Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The British prime minister, Winston Churchill, was disturbed by the results of the Bravo test. Churchill had been an early proponent of defending Western Europe with nuclear weapons, not conventional forces. In 1952, Great Britain detonated a fission device, and its first atomic bomb, the “Blue Danube,” had recently been transferred to the Royal Air Force. The Blue Danube, with a yield of about 16 kilotons, now appeared minuscule and obsolete. “With all its horrors, the atomic bomb did not seem unmanageable as an instrument of war,” Churchill told the House of Commons a month after the Bravo test. “But the hydrogen bomb carries us into dimensions which… have been confined to the realms of fancy and imagination.” A small, densely populated nation would be especially vulnerable to such a weapon. Churchill asked William Strath, an official at the Central War Plans Secretariat, to lead a top secret study of what a thermonuclear attack would do to the United Kingdom.

Strath submitted his report in the spring of 1955, and its findings were grimly apocalyptic. According to the latest intelligence, a Soviet assault on the United Kingdom would have three main objectives: destroy the airfields hosting U.S. or British bombers, destroy the British government, and “render the UK useless as a base for any form of military operations.” That would be relatively easy to accomplish. “The heat flash from one hydrogen bomb,” the Strath report noted, “would start in a built-up area anything up to 100,000 fires, with a circumference of between 60 to 100 miles.” If the Soviets detonated ten hydrogen bombs along the west coast of the United Kingdom, the normally prevailing winds would blanket most of the country with fallout. Almost one third of the British population would be killed or wounded immediately. Most of the nation’s farmland would be rendered unusable for two months, some of the most productive land might “be lost for a long time,” and supplies of drinking water would be contaminated. In a section entitled “Machinery of Control,” the report warned that society would collapse in much of the United Kingdom. Local military commanders would be granted “drastic emergency powers,” and civil order might have to be restored through the use of “rough and ready methods.” Strath urged the government to release accurate information about the hydrogen bomb so that families could build fallout shelters, store canned foods, and prepare for the worst.

The Strath report was kept secret, its plea for greater openness ignored. Instead, Prime Minister Churchill ordered the BBC not to broadcast news about the hydrogen bomb that might discourage the public. Telling the truth about nuclear weapons, the British government feared, would weaken popular support for a defense policy that required them. Churchill had already chosen a different sort of response to the threat of thermonuclear war. “Influence depended on possession of force,” he told advisers, not long after the Bravo test. Great Britain would develop its own hydrogen bombs. Once again, the appeal of the H-bomb lay in its symbolism. “We must do it,” Churchill explained. “It’s the price we pay to sit at the top table.”

The Eisenhower administration also struggled with how to handle public fears of the hydrogen bomb. The head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, waited almost a year to acknowledge that the Bravo test had spread lethal fallout across thousands of square miles. While Strauss tried to limit publicity about the dangers of fallout, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) conveyed a different message. Val Peterson, the head of the FCDA, advised every American family to build an underground shelter “right now.” Once the Soviets deployed their hydrogen bombs, Peterson added, “we had all better dig and pray.”

The FCDA had argued for years that people could survive a nuclear attack by seeking some form of shelter. An animated character, Bert the Turtle, urged America’s schoolchildren to “duck and cover” — to hide under classroom tables or desks as soon as they saw the flash of an atomic bomb. And a widely distributed civil defense pamphlet, “Survival Under Atomic Attack,” provided useful and encouraging household tips:

YOUR CHANCES OF SURVIVING AN ATOMIC ATTACK ARE BETTER THAN YOU MAY HAVE THOUGHT…. EVEN A LITTLE MATERIAL GIVES PROTECTION FROM FLASH BURNS, SO BE SURE TO DRESS PROPERLY…. WE KNOW MORE ABOUT RADIOACTIVITY THAN WE DO ABOUT COLDS…. KEEP A FLASHLIGHT HANDY…. AVOID GETTING WET AFTER UNDERWATER BURSTS…. BE CAREFUL NOT TO TRACK RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS INTO THE HOUSE….

The destructive power of the hydrogen bomb forced civil defense planners to alter their recommendations. Suburban families were advised to remain in underground shelters, windowless basements, or backyard trenches for four or five days after a thermonuclear blast. Urban families were told to leave their homes when an attack seemed likely. Eisenhower’s plans for an interstate highway system were justified by the need to evacuate American cities during wartime. Val Peterson called for concrete pipelines to be laid alongside the new roads, so that refugees could sleep inside them and avoid fallout. “Duck and cover,” one journalist noted, was being replaced by a new civil defense catchphrase: “Run for the hills.”

Hoping to boost morale and demonstrate that a nuclear war would not mean the end of the world, the FCDA staged Operation Alert 1955 during June of that year. It was the largest civil defense drill in the nation’s history. During a mock attack, sixty-one cities were struck by nuclear weapons, ranging in yield from 20 kilotons to 5 megatons. As air-raid sirens warned that Soviet bombers were approaching, fifteen thousand federal employees were evacuated from Washington, D.C. The president and members of his Cabinet were driven to secret locations and remained there for three days. Throughout the United States, families climbed into shelters or rehearsed their escape routes. In New York City, everyone was cleared from the streets and kept indoors for ten minutes, bracing for the arrival of a Soviet hydrogen bomb — whose ground zero, for some reason, would be the corner of North 7th Street and Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Administration officials called Operation Alert a great success. The secretary of the Treasury, George M. Humphrey, said that the exercise demonstrated the United States would “be able to take it” and “recover surprisingly rapidly.” Out of a U.S. population of about 165 million, only 8.2 million people would be killed and 6.6 million wounded — and more than half of those casualties would be in New York City. If everybody took the right precautions, Val Peterson assured reporters, “we might — ideally — escape without losing any lives from fallout.”

In a public statement, Eisenhower said the drill had brought him “great encouragement.” But at a Cabinet meeting, he summed up his feelings in one word: “staggering.” On the first day of Operation Alert, the president had declared martial law, transferring power from the state governments to half a dozen Army field commands. The casualty figures released to the press vastly understated the likely impact of a thermonuclear war. A new word had entered the lexicon of nuclear war planning: megadeath. It was a unit of measurement. One megadeath equaled one million fatalities — and the nation was bound to suffer a great many megadeaths during a thermonuclear war. On January 23, 1956, President Eisenhower recorded in his diary the results of a top secret study on what would really happen after a Soviet attack:

The United States experienced practically total economic collapse, which could not be restored to any kind of operative conditions under six months to a year…. Members of the Federal government were wiped out and a new government had to be improvised by the states…. It was calculated that something on the order of 65 % of the population would require some sort of medical care, and in most instances, no opportunity whatsoever to get it….