civil defense
by dorothy kirschbaum

The following article was written to oppose some unfortunate trends in the late l950’s. It is an example of the validity of writing letters to public officials and print media when a policy defies logic and realism. It shows that one person can make a difference.

During the 50’s it became clear that the Soviet Union had embarked on an all-out effort to arm themselves with enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems to be an ominous threat to the United States. These were uninterceptble weapons with enormous destructive power. The American public responded by building bomb shelters stocked with canned food , bottles of water and blankets.

Our seven-year-old daughter Barbara whose closest friend, Cathy, lived nearby, came home one day obviously upset. Upon being questioned, she said that Cathy’s parents had had a bomb shelter dug in their back yard, which was stocked with emergency supplies. Cathy had warned Barb that in the event of an attack, Barb should not try to get into Cathy’s family shelter and if she tried they would have to shoot her. These ideas were devastating to a seven-year-old. I was furious. Both parents were physicians and should have been aware of; the futility of trying to survive a saturation bombing attack. It reminded me of a cartoon which had appeared on the newspaper’s editorial page: a man emerging from his shelter to a scene of smoldering radio-active devastation as far as the eye could see, looking around he rejoices, “And it’s all mine!”

Soon after this, I was scheduled to attend another legislative seminar in Washington as a representative of the Women’s International League For Peace And Freedom..

When all of us were assembled at the hotel, the legislative secretary (registered as a cause lobbyist) issued passes to the Senate gallery. We were to wait there for Senator Douglas of Illinois to give a speech in tribute to the memory of Jane Adams, WILPF founder, Nobel Laureate, and recognized as an outstanding citizen of the state of Illinois.

While we were waiting, it was interesting to watch the inattentive senators conversing while Senator Stephen Young of Ohio was delivering a speech. In spite of the competing noise as tourists came and went from the gallery and senators conversed on the Senate floor, Senator Young , though rather aged, had enough voice to make himself heard speaking about civil defense. He was talking about what nonsense it was to assume there would be time to run and a place to hide, and an uncontaminated environment to come home to. In other words, civil defense was a chimera, an unrealistic view of what was possible to assure survival of a nuclear attack.

I watched the press table. They appeared not to notice what Sen. Young was saying. No rush to phone in a headline-grabbing article.

The next day , I searched the Washington Post, the NYT and there was no mention of Sen. Young’s speech. When I arrived back home, I wrote the Progressive, whose editor was Morris Rubin. I told him it was a dynamic speech and I hoped he would run an article which recognized its importance. He replied by return mail that he had contacted the senator’s office for an article. It appeared on the following issue of the Progressive as its lead article, titled, “Civil Defense, Billion Dollar Boondoggle”. I thought “Great”. I assumed that would be the end of it. The Progressive sold 5,000 reprints of the article and I thought, “Fine, at least a few people would notice. Then I saw a mention of it as a magazine article by Stephen Young (notice: no magazine identified} in the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. I thought that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. The Reader’s Digest ran an article with enough rephrasing that they did not feel obligated to credit the Progressive. That article sold five million reprints. Civil Defense was dead. No more school drills of “drop and cover”—as though having a school desk between you; and annihilation would make a difference. No more burrowing into the ground to survive a direct hit which would leave a crater 200 feet deep and a devastated area 200 miles in surface diameter. If you should be capable of surviving the first hit, what were the chances of avoiding contamination from the fallout?

Blessings on Stephen Young, on the Progressive and on the Reader’s Digest. It was their finest hour.

As for me, I had dropped a pebble in a pond—not a boulder—just a pebble, but the concentric ripples had reached clear to the banks of the pond.

 

Dorothy Kirschbaum's graduate studies were in political science and history. She taught history and government in high school andwrote and taught Comparative Religion after the Supreme Court decreed that although religion may not be practiced in public schools that they actively encouraged the teaching of comparative religion.
She and her husband fell in love with Asheville and moved here in 1981. Since her husband’s death, she shares a home with her daughter Karen in Candler.

She is a life member of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and her mother before her was a life member and served on the National Board of WILPF. WILPF was founded by Jane Addams.