those fallout shelter signs that you see. Those are from a survey program that was done in the late 50s and

early 60s about existing spaces that you could just slap a sign onto and say, now this is a shelter. But that's a far cry from the kind of protection you would get from like a, you know, a bunker that was built specifically for this purpose. And what were the Soviets doing instead? The Soviets were mostly building bunkers. I mean, they did have a lot of bunkers. And I don't want to make it sound like the Soviets would have, you know, there was a lot of controversy in the 1980s about Soviet civil defense. And there were sort of hawks basically saying, oh, the Soviets are way ahead of us in the bunkers.

And they're going to be able to beat us at nuclear war. And they're going to be more willing to do nuclear war. I don't think that's all true. But at the same time, the Soviets were more willing to invest in physical infrastructure. They didn't have to ram it through Congress. They didn't have to get democratic participation. They also could make some of these things sort of dual use. So, for example, they did a lot of work so that, like, the Moscow subway system could double as a blast shelter.

And that's actually older than even the Cold War. They had some of that even in World War II. Whereas if you go to, say, like, New York City, the subway system clearly is not meant to double as a blast shelter. It's rickety and there's rats everywhere. Washington, D.C.'s subway system is a little bit better at that sort of stuff. Those big vaulted ceilings they have in there can take a lot of pressure by comparison. But that's mostly the Soviet approach. They also did education.

They also did stockpiling of food. They also looked into, which the U.S. also did, plans for how would you evacuate a city? If you knew that you had a couple days before an attack, which is kind of a fantastical assumption, but let's imagine you did. Could you get most people out of the city without them panicking and clogging? the roads. The answer is not very easily, but you can imagine creating schemes in which that might work. So both the U.S. and Soviets pursued this. In general, the Soviets spent more money on a lot of this stuff. But again, it's not totally clear how much that would have helped in the event of

even an attack. Even if you spend a lot of money on bunkers, you still need a lot of bunkers to put a real dent in the sort of, you know, victim pool, as you could say. And even the Soviet system, for as extensive as it was, could only accommodate a small fraction of the population. So whether that was the right idea or not, I don't know. But in, at least in the Soviet Union, in theory, it had support, though in practice, it's not clear that that panned out as well. I'm reminded of the classic Twilight Zone episode from 1961 about the fallout shelter. I'm wondering if there's something in the American psyche you think that prevented us from really embracing this. I think you'd said earlier that it kind of asked us to imagine the worst possible scenario and we weren't willing to do that.

Yeah, people, Americans don't like to think about their own inevitable day. and they don't like to think about the consequences of even, you know, to use the phrase a day after. Americans, in my experience, and I think this goes back as well, if you ask them to talk about nuclear war, they sort of imagine a big flash and that's it. And on the one hand, that's very scary. But on the other hand, you don't have to deal with the consequences of that. I've had people tell me, and I don't know how you feel about this. Oh, I'd rather go in the first attack and not have to, be involved in the rebuilding and

etc, et cetera. And I'm never sure how much I believe people on that. If you put people in situations, not that I've done this, but if you put people in situations where they really are fearing for their lives, most people, including Americans, will happily take the

low chance of survival, have to deal with the consequences, but you get to live route. But in the abstract, I don't think they like to think about these. And there were people even in the 1950s, even before the counterculture got big and even before people got really cynical in the 1970s about like government and things. There were people even in the 50s who said, I don't want to participate in this. I don't

want to think about dying. I don't want to prepare for dying. There were also people in the Soviet Union felt similar that this was going into a shelter, hiding in a bunker was like going into your own tomb or something like that. And so they'd rather focus on the aspects of life and living and all of that than, you know, hiding away from the military point of view, they would rather spend the money on more offense on the idea that a better offense equals a better defense. And so, you know, why build shelters when you could just build more missiles and make sure that nobody's going to shoot their missiles at you anyway? You can see all of these perspectives, though, of course, you can see the perspective of the civil defense advocate who would say, look, we're not in total

control here. And if we can save an extra 20% of the population, hey, that's like a few, that's tens of millions of people. That's a lot of lives. It might be worth doing. If, if nuclear war is likely to happen, which most people in the Cold War thought was probably the case at some point, then the difference of whether or not, as Herman Kahn, it was a civil defense advocate, think tanker, all that at Rand Corporation and Hudson Institute put it, the difference between a world in which there is no, there are barely any survivors and a difference in a world where there are, you know, 20, 30 percent more survivors, these are both unattractive outcomes, but they're different.

