Shelters or Evacuation?: A Critical Problem of the Federal

Civil Defense Administration

By Sara Baker

             Between late 1950 to early 1951, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) was created during the Harry S Truman Presidency. It was a civil defense organization intent on producing well-informed citizens who were prepared for a nuclear attack. For over seven years, the agency struggled to gain both a public following and support from Congress and Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. The FCDA’s failure to attract support, however, was a direct result of its inability to create an adequate survival plan for Americans. Its vacillation between shelter and evacuation strategies ultimately ensured that the agency would languish.

            Prior to the creation of the atomic bomb, the World War II application of civil defense left no precedent for the FCDA. In those war years, civil defense primarily meant conserving resources for the war effort, participating in factory production jobs, and contributing to drives for scrap metal. These duties were aimed at showing symbolic and material support for the American military forces, rather than in anticipation of an attack on the United States.

            By 1950, the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb, the Korean War had escalated, and Communism had emerged in China. With a growing sense of endangerment, Americans increasingly began to pressure their government for action. In October 1950, Congressman John F. Kennedy sent a letter to President Truman in which he warned of an “atomic Pearl Harbor” if civil defense was ignored. On December 1, 1950, after nearly a year of tension created by these international forces, President Truman therefore established the Federal Civil Defense Administration by Executive Order.

            The agency had been created, among other purposes, to provide citizens with some means to survive or escape a nuclear bomb. In its enabling legislation of January 1951, the FCDA’s policy statement outlined its primary task: to develop “a plan of civil defense for the protection of life and property in the United States from attack.” Although the methods by which this would be accomplished were unspecified, the FCDA, led by its Administrator, was to form plans to save “lives and property.”

            In addition to statutory regulations, the agency relied upon certain assumptions from intelligence data in its planning. FCDA plans were contingent upon three basic premises: first, the Soviet Union was able to attack any area within the United States; second, the Soviets were capable of manufacturing and transporting atomic weapons; and third, the Soviet Union was also attempting to develop guided and ballistic missiles. In terms of targets, FCDA officials presumed that military structures, large cities, industrial areas, and other strategic sites would be at risk in a nuclear attack.

            Perhaps the most influential factor complicating the FCDA mission was international events that were beyond the control of the agency. As Katherine Howard, a Deputy Administrator, observed, “[Civil defense] was like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, running just as fast as she could just to stay in the same place.” Changing nuclear technology and foreign policy developments indeed dictated how the Administration conducted its programs. This explanation largely justified why the FCDA failed to form a consistent civil defense program to handle an actual dropping of the nuclear bomb.

            Between 1951 and 1958, the agency alternately supported evacuation and fallout shelter plans. The FCDA’s difficulty in doing so credibly arose because of the inherently contradictory principles behind each plan. The evacuation method implied that a citizen could survive a nuclear strike by not being at the site of impact; by contrast, fallout shelters signified that a citizen could survive a direct nuclear attack by retreating to even a crude household shelter. These opposing concepts -- and the willingness of the FCDA to back both without resolving the inconsistency -- became a major setback for the agency.

            Fallout shelters had long been a civil defense consideration. Prior to the FCDA’s existence, the Lehigh University Institute of Research had studied possible civil defense programs and established guidelines that became the basis for later FCDA shelter plans. Other pre-FCDA reports also recommended shelters as the most effective survival technique.

            Thus, under Millard Caldwell, the first FCDA head, fallout shelters immediately became the primary civil defense objective. The Administration promoted a study which asserted that shelters utilized within existing structures could cover almost half of the citizen population in areas most likely to be enemy targets. The states were supposed to construct new fallout structures for the remainder, with the costs assumed both by the states and by private industries. Indeed, the FCDA did not offer federal funding, even for altering existing structures, because it could not afford it. Nonetheless, the agency insisted on a federal-state division of authority to accomplish this goal: the federal government was to formulate plans through the FCDA, and the states were to build the shelters.

            The FCDA had originally considered the option of developing a national shelter program with the states, rather than support private home shelters. FCDA funds, however, were inadequate to complete such a plan, and critics feared the results would resemble a Communist state in which the military dominated society. By contrast, private shelters were to be voluntary efforts that were privately funded.

