This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (17 page)

Though accurate, such statements had little effect. The attitude apparent in 1946—“I let the government worry about it”—had crystallized into faith in the armed services’ capabilities. This trust also eased Americans’ concern over the militarization of American society and institutions taking place around them. Historian Michael Sherry: since 1945, American leaders had “sought to disseminate an ideology of preparedness, to forge a permanent military–industrial–scientific establishment, to reorganize the armed forces, to institute a permanent system of universal training, to acquire far-flung military bases, to occupy defeated enemies with American forces, to retain a monopoly of atomic weapons, and to create a high-tech American Pax Aeronautica.”
⁵⁰
By 1950, they had succeeded on every count save one, the atomic monopoly; furthermore, Korea had demonstrated the need to fight a difficult land war far away. Americans pondering the urgent reasons for and mighty costs of militarization and containment could hardly be faulted for assuming one of the benefits was continental security. If America’s military,
especially its Air Force, was the best in the world, then why couldn’t it fully protect the homeland and the capital?

The encirclement of Washington by antiaircraft missile batteries nurtured this faith. By 1951, Western Electric and other contractors had developed a supersonic, radar-guided missile capable of tracking and striking aircraft. The Army named it “Nike” and called for rings of bases around the nation’s key military and urban areas, including Washington. Reminiscent of Tracy Augur’s search for dispersal sites, the Army Corps of Engineers surveyed land 25 miles from the center of Washington. Like dispersal campuses, Nike bases required land with good road access, a reliable electrical grid, and sewer and water mains. The southwestern, rural part of Fairfax County, Va., offered numerous usable parcels, and by October 1953, the Corps had procured 30 acres of farmland near the town of Lorton. Construction began in March 1954; two other batteries were also built in Fairfax County. In all, the Army built 20 Nike bases around Washington and Baltimore. Ready in 1955, the Lorton base was among the first batteries finished. In underground concrete boxes, the gleaming white Nikes lay atop a platform that lifted the missiles, one by one, to rails leading to the base’s four launch pads. The Lorton base, known as the “National Nike Site,” had barracks for its 100 troops, radars, and an outbuilding to house the missiles’ volatile propellant, a brew of jet fuel and nitric acid. Larger than most Nike sites, Lorton maintained double the usual number of missiles. And it had tours, lots of them. The crown prince of Iraq visited; so did the military chiefs of staff from Haiti, Chile, and Paraguay. The public came, too. Sundays were designated “open house” days, and they attracted diverse groups of locals and tourists.
⁵¹
Showcasing the National Nike Site proved the United States wielded potent defensive weapons, even though the Army was careful not to predict the Nikes could incapacitate all aircraft.

Although Caldwell and Truman et al. iterated the nation’s vulnerability to attack, they didn’t want Americans to linger on this question. Instead, lead
ers hoped the rhetoric of preparedness would stimulate volunteerism, even if privately they didn’t believe in civil defense. No matter how much money is spent, we will never have a workable defense against an atomic attack, wrote NSRB chairman Stuart Symington, adding, “[m]ore and more it would seem that the only true defense for the United States is the capacity for devastating and sustained retaliatory attack; because nobody ever started a war they did-n’t think they were going to win.” This from the man entrusted with national civil defense prior to the FCDA’s creation. To Symington, stockpiles of atomic weapons guaranteed peace better than a “broom-stick army of eager but untrained volunteers which some might believe could be mustered overnight to cope with the crashing impact of atomic warfare.”
⁵²
Trying to present civil defense as the bomb’s partner in deterrence, Caldwell echoed Symington. The Soviet Union won’t start a war it cannot win, he said, and if its leaders know civil defense stands at the ready to execute survival and recovery throughout the United States, then they won’t attack. Added
Caldwell, almost as an afterthought, “A strong civil defense cuts down the effectiveness of the enemy’s stockpile of atomic bombs. It makes him build two bombs instead of one.”
⁵³
Americans listening closely might well have asked how civil defense could be a deterrent if it only encouraged the enemy to build more bombs.