No, I think that tracks with the conversations that you and I were having in Hawaii, full disclosure listeners, Alex and I were at the same conference a few months ago on the anniversary of the false alarm in Hawaii. and we were asking people about, you know, what were they doing when the false alarm happened? And the overwhelming majority of the people that I asked that question said that they kind of, they just accepted it and they sat, they got some more sleep, you know, they sat and stared at the, they stared at the window and enjoyed the, what they thought, imagined maybe the last moments of their life, right?

Yeah, if you really feel like you don't know for people in Hawaii a lot was, what can you do, sort of fatalism. And if you really are faced with there's nothing you can do, then, right, you sit there, enjoy, enjoy the things, see it to the end. Civil defense is about trying to give people something they could do. And it's remarkable that there's a lot of people who are resistant to this idea for different reasons, but they would in some ways prefer to think that there is nothing you could do. somehow having something to do gives you a burden or gives you maybe a false hope or something like that. And they're very suspicious of you saying something like, well, you know, go to a, you know, find a basement or something like that and say, well, what can a basement do?

Well, the data says it can actually do a bunch, but a lot of people are very reluctant to see it that way. There's a weird, like, fatalist death drive in American culture, but that's a whole other separate conversation. What do you think is the legacy of American civil defense? Did it change American life in any fundamental ways that we're still living with now? Well, I find interesting about civil offense is it's the most stark result of taking very seriously the threat of nuclear weapons. or you're really planning and you're really running through the possibilities and you're saying,

well, we're not totally in control of whether this is going to happen and if it does happen, it'll be terrible. But we have a sort of responsibility for running out the imagination, running out the narrative. And it leads you into really unusual places that, you know,

like will our paperwork survive? Will your credit card company survive? Will any of that matter? What kind of food will be edible after the fact? One of my favorite pamphlets is on, what do you do with all the corpses? Like, let's say you're in the survivor category, and you've got 200 million corpses you have to dispose of. How do you do that in an orderly fashion that is in accordance with our values and our legal system, if you even care about that in the post-apocalyptic era?

But at a minimum, how do you do it in a way that accords with hygiene and things like that? And it turns out it's not very easy. I think my recollection, I don't mind the exact numbers, my recollection is that if you were trying to identify 10,000 corpses and you laid them out side by side, that runs, I think, five miles, which is a pretty substantial distance now. So it's, you know, identification is not super likely.

I find all that stuff very interesting, not in a morbid way, but in a actually running it through and getting beyond the flash of light. And I think that if you don't, if you only stop, but the flash of light, you're not really taking the threat seriously. Again, it becomes synonymous with your own inevitable death that you don't want to think about anyway. The important part about civil defense for the legacy, and some of this is not people resist civil defense, and that's part of this, but civil defense was the really most in-your-face way to make

people reconcile with that reality, to make children reconcile with that reality, and their parents and the individual cities and mayors and people like that it takes this big global conflict and it makes it disturbingly local so it's you and your own mother trying to figure out where you're going to go if you hear the siren and things like that and this is why i love duck and cover as an aside aside from all the the dopey parts of that film that don't resonate today the the core message is that this is not some abstract problem But this could happen any day of the week. You could be playing a baseball game with your friends, and you might hear the air raid siren go off.

And if that happens, you have to act. And that kind of recendering, I don't think you get a lot of the anti-nuclear activism and political action that you get in, say, the 1980s without a generation who have been forced to hide under their desks. And that's about the sort of time that passes around then. I don't think you get an American public who thinks that nuclear issues are their personal issues unless you center it in them. And so this is why I'm interested in thinking, what would this kind of work look like today? Both you save lives if you do the right thing or communicate to people that they should do the right thing. But also, you raise this possibility of radically changing American culture in a way that takes nuclear issues and makes them, much more centered in individuals and even in some cases like the hiding under the desk type thing