            As early as 1951, the FCDA thus seemed to favor a vision of privatized rather than public shelters. Administrators realized that the agency’s current funding would be sufficient only to convert existing spaces into shelters. FCDA plans for private shelter construction nonetheless required federal resources.

            Yet, proponents for a national shelter plan continued to insist that their plan was feasible. They supported building large underground garages, particularly in urban areas, as an example. These garages would be used as parking facilities in peacetime, they argued, but could also serve as effective shelters during a nuclear attack. To their dismay, the FCDA failed to offer a feasible plan for joint effort from federal and city governments to build such shelters. Congress showed little willingness to provide federal funds, while city governments did not have the resources to single-handedly build shelters.

            Indeed, Congress was particularly opposed to such shelter plans, denying funding for them on several occasions. In the minds of Congressmen, shelters were costly and had not been proven effective. To stifle the program, legislation mandated that any federal expenditures for shelters had to be matched by state and local funds. One Senator subsequently declared, “Any effective digging in...is just out of the question.”

            Although there was rhetorical interest in the shelter concept, solid involvement in the program by the Truman administration was also limited. The estimated cost of a shelter program was high, with predictions falling between $16 billion and $32 billion over five years. The FCDA’s 1951, 1952, and 1953 budgets were low, and they failed to provide any funds for the shelter program.        Despite negative Congressional attitude towards the shelter strategy, the public was interested. During 1951, nearly ninety percent of citizens knew about taking cover from an attack. This attention increased when concern over fallout became more widespread. A 1951 Life magazine article publicized various shelter models, from an $8 hole to a $5,500 shelter, complete with a telephone, Geiger Counter, and water supply.

            Throughout the Truman Administration, as shelters grew in visibility, the agency hoped to gain high-profile support for this program. A few public officials, such as California Governor Earl Warren and Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, endorsed shelter building. Attempting to gain Presidential participation in the plan, the Administration even proposed a $938,000 shelter for the White House, as well as a huge underground fallout garage in Truman’s home state of Missouri. One official assured that this would enable the President and his officials to take cover “with a case of ginger ale and some biscuits and camp out until the smoke blew away.”

            In spite of the increased curiosity about shelters, the FCDA under Truman still could not produce a successful program. The agency had urged self-help -- citizens becoming active in ensuring their own survival -- while pushing Congress for funds. This created a situation in which “there was no discernible ideological center from which shelter policies sprang, resulting in a confused presentation to both Congress and the public...” With the 1953 appointment of Val Peterson as head of the FCDA, the agency fully retreated from efforts to push a national shelter program. Unlike Caldwell, Peterson did not prefer shelters to evacuation. He believed that such a plan would harm the economy, thereby leaving national security unstable.

            By 1955, the FCDA policy departed from “duck and cover,” the catch phrase for shelters. In that year, the powerful hydrogen bomb was introduced, and evacuation became the agency’s strength. As Katherine Howard suggested in a speech, “[T]he best safeguard against an H-bomb was, simply, not to be there.” She further observed, “no one was going to try to [dig] a hole that big to build shelters...” Thus, Peterson, Howard, and the FCDA began publicly to back evacuation and discredit the apparently obsolete shelter plans.          

    The FCDA project Operation Alert evolved out of the evacuation concept in 1954. Proponents of this plan instructed evacuees who had survived the theoretical nuclear attacks to flee from “target areas,” where the nuclear bombs were dropped, to a safer “reception area,” which was to be a smaller town located up to twenty miles away.

            With only half of these able to be protected with the existing shelters, the FCDA needed to plan for an organized mass exodus from the target sites. The evacuation concept was, therefore, given a more coherent form with the beginning of Operation Alert, which was to be a yearly nationwide test. Around sixty cities participated, and their results advised the FCDA on its shortcomings, along with its capabilities and civilian participation rates.

            Operation Alert was designed with several specific purposes behind it. If successful, the drills would foster “[i]ncreased knowledge and training in civil defense survival techniques on the part of the public...” Furthermore, the exercise would initiate “[o]perational planning for civil defense and training of civil defense personnel” and raise “awareness of the supporting role of cities and states and in areas not actually attacked.” FCDA officials hoped to expose a greater number of citizens to civil defense training through the plan, as well as to improve knowledge of the agency among the public.

