Civil Defense: Listening to Chicken Little

Abstract

The SALT II debate has revealed a growing acceptance among anti-SALT strategists that we must be prepared to fight a nuclear war. The "war fighters" advocate strategies and force levels that reflect the traditional belief that weapons exist to fight wars, not just deter them, and nuclear war is like any other in this respect. There is little recognition by this group that events leading up to a crossroads in human history— the firing of thousands of nuclear weapons— would be anything other than a neat, mechanical, step-by-step procession to confrontation, from which the two sides could easily disengage. Civil defense, programs are prescribed as an integral part of a credible war-fighting capability, and Protection in the Nuclear Age, the government's most recent public information film on the subject (produced for the Federal Emergency Management Agency), accepts this assumption.