actually embodies the risk in their own behavior and we know from a lot of other research and how you prepare people for disasters and fires and earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes and typhoons whatever that if you if you want people to take it seriously you have to make these things local and you have to make them part of their sort of regular practice and nuclear has not been in that category for now over several decades. And I think that that has led to a sort of, again, a return of it into the sort of abstract frame of mind, not people thinking, oh, this actually affects me. And I think that's a negative aspect of getting rid of civil defense type preparations. We've allowed the nuclear to sort of go on its own track without us paying attention. Yeah, it's interesting that you talk about how

it seems to have sort of dropped off because nuclear war seemed to so used to so much permeate our pop culture. It used to be something that was everywhere. And at a certain point, it just kind of stopped. I mean, we've seen nuke still exist in pop culture, but we didn't take the threat seriously, I think, as we went to the 90s and nuke sort of became a plot device. Why do you think Nukes initially became such a big thing for pop culture and why did it stop? I mean, people in the Cold War really saw Nukes as being a massive force in their world. I mean, a real transformation that you have now, we have created the instruments in which we may as a species kill ourselves. And that's pretty big, right?

That serves a lot of also cultural points, right? I'm thinking of the Charlton Heston and the Eumeniac scene, right? I mean, we kind of like these stories in which we become our own worst enemies and things of that nature. Some of the most popular big name bits in the 80s were, again, taking this big nebulous issue and reducing it down to an individual person or an individual problem. So the day after is really about making people think through what it happens to everyday people. War Games is thinking through the relationship of computers and automation to all of these kinds of things, which is also pulling in a slightly different issue.

Even Dr. Strangelove, which is, of course, one of the real classics of this, is all about the sort of chaos, the lack of control in an area that, that pretends to always be about control and pretends to always be about dry theory and logic and all that. And it turns out, oh, no, there's a lot of chaos and absurdity in the whole system. So, you know, nukes are a real factor in the Cold War and people's attention. They're in the newspapers all the time. They are part of presidential debates. They are part of international exchanges. They have a real, we'd say, salience, and they're also part of people's lives. They're still testing nuclear weapons, mostly underground from the 60s on where, but they're being tested.

They're being produced. They're being fielded. There's being moved around. It's a real thing. When the Cold War ends, it's like the whole world, and especially the United States, takes a collective deep breath, and they say, okay, great, now we can worry about other things. And they do some steps to make the nukes a little less troublesome. They cut the numbers a bit. They get rid of some types of weapons. We have good relationship, good relationship with Russia. We actually give the Russians money to improve their own security. We actually set up a program that only expired a year or so ago in which we bought surplus Russian plutonium and used it to power American nuclear reactors. I mean, how much goodwill can you get? I mean, this almost looks like

nukes are not a thing. But of course they are. They didn't go away. And this is, I think, people have been in successive waves have been sort of waking up to this. In the 90s, you start to get a new theme, which is nuclear terrorism, and you start to see that in films. So there are films that are about that. Was it the peacekeeper? And one of my favorites of the nuclear film genre, Some of All Fears, which was a Tom Clancy book, but it's the most sort of, realistic depiction of what a nuclear weapon going off in a city today would look like. It's very cleverly done. You get that theme, which isn't totally new to the 90s, but that starts to look a lot more

plausible to people than like war with another state again. Now we're back at a location where not only are there other states that we might worry about like North Korea, maybe in the future Iran, something like that, but our relationship with Russia is so bad that there are a number of people saying, hey, maybe we're in like a new era where it's like all of the worst parts of the 90s mixed with all of the worst parts of the Cold War, and we just have to deal with all of these things again. And so there is an opportunity here in one sort of grim sense where if nukes were put on the back burner for most Americans, it's pretty clear that they need to be taken off the back burner and brought back into the forefront of their

minds because we did not end up in some world where they were not an issue. In fact, in some ways, according to some lines of thinking, were actually in a much more likely place for a nuclear weapon to be used at the moment than we were at many points in the Cold War where there was a sort of stability that had sort of settled in. So it's interesting, it's not unique that certain tropes and concepts come and go, but with nukes, you can really trace the attention. You can really trace the attention span and we're suddenly in a place where people are once again very disturbed about this. Speaking of false alarms, if we want to change tracks just a little bit, because you kind of said,