By the time Caldwell delivered his speech in June 1952, simple but firm logic molded the public’s attitude. Civil defense required one to contemplate horrors easier to ignore or believe could never happen; maintaining national security was the government’s responsibility and the basic reason for milita
rization and containment; if civil defense was truly a vital part of that national security, then surely the federal government would do more than
tell
Americans about the importance of civil defense, it would
show
them by fund
ing, nurturing, and administering civil defense at all levels. For that to hap
pen, executive branch officials, including the president, needed to resolve their own ambivalence about civil defense. Moreover, the executive branch needed a willing partner in Congress.

But Congress didn’t want to pay for civil defense, and its hostile attitude didn’t go unnoticed. In October 1950, following its release of the national civil defense plan, the NSRB polled 400 cities with 20,000 or more residents on the status of their civil defense programs. Tellingly, only 139 responded. Less than five percent of the cities had funded anything more than token measures, and nearly a third of the respondents criticized the federal govern
ment for its lack of specific guidance.
⁵⁴
The 81st Congress passed legislation creating the FCDA in January 1951, then promptly rejected its request for $403 million to get started, approving just $32 million. This was enough money for films, publications, studies, and staff, but not for urban shelters and medical stockpiles, which made up most of the request. For the fiscal year 1953, the administration requested $600 million, again most of it for shelters. Unimpressed with Truman’s statement that the nation “simply cannot afford a penny-wise-pound-foolish attitude about the cost of adequate civil defense,” Congress granted less than ten percent of that amount. Truman complained, Congress ignored him. For the FCDA’s first three years, budget requests totaled $1.5 billion of which the legislative branch approved just $150.1 million, none of it earmarked for shelter construction.
⁵⁵

Truman denounced these cuts as short-sighted, but Congressional penny-pinching made sense: growing stockpiles and the development of hydrogen bombs promised to make urban shelters obsolete by the time they were built. Yet few legislators cited this basic fact to justify their opposition. Like their constituents, members of Congress believed the military could repel an attack. The cost of the Korean War also made expenditures on “soft” defense programs such as civil defense seem wasteful. Some legislators believed the FCDA wasn’t capable of properly spending such large sums, while visions of a sprawling bureaucracy aroused the antipathy of Republicans and conserva
tive Democrats. Finally, legislators recognized that civil defense lacked a safe berth in the national security state. By setting civil defense on a foundation of
individual, community, and state self-help, the NSRB and the FCDA effectively exiled it to no-man’s land. The federal government was in charge of all other areas of national security, yet citizens were expected to take the initiative in civil defense. When the American people didn’t respond, legislators had all the more reason to shrug off the FCDA’s budget requests.

This same cycle applied to Washington. Citing the DCD’s failure to attract volunteers, Congress cut every annual budget. Between 1951 and 1953, Congress appropriated a total of $785,000 out of the $2.3 million requested. Washingtonians thus arrived at the same conclusion as other Americans: if hometown civil defense really was important, Congress would provide ade
quate funds. When they received the District’s annual civil defense budget, Congress’s appropriations committees then pointed to the public apathy as reason to withhold funds. The fact that District residents couldn’t elect their own representatives and senators further isolated the DCD. Representative Earl Wilson (R-Ind.), a member of the subcommittee on the District of Columbia’s appropriations, once told a Washington radio audience that local civil defense was unnecessary, that the Air Force could do the job. (Wilson also opposed air raid sirens for the District, contending that church bells could be used instead.) As long as his Indiana constituents were happy, Wilson didn’t have to please the District’s government or residents.
⁵⁶

Suburbanites could empathize with Washingtonians when it came to government support for civil defense. In May 1952, the Montgomery County (Md.) Manager struck all funds for civil defense from the annual budget. He justified the cut as a legitimate response to the failure of state and federal officials to adequately fund civil defense and to the “natural apathy on the part of citizens in a confused international period [that] has resulted in something less than a well-rounded [civil defense] program.”
⁵⁷
Later that year, the ground observer post at Sandy Spring in eastern Montgomery County closed, despite having an outstanding record. (During one four-month period, it went unmanned for just 28 hours.) Post Supervisor Arthur Farquhar, whose property served as the spotters’ base, requested a move to the FCDA’s training school at nearby Olney. After waiting two months for approval, Farquhar gave up and disbanded the post. The FCDA weakly responded that changing sites required consultation with the Air Force. Bureaucratic excuses mattered little to Farquhar and his team of volunteers, who simply wanted to move so they would no longer risk “illness from standing around on damp, cold ground or sitting in a draughty [
sic
] kitchen where windows and doors must be kept open in order to hear planes.”
⁵⁸

Like the District wardens who quit in frustration when Congress refused to buy them helmets, Sandy Spring’s spotters discovered apathy wasn’t the only enemy—presumed allies were, too.

