The difficulty was that, if it was to be taken seriously, the scale of the problem was huge and the costs were enormous. Further, the measures could, of necessity, only be passive: protective shelters for the population to take refuge in, respirators and protective suits to resist biological and chemical attack, fire engines to extinguish fires, and a proper organization to make it all work. Very few countries proved willing to undertake such measures on the necessary scale, particularly if they were achievable only at the expense of cuts in the more active part of the national defence budget.
It was generally accepted that even a counter-force strike (i.e. against military targets such as ICBM silos, airfields, naval ports and nuclear command-and-control centres) would result in massive civilian casualties – the so-called ‘collateral damage’. One major study suggested that both the USA and the USSR would suffer casualties of the order of 12–27 million deaths from a counter-force strike, while the estimated deaths from a counter-value strike (i.e. against cities and industrial complexes) would be 25–66 million in the USA and 45–77 million in the USSR.
fn1
In both cases (i.e. counter-force and counter-value), further large numbers would have
suffered
longer-term radiation-caused cancers. The study report also stated that, in addition, there would have been many further deaths and injuries from indirect consequences of the nuclear attacks, such as riots, sickness, disease and starvation, whose numbers were impossible to calculate.
1
Civil-defence measures potentially consisted of four elements: a system to detect an incoming attack and warn the civil population; a policy for the orderly evacuation of urban areas; the construction of shelters; and plans to achieve national survival after an attack. Different countries gave differing emphases to these, although towards the end of the Cold War there appeared to be a growing consensus that even the most all-embracing and expensive civil-defence policies would be of little use in the face of a heavy, all-out, counter-city attack. After all, ran one argument, what value would there be in surviving in a shelter only to emerge to a world that had been totally destroyed?
Warning systems were designed to enable the general population to seek protection against heat flash, blast and, to a certain extent, fallout. The USA and the USSR would normally have received between seventeen and thirty minutes’ warning of approaching missiles, but, like countries in western Europe, could have received as little as four minutes, which would have given very little time for the public to be alerted.
To be effective, an evacuation plan would have had to be implemented well in advance of an attack, but evacuation was a course fraught with difficulty. A general evacuation of the big cities would bring national life and much of industry to a standstill, and could not be sustained for a long period. Evacuation of a large city would be a lengthy, complicated and difficult operation, and if the missiles arrived while vast convoys of trains, buses and cars were stuck on the railroads and highways the nation concerned would actually suffer the worst of both worlds. Also, it would be difficult to predict in advance which refuge areas would be safe, and the arrival of large groups of townspeople in rural areas would cause enormous feeding, accommodation, medical, health, sanitation and morale problems. Finally, the opposing side might interpret the evacuation as a sign that the country concerned was conducting it as a prelude to launching its own strike, and use this as a pretext to strike first.
THE USSR
The USSR treated civil defence more seriously than most other countries, with the central headquarters being an integral part of the Ministry of Defence. One of the deputy ministers of defence was specifically responsible for civil defence, and there was a chain of command running through the council of ministers in each of the fifteen republics of the USSR down to
full-time
officials at town and large-factory level. The Ministry of Defence also controlled a nationwide network of civil-defence schools, where training courses were run for both military and civilian personnel.
The civilian organizations were backed up by a military Civil Defence Corps, some 50,000 strong, which was trained in basic military skills as well as civil-defence skills such as operating engineering equipment, traffic direction, and first aid. Other Ministry of Defence bodies, such as the Construction Troops, the Railway and Road Construction Troops and the Transport Organization Service, were also called upon to perform civil-defence tasks, including building shelters.
In and near the major cities, the USSR constructed hardened command posts which were designed to accommodate approximately 100,000 people in what was termed the ‘leadership category’ – which, by definition, meant Communist Party officials and military officers. There was also a shelter programme for the people, and by 1981 there were some 20,000 shelters, capable of accommodating approximately 13 million people, which amounted to approximately 10 per cent of the population of cities with over 20,000 inhabitants. The rate of building continued for several years after that, but it failed even to keep pace with the increase in population numbers and by the late 1980s the programme was moribund.
The remainder of the urban population would have had to rely on evacuation, and the occasional small-scale exercise was conducted. Whether the system would have coped with transporting, housing and feeding millions of city-dwellers eager to reach the countryside, particularly in the depths of a Russian winter, can only be a matter for conjecture.
The other Warsaw Pact countries had generally similar organizations, with a department in the national ministry of defence, usually headed by a lieutenant-general, responsible for civil defence.
THE USA
In the USA the responsibility for civil defence originally lay with the Department of Defense, but it was passed to the newly established Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1979. FEMA plans assumed that the primary Soviet strategic mission in a first strike would be against counter-force targets, and its crisis relocation plans were based on the high degree of mobility inherent in the United States, with an extensive highway system and widespread automobile ownership. Whether the gasoline would have been available for such a mass movement, whether the huge numbers of travellers would have been amenable to control, and whether the rural areas could have accepted and sustained the numbers involved was never put to the test.
THE UK
The British system made the civil authorities
fn2
responsible for civil defence, with the military in support. A large Civil Defence Corps was established in the early 1950s, consisting mainly of volunteers, backed up by a small cadre of full-time staff. This corps was trained and equipped for both heavy and light rescue, and operated in conjunction with the police, the fire services and the military, but it was disbanded in the early 1960s.