            Operation Alert depended on several principles. As the basis of this program, the FCDA claimed that any incoming attack would be spotted by at least three hours before the actual strike. It also presumed that there could be up to around ten million deaths, seven million injuries, and over twenty million homeless people. The FCDA further assumed that, excluding top government officials and the President, federal employees would remain to run the government during and after the attack.  

            In a typical drill, the FCDA would first announce, “Strong movement of unidentified aircraft over United States and Canada, heading south.” Upon hearing this broadcast, cities such as Los Angeles, Boston, St. Louis, and Cleveland were officially under “attack.” Sirens further warned listeners to the simulated approaching danger. Traffic ceased, and city-dwellers hurried to refuge under shelters, subway systems, or buildings.

            FCDA Administrators received simulated assessments of damage after each “bomb” hit a city to show the dangers of not evacuating. These reports were chillingly elaborate. Through Presidential statements, the agency relayed to the public statistics on casualties, the availability of supplies, the size of the bombs dropped, and the effects of the blast. Reports were also issued for specific cities. In Deputy Administrator Howard’s hometown of Boston, one of forty cities to evacuate in 1955, there were 450,000 “casualties.” In New York City, 12,000 workers began compiling massive mock casualty lists and surveying damage. The Washington, D.C. streets were said to have been deserted, with citizens, White House staff, and federal and district workers finding reception areas. An imaginary bomb had been dropped on the Capitol.  

            Special Operation Alert exercises were carefully scheduled to test the readiness of not only civilians but of federal employees as well. These alternative Operation Alerts gave these employees the chance to learn the evacuation method but remain at work during the regular citizen drills. By observing federal employees at work during a potential emergency, the FCDA surmised, citizen panic could be averted. Above all, the drill was to foster a calm, organized way to leave an area.  

            Overall, the FCDA presented an optimistic front about the evacuation program. Its officials noted that the federal employees would do “an exceptionally fine job” in a nuclear emergency. The agency further concluded from results that civilians realized the importance of civil defense. Also, FCDA officials promoted the national highway system and the emergence of radar detection technology as ways to increase effectiveness in an actual nuclear evacuation.

            Despite the apparent public agency confidence in evacuation, there were signs of trouble. As early as 1955, just months after the second Operation Alert drill, Howard proclaimed that evacuation could not combat radioactive fallout and instead recommended that even primitive shelters “were just fine” for preventing fallout exposure. Furthermore, one Operation Alert report conceded of the exercises, “participation was [often] limited to activation of control centers and the sounding of alarms.”

            President Eisenhower proved to be a less than avid supporter of the program as well. Early in his Presidency, Eisenhower had been instrumental in implementing Operation Alert. After the 1954 Alert, though, the President unenthusiastically commented that the drill was “reasonably successful.” He also singled out Congress for not providing a reception area for its members, a failure he believed would imply that government might not be able to continue in an emergency.  

            The public in truth had only dubiously participated in the Operation Alert exercises. This ambivalence had existed even in the drill’s first few years of implementation, well before it became an object of debate. The FCDA could not blame this attitude on the public’s hesitancy to believe in the nuclear threat; a majority of respondents in polls from 1950, 1951, and 1956 verified the belief that their respective cities would be at risk in the event of a nuclear attack.

            The FCDA’s Public Affairs Director, Ed Lyman, had considered the evacuation program to be the most “serious challenge in the field of mass public education...” The FCDA urged the public to support the issue of evacuation, and worked closely with the Advertising Council to gain cooperation. In a militaristic note, one Council report declared, “[The public] must practice evacuation until people become conditioned to doing the right thing automatically...”

            “Conditioning” citizens would be an impossible task. As shown in a 1954 study, few people reacted favorably to evacuation. Even under the best circumstances, with over two hours of warning time, nearly ninety percent of poll respondents in urban areas were unwilling to leave their cities. With less than half an hour of warning time, the figures for those who would evacuate fell to well under ten percent. Still, over half of the respondents agreed that they would participate “without hesitation” in evacuation exercises.

            By 1956, evacuation seemed to fall out of favor with the public to an even greater extent. Many people resented the mandatory drill, and others simply did not want to leave their homes and belongings. A poll from that year showed that less than two percent of participants made “spontaneous references” to evacuation when discussing civil defense. With prompting, the same percentage viewed evacuation as a possible survival technique. By comparison, over twenty-five percent of respondents brought up shelters without prompting.