like you said, this stuff is very, very, actually very prevalent, very scary now. And we are just kind of starting to think about it again. One of our previous conversations you had mentioned that, you know, looking at false alarms, this is something that they studied in the 50s, right? Well, when you set up any big system of alarms, which they started setting up in the 1950s, like air rate alarms, you're going to have some number of false alarms. That's just build that into your assumption, right? If you have a burglar alarm in your house, it's going to go off periodically when it's not supposed to, right? If you have a fire alarm, it's going to get triggered. So in the 1950s, a number of cities had set up. big alarm systems. And basically the idea was they were assuming that the threat of attack would come by a bomber. And you can see a bomber from really far away with radar. And so if you see the bombers coming and you ring the massive alarm signal and everybody in the town can hear

it, they can either take cover or evacuate or try to do things because you'd have a couple of hours. So it's not the worst situation and you might be able to recover from it. There were at least three major false alarms in the 1950s that were significant cities and significant numbers of people were basically exposed to an alert signal that for all they would know was real. They're really interesting circumstances. One of them was in Oakland, California, and was actually triggered because bombers were seen coming into Oakland. And it took about 20 minutes to find out that those bombers were American, so it's fine. But in that time, they did not really know. They assumed that they might be Soviet bombers in the beginning of an attack.

And so they rang the alert for the entire city that said, hey, take cover. There are bombers coming in. So that's a lot of people who were exposed to that. a little bit later there was one in Washington, D.C., in certain federal buildings in particular. This was caused by the phone company was doing some work in various lines, and they accidentally triggered the circuit that let off the air rail alert. And these were people who were trained to deal with this. These are people who were working in like agencies, government agencies, and expecting that they

would be targeted by the Soviet Union. and it took a while for them to circulate the information that that was just literally a crossed wire. And then the third one I really love, because it's just for all of these causes, it's easily the most absurd. I think it was in 1959, the Chicago White Sox won the pennant for the first time in 40 years or something like that. And as a consequence of winning the pennant, the assistant fire chief or whatever, who was the acting civil defense director, decided it would be worth running the air raid siren as part of the festivities. And so he told a few people, like just a minute before it went out, he told the newspapers in the radio that it was just for fun.

But he ran the We're under attack siren at 10.30 at night for a huge part of the city, again, out of joyousness. And what's interesting is that there were the National Academy of Sciences, commissions university scholars, in some cases, right after these things happened, to study what people did, because you can't run an experiment like this, right? If you're a researcher today, you're not allowed to scare the crap out of people and tell them up, you're under attack, and then say, okay, just kidding. Like, no institutional review board's going to approve that. So when you have these kind of accidents, it's actually a great opportunity for learning,

okay, do people actually take cover? You told them that they are under attack, right? You told them that this is happening. Do they do what you say? And the answer is no. Well, again, that's that's something we, that's something again we saw kind of in Hawaii as we were talking to people, right? Like, no one, no one knew what to do. Everyone's kind of kind of do their own thing. And there's not a lot of really good information out there of what to do if there's a nuke coming. What's interesting is that these people in the 50s knew what to do. They were actually people who had often trained for it, like it was part of their world to do this, and they knew what the signal was.

And yet the number who actually did what the signal told them to do, which is to find a shelter space or something like that, was like not more than one out of four in all the cases. And it was really interesting to me to read this report on this, because the reasons why people didn't do it, those do resonate very strongly with the Hawaii. what people told us at Hawaii. Like, for example, the people who did the worst at this were those who had in the 50s,

they had the least amount of education or they had the most amount of education. It was like on either end of this U-shaped plot, right? If you had a college degree, you probably ignored the signal. And if you had no high school, you probably ignored the signal. The people who took it seriously were the people in between. And in sort of talking with people about why that is, these research, concluded the people who didn't have enough education did not really understand the signal and did not know what to do so they didn't know what to do the people had too much education found ways to rationalize not doing what they knew to do right so we heard a number of people in hawaii say things like well i've been following the news and north korea really closely so i would know if this was likely which is not even you know it's probably not true right it's like you know do you know what time it is in north korea right like most people are not actually clued into the minute by minute hour by hour of what's happening on the Korean peninsula. Some people are, but very few are.