On several occasions during the Cold War the British government considered the idea of a large-scale shelter programme for the general population, but the idea was always rejected on the grounds of the enormous cost, a 1980s assessment putting the price at some £1,300 per head. As a result, the actual plan – known as the ‘Stay-Put Policy’ – depended upon providing a warning system and the use of TV, radio, newspapers and mailshots to tell the population to remain where they were in the event of war. The education of the population in protective measures would have been implemented only when war appeared inevitable.
Actual warning of a nuclear attack and reporting post-strike developments was the responsibility of the UK Warning and Monitoring Organization (UKWMO), which consisted of a very small number of full-time officials and some 10,000 men and women volunteers of the Royal Observer Corps.
fn3
The national nuclear-attack warning was disseminated using a cascade system, which originated with the detection of an incoming strike at the Ballistic Missiles Early Warning Station (BMEWS) at Fylingdales, Yorkshire. BMEWS passed the warning to the UK Regional Air Operations Centre, where an UKWMO cell activated some 250 carrier control points (CCPs) located throughout the UK in major police stations. On receipt of the signal, these CCPs would, in their turn, pass the warning to some 11,000 lower-level warning points (selected industrial premises, smaller police stations, fire stations and UKWMO monitoring posts) as well as activating some 7,000 powered sirens to alert the general public. In the post-strike period, UKWMO was responsible for plotting the national fallout patterns, using input from its network of some 870 three-person monitoring posts spread across the whole of the UK.
The UK governmental organization for the aftermath of nuclear war involved setting up a network of ‘regions’, each divided into a number of sub-regions, which were themselves divided into a number of counties. There was a headquarters at each level, consisting of elected representatives, civil servants, and officials of the military, police and fire services, together with support staff. Each command level, down to and including counties, had a purpose-built, heavily protected bunker; these bunkers, together with a small number of central-government and military bunkers, comprised the total national stock of nuclear-proof accommodation. There were also extensive preparations for a post-strike, military-run, country-wide communications system, which would have provided government communications until the civil system had been restored.
Finally, there was a Home Defence College, run by the Home Office, whose task was to provide training in civil-defence duties for officials and elected members. The government also maintained stockpiles of strategic commodities such as fuel, sugar, salt and flour.
OTHER COUNTRIES
Other NATO countries’ policies were generally similar. The NATO policy was that ‘The deterrent posture of the strategic concept of flexible response can only be fully realized if military preparedness is complemented by credible civil preparedness.’
2
Civil emergency planning was essentially a national function, but NATO policy was co-ordinated by the Senior Civil Emergency Planning Committee, which met in Brussels twice a year in peacetime but would have gone into permanent session in war.
Shelter policies were debated in most countries throughout the Cold War, as it was clear that shelters would provide protection from most of the effects of a nuclear war. In West Germany, legislation ensured that all new housing included a cellar built to government specifications. The Swedish system potentially housed some 70 per cent of the population, the Swiss some 90 per cent.
Norway was one of the NATO countries to take civil defence very seriously, with a civil-defence organization run by the Ministry of Justice. The civil-defence force had a permanent staff of 500 and a mobilized strength of 70,000, with some 33,000 more in an industrial-defence organization. In 1990, with a population of approximately 4.2 million, the country had sufficient shelters to accommodate 2.6 million people (62 per cent of the population), of whom about 2.3 million would have been in private shelters built to government standards and about 276,000 in public shelters. The government also had plans to evacuate some 500,000 people from cities, towns and areas close to military installations.
3
A NON-CREDIBLE SYSTEM
There was no doubt that the two measures which might have been effective were shelters and evacuation. The former would, however, have been enormously costly, while the latter would have involved major problems of control and reception arrangements. There was also the major question of whether the general population, faced by the prospect of imminent nuclear attack, would actually have been amenable either to reason or even to a degree of coercion. It is certainly arguable whether the inhabitants of major cities such as London, New York, Washington DC, Paris, Cologne, Moscow or Leningrad, knowing that their cities must be on the enemy’s target list, would have remained in their homes, and there must have been at least a possibility that a fairly large number would have fled, probably with increasing degrees of panic, to the countryside.
The general picture, however, was one of governments doing the bare minimum for the civil population and begrudging any expenditure on preparations for civil defence. Curiously, many countries did this against a background of a network of government bunkers which would have ensured that those making the ‘no evacuation/no shelter’ policies would themselves have dispersed and survived.
fn1
The wide ranges resulted from taking a variety of assumptions for the attack pattern and for weather and other environmental factors at the time of the attack.
fn2
In the United Kingdom, civil-defence responsibility was split: the Home Office (equivalent to an interior ministry in most other countries) was responsible for England and Wales, while the Scottish Home and Health Department and the Northern Ireland Office covered civil defence in their particular areas.
fn3
The Royal Observer Corps was established during the Second World War to spot, identify and report approaching enemy aircraft; it converted to its nuclear-war role in the early 1950s. Its personnel wore a distinctive uniform, but were part-time, unpaid volunteers.
14
Assessing the Balance
FOR CIVILIANS, THE
media and academics, the most obvious way of assessing the nuclear balance was by simple numerical comparison of missiles, warheads, bombers, bombs, submarines and so on. Known as ‘static’ measures, these could be very misleading, but they were (and still are) all that was possible without access to the full range of facts and to computers with the processing power necessary to run the comparisons.
The raw yield of a nuclear weapon is expressed in terms of its equivalence to the energy released by high explosive (TNT). Raw yield is, however, not an accurate expression of the weapon’s effect, and to compare the total raw yields of weapons held by different nations is virtually meaningless. The first refined expression of war fighting performance is therefore
equivalent megatonnage
(EMT), which reflects a weapon’s potential to damage ‘soft’ or area targets.