            Ironically, Operation Alert proved that many civil defense concepts were groundless, and results consistently showed faults in evacuation plans. As an example, when the City of Milwaukee conducted a study of its evacuation conditions, it discovered that with seven hours of warning and perfect traffic conditions, efficient evacuation from Milwaukee was impossible. Other detractors of evacuation pointed out that the FCDA could not depend on an adequate amount of time in a real-life nuclear emergency, which disputed a basic FCDA claim.

            Opponents of evacuation also reported that there were many citizens, even within the Eisenhower Administration and the FCDA, that did not participate in Operation Alert. One report claimed that Secretary of Health and Education Oveta Culp Hobby stopped to eat a leisurely lunch on the way to her evacuation site. One civil defense worker, John Garrett Underhill, scathingly labeled Operation Alert “so inadequate it couldn’t cope with a brush fire threatening a doghouse in the backyard.”

            The FCDA tried to answer these critics. Administrator Peterson argued that evacuations were no different from workers’ commutes to work every day. He also cautioned against abandoning evacuation drills, claiming, “[Citizens] will leave [the cities] as a bitter, angry, destructive, violent mob, or in some semblance of order.”

            Responding to public apathy and Presidential uncertainty towards evacuation, some members of Congress took action against the program. Citing the 1954 hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean and the 1956 creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, California Congressman Chet Holifield declared that Operation Alert subsequently seemed to be “a confession of failure and desperation.” These new weapons lessened warning time, he claimed, which undermined the evacuation premise.

            In its 1956 report entitled Civil Defense for National Survival, the Holifield-led House Committee on Government Operations strongly discounted evacuation. It noted that the sudden nature of an atomic attack prevented the planning needed to execute a successful evacuation. The final report ultimately deemed evacuation exercises “weak and ineffective.”

            The Committee found other criticisms of the FCDA evacuation program as well. One problem of promoting evacuation, it argued, was that it would expose evacuees to fallout radiation and actually endanger them in the process. Additionally, the report emphasized that the FCDA’s costly attempts to prove that urban evacuation was possible ignored the question of whether it was appropriate. Finally, Holifield’s Committee gave credence to a previous study by the military, which deemed evacuation as a civil defense focus “a cheap substitute for atomic shelter.”  

            Stung by these harsh findings, the FCDA survival strategy again shifted back to shelters and a possible $30 to $50 million shelter plan for 1956. Even Peterson now admitted that evacuation was a poor solution for hydrogen bombs, and the Holifield study had described fallout shelters as the most viable method. Citing testimony and information provided by shelter design experts, his Committee had estimated that shelters could reduce casualty rates of a nuclear attack by two-thirds.

            To develop the renewed shelter program, it was imperative that the FCDA win the trust of the public. But most people remained unmoved. Plans emerged that would offer tax incentives or special mortgage rates to shelter-owning families. The proposals were not enough to spur mass shelter construction, but they were large enough to validate the concept of “federally subsidized self-help.”

            Following the fundamentals of Holifield’s proposal, the FCDA submitted a $32 billion shelter proposal to Eisenhower, who was alarmed at what he believed to be a fiscally unacceptable request from the agency. Seeking answers for which method would be more effective and resourceful, Eisenhower formed a committee consisting of private citizens that were to recommend a course of action. Attorney H. Rowan Gaither, Jr. would chair the Gaither Committee, as it came to be known.

            Ultimately, the panel’s suggestions did not deviate significantly from those of the FCDA. In the Committee’s 1957 report, Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age, the panel agreed to recommend a massive fallout shelter program that would cost up to $50 billion. Although the proposal was similar to the shelter plans the Gaither Committee had been called to study, debate exploded within the National Security Council.

            At Eisenhower’s request, “one of the largest National Security Council meetings ever held” served as his sounding board for the Committee’s findings. There, after discussion among the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Cabinet members, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proved to be the most outspoken critic of the shelter proposal supported by the Committee and the FCDA. He was particularly concerned about how American allies and the Soviet Union would respond to such an ambitious program. Dulles further argued that the massive shelter construction would result in a “fortress America” situation. Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, disagreeing with the alternative FCDA strategy, claimed that Operation Alert primarily served to “scare a lot of people without purpose.” Eisenhower eventually agreed with the Secretary of State.