And in fact, some of the reasons that I heard for people saying, well, I didn't take it seriously, are totally rationalizations. People just kind of made it up because it made them feel better, not because they had a strong reason for actually thinking it was true. They also found in the 50s that women tended to be better at following the instructions, especially women with children, which is kind of interesting, and also dovetails with some of the sort of informal data we have on Hawaii, where you see people who are in charge of young people, young children, or even college students.

You have people who are, you know, there's the famous footage of that guy stuffing his children into the storm drain or whatever, right? Like that sort of instinct seems to motivate people or if they think, if it's just them, they'll find reasons not to take it seriously or to ignore it, but if it's like, oh, I have this dependent,

I need to really take care of that matters. And then the other thing that I thought really stood out a lot, almost everybody in the 1950s, and I heard this very similarly in Hawaii, they tried to confirm the information before they took it seriously. Not 100% of people, but a lot of people did. So they would turn on the radio, turn on the television, call 911 and ask them, is this thing real? And this is like, from a civil defense perspective, not a good strategy. It's a waste of time. You're wasting precious minutes trying to confirm. And you're also going to tie up the phone lines and you're also maybe getting wrong information.

Today, if we were saying what are people, Hawaii did, a lot of them pull out their smartphones and start Googling. A lot of them went to Twitter. Some did turn on the television. I don't know how many of them turned on the radio, but this attempt to confirm was very big. I had one person tell me that the reason they didn't believe it was because they felt that there would have been, the tsunami sirens would have also been running if it was real. And thus they weren't running, so it must not be real. which is, again, that's a very nice rationalization, but it assumes that you really know exactly what would happen

in the event of a real signal. I don't know if the tsunami sight ones would be running. That wasn't publicized or anything like that. So there's a lot of interesting parallels on like human behavior. I think that the underlying conclusion of the study was people don't really want to believe that's happening, even if they've trained for it, even if they're in theory ready for it.

And they will grasp on any opportunity to say, no, this can't be real. And if you're a planner whose plans require human beings to actually do these things, you have to take that in consideration. That makes me – so this actually brings me to a follow-up question I actually did have for the 90s. What was it that made both the American public and American policymakers seem to really believe that they could kind of be less worried about this issue when there really weren't a lot of indicators that. that was true. You had Indian, Pakistan, continuing, and doing testing in the 90s, which, I mean, I was young back then, but I don't remember anybody mentioning that nukes were still being used. It was always very much talked about it. Man, the Cold War was really scary. It's a good thing

there aren't those worries anymore. And it seemed like people really genuinely believed that up until really even into the 2000s. What allowed us to just kick the can down the road? I think that there was, you know, you could probably point to a lot of different impulses, either socially or politically, right? And this is not a criticism of any of the officials or anything like this. But I've talked with sort of high-level officials who are from the Clinton administration, for example. And they really didn't think nukes, especially nukes with Russia, were going to be as big a deal anymore.

They really were sold on, no, no, no. That's the past. We're moving to the new world. The new world is going to have all this other stuff going on, which is going to be complicated. You know, the information super highway, right? All of these kind of 90s buzzwords and all that kind of stuff. But it's going to be about the economy and global trade and interdependence. And again, not to kick on scholars who have since recanted and all that.

But all of this, you know, fashionable discussion about the end of history being looming in front of us, right? the whole Francis Fukuyama thing, where now we've all reached a consensus that communism is bad and so is fascism. And basically liberal democracy and global capitalism is the way to global prosperity. And this is great. We're just all going to kick in and pretty soon the wheels of history will stop grinding us all up and we'll just end up basically all being like the Netherlands or something like that, right? Or a Scandinavian country where everything kind of works out pretty well and we don't have to worry about sectarian threats or religious extremists or, you know, ideologies or any of that stuff. And, you know, in retrospect, the fact that that's so wrong, like, totally wrong is really easy to see.

