8-30-08, 10:55 am

Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked by Dee Garrison Oxford University Press: New York: 2006.

Dee Garrison, professor of history emeritus at Rutgers University, has written, in this important book, a cautionary tale for the US government and people. Garrison demonstrates the continuing truth of George Santayana’s famous adage: those who learn nothing from history, as the Bush administration shows in its strong “stay the course” commitment to idiocy, are condemned to repeat it.

Let me say that I have known and respected Dee Garrison as a colleague and friend for over 35 years. Her work as a feminist and peace historian, a teacher and defender of academic and intellectual freedom, is a model for both scholars and teachers and concerned citizens.

Bracing for Armageddon is an insightful well documented history of the myth and business of “civil defense.” Civil defense gave us installment plan bomb shelters, highways to evacuate cities, Reagan’s “Star Wars” continental civil defense in outer space, and the present recycled Reagan policies of the Bush administration.

Garrison’s work is backed by extensive research in primary sources ranging from manuscript and document collections of government agencies, political leaders, and peace organizations, official reports and interviews with Helen Caldicott, Jackie Goldberg, Mark Lane and other peace activists over the decades.

While much of what Garrison unearths will not be a big surprise to peace activists (although the specifics may be), it will be to large sections of the general public.

First, Garrison shows that “civil defense” was always something of a confidence trick. At heart civil defense was a huge propaganda enterprise to convince the public that “deterrence” connected to expanding nuclear arsenals and military budgets would work to preserve peace. It was also a device to provide profits for the bomb shelter industry and the various companies and contractors connected to “civil defense.”

The conclusion which Garrison draws that should be most embarrassing for US government and corporate leaders is that “declassified records of Cabinet and National Security Council meetings reveal that, throughout this period [meaning the entire nuclear era] when both Democratic and Republican government leaders discussed civil defense issues, their most detailed analysis was of their own special shelters and escape procedures.”

Leaders of the US government were well aware that the nuclear war that they contended could either be won or deterred with bigger and better nuclear weapons would kill most of the people whose taxes were funding their activities. They were most interested though in maintaining support for the program, both because of the profits it produced for their backers, and also the increased possibility it provided them for survival.

As she tells the story, Garrison shows how the two edged concept of “threat” – threat from the “enemy,” threat to destroy the enemy while saving yourself – worked to create the civil defense industry.

Garrison begins with the first decade of the Cold War era. Here she shows that both Truman and Eisenhower were interested far less in “civil defense” than in fighting the Cold War in World War II terms. Most civil defense funding came from state and local governments, while the big federal bucks went to develop weapons systems. Women were used conspicuously in the civil defense programs, becoming in effect the “mothers” of the Military Industrial Complex, the homemakers defending the home and bomb shelter while men directed the weapons programs and the military, doing the “work” and acting as the “fathers” of the Military Industrial Complex. Propaganda, in the form of allaying public fears and gaining public support for the nuclear arms race and related Cold War policies, was the principle goal of civil defense, not any serious program of saving lives.

While both Republican and Democratic Party leaders supported these policies, opposition did develop from a variety of peace oriented groups like the War Resisters League and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement (in the face of FBI intimidation) along with scientists and progressive activists in many areas.

Attempts by government officials to repress scientific studies showing the absurdity of what they were doing began to backfire. When Lewis Strauss, Eisenhower’s chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, sought to block the presentation of a paper by Nobel Prize winning scientist Herman Muller on the dangers of nuclear fallout to a United Nations Conference in Geneva, he was on the receiving end of sharp criticism by scientists in the US and internationally.

Also, the government’s major annual propaganda pageant, Operation Alert, where large sections of the population was supposed to “take cover” for 15 minutes, while a nuclear attack was carried out. As Garrison shows, the propaganda films that emerged from these annual “alerts” portrayed nuclear war as a mild inconvenience for a nation of white, middle-class suburbanites who barely got their hair ruffled as they emerged from the attack and waited for instructions from “the calm and efficient men in the new underground White House.”

Garrison brilliantly weaves this history of idiocy in power together with the intelligent and creative resistance of men and women without power who knew much more about the effects of nuclear weapons on humans and the environment than those who were ordering their arrest for civil disobedience protests against the drills and tests, and actively seeking to deny when they could not repress exposés of both the dangers of nuclear radiation and the futility of civil defense.

The US had 1,200 nuclear weapons when Dwight Eisenhower became president and 30,000 when he left. It was only to get worse. John Kennedy had campaigned on a so-called “missile gap” and with the support of many Democrats a federally supported bomb shelter program, which Eisenhower had opposed.

In the early 1960s, this program was advanced at both the federal and state level, with New York governor Nelson Rockefeller becoming the most important policy implementer at the state level. The publication of Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War in 1960, while it was reviled and often satirized by peace activists and many liberals for its thesis that one had to learn to live with prepare for, and even think positive thoughts about nuclear war (some of Kahn’s ideas were direct background for the film, Dr. Strangelove) was to become influential among a number policy planners, including Henry Kissinger and Paul Nitze, who would later break with each other over “détente” but not over “managed nuclear war.”