            Despite the FCDA’s return to shelters, the confidence in this program was unsteady. Efforts to promote the shelters -- as did one piece in Life magazine, which advertised a $3,000 “H-Bomb Hideaway” – seemed more desperate. In 1957, the heat from an atomic test in Nevada melted an aluminum fallout shelter. Observing this failure and the apparent inadequacy of evacuation, one study revealed that the American public increasingly feared that an atomic attack could not be evaded.

            In 1957, only a year after returning to shelters, FCDA officials privately questioned this move. In one administrative document, the agency conceded that shelters offered no protection against nuclear fallout and added that, due to financial limits, a shelter program was possible only in the future. Yet, the same report discredited evacuation as well, noting that the potential for clandestine nuclear weapons and a decreasing amount of warning time would lessen effectiveness. The FCDA had reached a critical point, but it could not solve its own uncertainties.

            Furthermore, partly as an outcome of the National Security Council debates, the President now appeared to be as adverse to a large national shelter program as he had been to evacuation. He feared that an expensive shelter program would reduce funding for offensive weapons, which he favored. Against the recommendations of the Holifield and Gaither Committees and the FCDA, Eisenhower spurned the expansive shelter plans.

            By 1958, the year of its dissolution, the FCDA had not received adequate funds for applying a shelter program. Maintaining that a costly shelter program would hurt national defense, Eisenhower tried to soften his rejection by showing support for private shelters. Attempting to bypass an increased government role, President Eisenhower issued a National Shelter Policy in May 1958. This required only leadership and guidance from the FCDA, and placed responsibility for building shelters on individual homeowners. As one historian concluded of the shelter debate:

There would be no more discussion of public shelters, or even public-private collaboration, just talk of self-help and private retreat. And in this policy environment, the language of personal responsibility grew even more extreme: the new National Shelter Policy...recommended “rescuing yourself...” [T]he...shelter program was more a phenomenon of policymaker hand-wringing, popular curiosity, and media hype than an actual construction boom.

Just two months later, the FCDA merged with the Office of Defense

Mobilization (ODM), a similar civil defense agency, into the Office

of Civilian Defense Mobilization (OCDM). It remained to be seen as

to whether the new OCDM would settle the debate between the shelter

and evacuation strategies. By then, however, it was evident that the FCDA had yet to formulate an accepted civil defense program. This failure was complicated by the agency’s conflicts with Congress and Presidents and its inability to sway Americans to the civil defense cause.  

            Although there has been no definitive count of the number of shelters built during the FCDA’s lifetime, most estimates are low. By 1960, according to one report, there were just over 1,500 private shelters. A civil defense estimate of about the same period reached a higher figure of approximately one million -- still less than one percent of Americans. In absence of both a plan and funding for public shelters, few people could or would construct shelters on their own.

            The review of the Operation Alert program has been equally dismal. From the beginning, when only one percent of poll respondents had even heard of an evacuation strategy, the FCDA faced a challenge in trying to gain citizen support for it. This difficulty increased when the agency implemented mock martial law beginning in 1955. The initiative faced rebuke from Congress as well, for Holifield’s report proclaimed, “Operation Alert bungled into crude compulsion where insight, administrative skill, and inspiring leadership were needed.”

            As a result of the FCDA’s confusing agenda, the American public did not embrace either program and both had repercussions that could not be resolved by the FCDA’s lukewarm support. Fallout shelters were exceedingly costly and dependent on the efforts of the federal government. Evacuation was more localized, and at least seemed to be more cost-efficient; therefore, the agency sustained Operation Alert because it may have seemed like their best chance for Congressional support. Yet, evacuation relied upon citizens who were repeatedly resistant to this tactic. Individual citizens preferred shelters to evacuation; Congress generally preferred evacuation to shelters; the Presidents showed no consistent preference for either; and the FCDA was left trying to comprehend mixed signals and find a policy basis for them.          

            The FCDA had begun with a sense of urgency in its purpose, but civil defense proved to be a truly impossible task. The agency sustained itself throughout the 1950s rather clumsily, with little funding, poor direction, and few significant successes. Finally, in 1958, the agency suffered its final blow. In waging its battle to form a survival program that was both acceptable to agency officials, Congressmen, and two Presidents and reasonable to the public, the Federal Civil Defense Administration lost its own war for survival.

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