And of course, 9-11 is sort of the big wake-up call for Americans on the whole of like, hey, it's actually not like that at all. And all these things you said are gone are right here. and they're even worse than they were before in some places. But I think there was a willingness to believe that in the United States. And part of that was, again, this sort of monofocus on the Soviet Union as the threat. Russia, especially in the 90s, was not the Soviet Union. Aside from the fact that it had different leaders who were a little more lovable, Yeltsin, that sort of thing, it was also poor and not very threatening and needed our help more than it could oppose us and all of that kind of stuff.

and I really think people did not expect it to come back the way it did in the sort of revanchivist Putinist way. And they also were really, you know, overlooking a lot of the other things. Okay, India and Pakistan, and there was a lot of hand-wringing over, oh, my God, are these guys going to kill each other? Jesus, right? Can we get them to stop doing this, these two allies of ours? China was our number one favorite trading partner, right? They're not going to nuke us. France, England, who cares about them, right? I mean, South Africa got rid of its nukes.

I mean, if you look at it through that lens, you see, okay, there's a few rough spots here. Fine, fine. But, like, you manage Pakistan and India. Maybe they'll fit into some nice dynamic where they won't kill each other. And everything else moves slowly. Now, now we see really different trends. We see Pakistan helping other nations proliferate. We see Russia is just sort of building up a grudge that it's going to really try to come back with.

We see China as this very expansionist, you know, power that is becoming a global superpower of its own, et cetera, et cetera. But you can, I don't know. I grew up in the 90s, and you can see why that was much more appealing to see everything as like, basically, we figured it all out, we won, let's move on. And you got a lot of people in the 90s saying, look, all this nuke stuff, and especially any, nobody's trying to suggest civil defense in the 90s. But you get people saying in the 2000s and 2010s even recently, oh, my God, why are you scaremongering? All this stuff isn't that big a deal. You're just trying to make us be afraid.

And so we'll do whatever you say, this kind of paranoia vision of this. But, you know, these threats didn't go away. Some of them maybe got worse. Some of them got even more changed a lot. But I think it's pretty clear that things didn't just, you know, in retrospect, it's very clear nothing got really sort of solved by that. And I think actually you could make the argument that the fact that people were so willing to believe they were solved actually got in the way of solving one of these problems. So what do we do now? Do we have any kind of civil defense?

And if something's coming, where do I hide? We have emergency management, which is what civil defense turned into. over the course of the 70s, 80s, and especially in the post-9-11. Emergency management is not quite the same thing. It's basically about what do you do with all the people after the bomb goes off? That has its, you know, how do governments deal with us?

It's not so much about telling people what to do. If you read all the emergency management plans, they all basically say, we need people to cooperate with us and do the right thing. So the fact that people are probably not going to do that is probably going to screw up a lot of these plans. We don't have a lot of messaging on this.

You can go online and look up what to do. You can go on to ready.gov and look up. You have to click through several screens, but you can find recommendations for nuclear. But it's not the same level of information, certainly not the same level of, again, what we call salience. People aren't sort of aware of this.

They don't know about it. They don't think about it. And it's an open question, should we have more? Should you have warning systems? Hawaii, for all of its flaws, was really one of the sort of vanguard of this. They were one of the first states that said, we need to be really proactive about this because of the ballistic missile threat from North Korea. And they're in the path of that. California probably should, too, but the missiles that North Korea has now are long enough to reach pretty much anywhere in the U.S.

maybe everybody should have something like this. If you think the possibility of things going sour in North Korea over, say, the next decade or so are high, then maybe you should have this kind of thing. The dark irony of the Hawaii incident, it really highlights the dangers of a false alarm. The political damage was very high, and people were very unhappy, and there's even one lawsuit about health effects from a guy who had a heart attack that he claims was caused by it. but it also made the state of Hawaii basically shelved their program. So Hawaii went from being the vanguard to now being one of the first to abandon it again because the political consequences of it spruing up are too high. And that's not good.

That doesn't help us. So we could do a lot more. That's not to say states don't have emergency management agencies. It's not to say there aren't some messaging campaigns out there, but there's less than there, I think, ought to be relative to both the size of the issue what it ought to be in the American consciousness, but also relative to the amount of lives that are potentially at stake

in the event of even a terrorist nuclear weapon going off and people doing the right thing, worse than North Korea. As for what to do, the official guidelines now are no longer dachn cover. The pithy phrase that Homeland Security and FEMA would like you to know, which almost nobody knows, apparently, we've done studies, nobody knows these.

