World War II, which featured the wholesale bombing of civilian population centers, brought forth new weapons of mass destruction: the atomic bomb, nerve gas, and bacteriological agents. Developments in aircraft and missiles ensured that in the postwar era the cities of the United States would be within range of an attacker. This study examines the way in which the federal government went about trying to devise means, in addition to military defense, to limit the damage which might be inflicted by an enemy attack with nuclear or other weapons. The study is based upon the voluminous files of the agencies which took part in civildefense planning from 1945 through 1950, upon extensive interviews with civildefense planners, and upon pertinent published sources. The army initiated postwar civil-defense planning in 1945, but the armed services finally disowned the suggestion, which had emanated from their midst, that the military establishment should be responsible for civil defense. When civildefense planning was turned over to the National Security Resources Board in 1949, the government committed itself to a civilian civildefense program. The civil-defense planners produced a plan, which crystallized in the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 and placed the bulk of the responsibility for civil defense on the states and cities. The federal civildefense program did not prove adequate to cope with thermonuclear weapons, a fact by late 1952 but predicted as early as 1945. Civil defense was always one step behind offensive developments. Congress did not appropriate funds for shelters, in part because adequate research had not been done. The civildefense program was predicated upon enlisting millions of volunteers, which the planners had been repeatedly warned was not feasible in peacetime, and on educating the public in methods of self-protection, which proved to be of limited utility. Civil defense has never been fully accepted as a realistic, important, and essential enterprise. The planners perhaps could not have devised an ~adequate solution. Civil defense is no more than hiding, patching-up, and fixing-up. Nevertheless, many of the difficulties which beset the civildefense program can be attributed to the approaches and the concepts of the civildefense planners and of the federal government in general. The civildefense planners did not have adequate information on which to base their planning, as a result primarily of a general lack of information about Soviet capabilities and the effects of nuclear weapons and the restrictive security policies of the military establishment and the Atomic Energy Commission. The planners, however, did not use all of the information which was available. The approach to civil-defense planning was disorderly and fragmented because of institutional confusion and bureaucratic boundaries. But the planners themselves contributed to this state of affairs by placing the accent on technical and organizational detail rather than on the determination of overall policy. The planners clung to the methods used in World War II but disregarded the enduring lessons of that conflict, which the initial planners had themselves stated. The planners failed also to give primacy to fundamental research and to devise alternative plans for a variety of possible situations. Outside pressures, rather than rational methods of decision making, dictated the pace and the nature of civil-defense planning. Since acceptability, rather than effectiveness of feasibility, was the key concept of the planners, they tended to avoid the toughest problems and the challenges inherent in the development of more powerful weapons. The civildefense planners were unable to profit from much of the experience of the past, to face the future in a realistic manner, ox to view the entire problem of civil defense in the broad perspective of the current situation.

Tyler, Lyon G.

Tyler, Lyon G.

830/945.T8.C5 (ELQ RC Annex)

1967

Civil Defense ;

Microfilm #6809723

08/24/01

North Carolina

Duke University

History

CIVIL DEFENSE: THE IMPACT OF THE PLANNING YEARS, 1945-1950

CIVIL DEFENSE: THE IMPACT OF THE PLANNING YEARS, 1945-1950

Dissertation

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