The Federal Relocation Arc

In 1952, State Department employee Earl G. Millison was waiting for a
n
overseas assignment. Instead he went to Front Royal, Va., a small town o
n

the northern edge of Shenandoah National Park, some 70 miles west of Washington. Once a rough-and-tumble frontier settlement known as “Helltown,” Front Royal now catered to tourists vacationing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Front Royal’s part in U.S. foreign relations wasn’t obvious, especially since Millison went to an Agriculture Department reservation just outside of town. The 6,000-acre parcel housed a beef cattle research station. There were stables, a veterinary hospital, research laboratories, and even a theater and recreation building. On an acre of the site, the National Bureau of Standards had a one-man operation studying the effects of sunspots on radio waves. Established in 1914, the Front Royal reservation had also served as an army cavalry station, a K-9 dog training site, and a World War II prisoner of war camp.
⁵⁹
Despite these varied functions, Millison found neglect and disuse; he even had to set up his office in an abandoned building. Vines smothering exterior walls had broken through windows and grew unabated inside.
⁶⁰

What was Millison doing here? On May 7, Agriculture had granted permission to State to use the reservation as an emergency relocation headquarters; it was Millison’s job to build this facility.
⁶¹
He had plenty of work. Rehabilitating the buildings meant more than uprooting vines; water pipes and furnaces had to be replaced, a switchboard and phone lines installed. Told to prepare accommodations for 600 people, Millison needed beds, offices, a cafeteria, a hospital. A diesel generator for backup power was needed. Six springs provided water but the filter beds needed to be replaced. Gasoline and diesel fuel had to be stored for the generator and vehicles, requiring massive tanks. To do their work, State’s emergency cadre needed copies of essential records, office equipment, and secure communication lines (telephone, microwaves, and an emergency transmitter). As he surveyed the lush rot around him, Millison must have wondered where to begin.

He first approached a local politician named Billy Armstrong and asked for help. Armstrong told him how to find skilled laborers in town and recommended Mrs. Stokes, a long-time resident, as a secretary. Said Millison, she was “more than useful to me because she [knew] all the people in town and if I wanted information on something pertaining to the town she would know it at once.” Millison put his crew to work clearing out undergrowth and repairing the buildings. He negotiated with the telephone company to install a switchboard and an upgraded phone cable from Front Royal. By the year’s end, he had several buildings ready for occupancy. Unfortunately, he was out of money. When he received more funds, he acquired a diesel generator for emergency power and installed fuel tanks with a total capacity of 3,500 gallons. With Mrs. Stokes’s help, he contacted the owners of Front Royal motels, apartment buildings, and tourist cabins and arranged to use their properties to house the emergency cadre.
⁶²

Continued development produced an elaborate and extensive facility, code-named “Rabbit.” By May 1955, the 60-acre site included 35 buildings, 6 Motorola microwave units, and $100,000 worth of telephone and teletype equipment. Multilithograph and mimeograph machines went into the theater
basement. A daily workforce of 35–38 people provided security, maintained equipment and facilities, and cut the grass. Security Officer Bob Cook lived on the base, checking all the buildings in the mornings, the springs and pump houses in the afternoon. Six stucco and tile barns, each able to accommodate 100 persons, were converted into offices and a cafeteria. For the secretary of state and his immediate family, a ten-room house with three baths waited. Some of the cattle research buildings became boiler and plumbing shops, cryptographic storage, and a hospital. Powerful radio transmitters could be used to communicate with diplomatic posts overseas. The designated size of the emergency cadre grew, first to 700, then 1,200. Millison believed State arbitrarily picked this latter figure, a 100 percent increase from the original estimate, but said he could have managed if he “took over the motels.”
⁶³