The Illusion of Civil Defence

The New Statesman for December 8 carries an article by Gerard Piel, publisher of the Scientific American, called "The Illusion of Civil Defence," which promises to have a great vogue among those in power and those who think they ought to be. It is well worth reading as an excellent summary of the problems which surround a national shelter program.

Piel is not only interested in summarizing, however; he also attempts completely to substantiate his title, and here his performance is not as impressive. Piel argues that civil defence is an illusion, because it is impossible to devise a program--of which shelters would be only a part--which could be equally, effective in protecting against the various "attack designs" an enemy can choose from. There are basically two such designs: an attack "directed at the destruction of the country's capacity to retaliate," or an attack on "the corporate body of the enemy state itself" (in Admiral Burke's Phrase). Piel says that our military experts base their shelter recommendations on the assumption that the enemy is most likely to knock out SAC bases and missile sites. Since the bulk of the population will not, then, be directly attacked, the dangers of a nuclear explosion itself need not seriously concern them. It follows from this reasoning that what the population must be protected against is fall-out. Or, as Piel puts, it, "The fact is that the only thing they can worry about is fall-out."

At this point, however, there is an extraordinary gap in the argument: Piel does not discuss the effectiveness of fall-out shelters, granted the experts' assumptions about the enemy's attack design. Instead, he denies these assumptions, and spends a great part of his article describing the nature and effects of an attack on a heavily-populated area. These are, to be sure, harrowing pages to read; but since he has already said that "no responsible official or consultant suggests that anyone can be protected against what are called the 'prompt' effects of nuclear weapons: the initial radation, heat and blast," it is not clear what the relevance of this part of his discussion is to the question of nuclear defence.

Firestorms

Piel does call attention to an objection to shelters in areas on the perimeter of a blast which he feels--and rightly--has been neglected: the firestorm which the detonation of a bomb at the proper height can cause. As the size of the bomb increases, he points out, the fire radius increase at many times the rate at which the blast radius increases. Thus, "the 50-megaton bomb... must have a blast radius of about 13 miles, but an incendiary radius of 50; a 100-megaton bomb would have a blast radius of about 17 miles and an incendiary radius of 70 miles."

There is no defense against this firestorm, "a conflagration so huge that it must be reckoned a metereological event." Piel has the shelter advocates on two counts: not only does a firestorm-producing blast render defence of the metropolitan area impossible (the central city being the target); but if the bomb is detonated at that height, fall-out is minimized. Piel thus presents the vision of people being suffocated and cremated in backyard shelters, protecting themselves against fall-out that will never rain.

Though thoroughly argued, however, this is a minor point. Piel ought to deal with the questions raised by the experts' assumptions. But he dodges these; taking refuge in the possibility of a "counter-force plus bonus" attack, in which the enemy diverts a percentage of his missiles from military to civilian targets, or in the fact that since military targets are distributed over the whole country, both attack designs have the same effect. And both make defence impossible. But the point is that, if these possibilities are admitted, the "illusory" nature of civil defence is self-evident, and hardly requires an elaborate demonstration in the pages of the News Statesman.

The "Delicate Paradox"

Perhaps sensing the inadequacy of his argument, however, Piel descends to another level to bolster it. Here he is--for better and for worse--on more familiar ground: civil defense is an illusion because it rests on "a delicate paradox," that while its purpose is to minimize the loss of life in the event of an attack, its effect may be to increase the probability of an attack.

This line of argument is decked out with the usual trimmings: the swipes at RAND for its military bias, the rhetorical questions about who wants to survive in the "society that would emerge from the shelters" anyhow. and the final, strident, despairing plea for negotiations ("Both sides are driven to the conference table by the same iron compulsion of thermo-nuclear reality"). Nothing can disguise the fact that these arguments are of the heart and glands more than of the mind; and it is to Piel's credit that he does not try to disguise them (much).

But they cannot really stand as a substitute for the kind of detailed and thorough--but no less passionate--discussion of shelter-fallacies which Roger Hagah, editor of the Committee of Correspondence newsletter and a Teaching Fellow here, provided in the November 4 issue of The Nation (and in Cambridge 38). Piel does not come to grips with what he himself calls "the subject emphasized in civil defence, '(fall-out danger in nonblast areas. As a result, his argument is of patches, not of a piece.

Thus it will seem to an American audience that he relies too heavily on his readers' assumed sympathy as his binding thread. He will confirm, but he will not convince. (It is worth remembering, however, that he is writing in an English journal, for an audience that is more skeptical of civil defence than Americans appear to be, and certainly less informed about this country's shelter-craze.) Nonetheless, "The Illusion of Civil Defence" is a particularly interesting, particularly disappointing instance of what seems to happen to almost anyone who tires to speak intelligently on the subject. Piel's article suggests that it is difficult to write about such horror without surrendering to some kind of insanity.