Here, Garrison makes an important contribution to our understanding of nuclear policy development. Many Americans have read about MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) which stressed the need to keep on developing nuclear weapons in larger quantity and more devastating quality in order to prevent the enemy from using them. But few have read about the alternative doctrine, Nuclear Utilization Target Selection (NUTS) which Kahn became a publicist for and Kissinger, Nitze, and many others came to supports. NUTS, unlike MAD, was based on the doctrine of “limited nuclear war” as both the most effective deterrent and survival policy. It anticipated programs like “Star Wars” and their successors and de-emphasized Civil Defense to “insure” both “victory” and “survival.” Pentagon “body count” estimates of the number of nuclear related deaths and “kill ratios” were based on NUTS rather than MAD theorizing. Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy was to adopt the NUTS policy, ironically because of his revulsion to the “overkill” capacities represented by the weapons systems that his agency was producing.

Johnson and Nixon generally supported the NUTS strategy but the rise of the anti-war movement made any major program along these lines unlikely. Also, the positive aspects of Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties negotiated by Nixon and Carter made negotiation more viable then it had been in earlier cold war nuclear arms race periods.

In the mid 1970s, however, there were important little known developments whose significance was to be felt to this. In the brief Gerald Ford administration, Ford gave George H.W. Bush, then CIA director the mission to review CIA estimates of Soviet military capabilities and aspirations. Bush chose a group of policy planners and generals, “team B,” led by those associated with rabidly anti-Soviet policy positions. Led by Harvard historian Richard Pipes and including Paul Nitze and the then young Paul Wolfowitz, the group was, as Garrison notes, made up entirely of right-wing and far right-wing figures, even by Nixon administration standards.

Their predictable “analysis” was that the CIA had greatly underestimated the Soviet military threat and also the Soviet development of Civil Defense, which was evidence of the Soviet commitment to starting a nuclear war. Jimmy Carter’s election led a number of Plan B members, with the support of AFL-CIO president George Meany and the participation of the AFL-CIO’s global organizer of anti-Communist labor activities, Jay Lovestone, to form “The Committee on the Present Danger” (CPD) to publicize the Soviet “threat” and develop policies to counter it.

Even though there was a great deal of evidence, including material from Soviet defectors, which showed that the “Civil Defense Gap” the CPD was pushing was completely absurd, it continued to be pushed. In the Carter administration itself, battles raged between Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State who sought to build on détente to expand negotiations and conflict resolution with the Soviet Union and Zbigniew Brezinski, the rabidly anti-Soviet National Security Advisor whose family had fled the Soviet occupation of Poland after WWII.

Under Carter, a new agency, the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FEMA) was created to deal with national disasters, floods, earthquakes and nuclear war. FEMA carried forward to the highest level yet plans to evacuate government leaders in the event of nuclear war. In the Summer of 1980, as he was running for re-election against Reagan, Carter signed and publicized Presidential Directive-59, which in line with his Olympic Boycott and general cold war revival policy, embraced the NUTS doctrine, which Brezinski hailed as “moving us closer to a war-fighting doctrine.”

The directive, which brought the concept of “limited nuclear war” back with a vengeance, had one new wrinkle which was to become significant under Reagan and subsequently “the decapitation” of enemy leadership, targeting Soviet Communist Party national and regional headquarters and Soviet intelligence and communications centers for rapid destruction.

As in other areas, Carter’s move to the right helped to insure Reagan’s victory by making Reagan’s right-wing foreign policy positions more credible.

Reagan sought a massive revival of “civil defense,” mass evacuation of cities, and ran into a solid wall of mass opposition, facing the largest mass peace demonstrations in US history. FEMA’s “crisis relocation” policies also became a disastrous failure and a joke. Reagan’s response to these disasters, which became major political liabilities for him, as Garrison notes, was “the soothing, illusionary fiction of Star Wars – the largest, most costly, and greatest civil defense fantasy ever conceived.”

Garrison concludes with an epilogue that brings us up today. After the September 11th attacks, the Bush administration not only began to expand Stars War-based programs but also launched new nuclear weapons building programs, and according to materials revealed in 2002, directed the Pentagon to develop “contingency” plans for the use of nuclear weapons against seven countries (the NUTS doctrine multiplied by 7).

Finally, the administration created the largest most expensive and potentially most dangerous Civil Defense agency in US History, the Department of Homeland Security. “Homeland Security,” Garrison contends, “differs from previous nuclear civil defense agencies in the increased and unparalleled power it awards to intelligence and police agencies.”

Garrison concludes that people’s struggles from the 1950s on helped to push back the most dangerous and destructive schemes which took the acronyms MAD and NUTs the dangers are greater in many ways. Her final words, “the peoples fight continues” should be a wake up call for all us, which is the purpose of this excellent and hugely valuable study.