The phrases are get inside, stay inside, stay tuned. And get inside is basically them saying any kind of structure is better than no kind of structure. If you go under the websites, you can get more instructions about which structures are better than others. But any kind of structure gives you some kind of protection against blast, thermal radiation, so heat, ionizing radiation. so there's an initial burst of radioactivity, but also fallout, which especially for a terrorist weapon, would probably expose the most people to a threat. And you don't need a whole shelter, but there are some recommendations. A single-story house, you know, with brick veneer or something. That doesn't help you that much.

The basement helps you a little bit more. A two-story house helps you a bit more than that. The basement of a three-story house helps you better than all of those. the center of a massive concrete, you know, apartment building is pretty good. The lower sub-basement parking lot, all of these things are better. As you add more stuff, you know, especially concrete and things like that, but as you add more matter between you and the outside world, as you add more air between you and the outside world,

you're adding more and more sort of potential poor protection. And again, if the nuke happens to hit the building you're in, good luck. It's probably not going to help. But if it misses you by a little bit, which is highly possible, it's highly possible even if you're in the building that they're aiming at because you don't know how accurate an North Korean missile system is, right, or even a Russian one for that matter, Chinese. But that's all to the advantage. Stay inside means don't just after the bomb goes off immediately run out. You need to stay inside because of the fallout problems. Also, if you try to evacuate immediately, you're likely to get stuck on the freeway. And if you're stuck on the freeway, and fallout gets on you, your car offers you almost no protection. It's only a little bit better than being out in the open. So they're really trying to get people from clogging up all the freeways and trying to escape and thus exposing themselves after they've survived the initial thing to even more hazards. And lastly, the stay tuned. This is them trying to say, look, if you stay in contact with us,

we'll give you more information. We'll tell you which parts of the cities ought to evacuate versus which parts ought to just stay in their basements. We'll get around and make sure everything is good. Again, this assumes that all the communication infrastructure is going to be working, which is a pretty big assumption in my mind for a post-nuclear situation since even a hurricane can knock out all of your cell phones and things like that. But, you know, it's a good impulse, even if in practice it's going to be pretty tricky. That's basically what they want you to do.

And it's not about finding some specific thing, a place to go, though it is about a situational awareness where if you're at work and you know, oh, the biggest building at my work that has a basement is the one down the block a little bit. Where I work, there's a bowling alley underneath the administration building. It's inside of a mountain. And I sort of think, that's a pretty good place if I had to wait out, you know, for a couple days for radiation to go pass through. Also bowling, right? You know, what could go wrong? but knowing those kinds of things would be helpful more than having a specific place in mind because you don't really know where you'll be.

Secondly, the impulse they're trying to curb again is for people to get into their cars and try to, quote, head for the hills. You don't even know where the hills are. You don't know where the nuke's going to go off if it's going to go off. And the odds that you're actually going to get there and not just get stuck on the freeway are pretty bad. And that's what they definitely don't want you to do. So that's the official advice is I think if I were talking to, which I have, I've talked to civil defense official type people, emergency management people. I always think that they ought to level with you about the fact that this isn't going to save your life.

It's just going to increase the chances that you will not be killed or becoming otherwise injured by this. But there's nothing magical about it. It's just about playing the numbers. And if you do these kinds of activities, you help the numbers a little bit. You still don't want to get into a nuclear exchange with anybody. But again, we don't have total control over that. I think that strikes the right kind of depressing note that we'd like to end the show on. Alex, thank you so much for coming on to the show and talking to us about the history of civil defense and how to maybe possibly increase your chances of surviving a nuclear exchange.

I'm happy to be here. One last thing I'd say, if people are interested in the history of American and Soviet civil defense in particular, Edward Geist, now at the Rand Corporation, has a very nice book that just came out a couple months ago called Armageddon Insurance. And it's basically the most detailed history of American and Soviet civil defense that's out there right now. And so for people who really want to get the inside story on that, heavily recommend Ed's book. A lot of what I say is based on things I've learned from him over the years. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening to War College.

I'm feeling a little ill just right now thanks to all the pollen that's in the air so you'll excuse me if we rush through this bit. War College is me, Matthew Galt, Kevin Nodell, and Derek Gannon. It was created by me and Jason Fields who isn't allergic to anything. That jerk. Follow us on Twitter at war underscore college

or on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. We will see you next week after the pollen has calmed down and I burned all the trees in my neighborhood. Until then, please stay safe. safe.