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It has been estimated that a great majority of the deaths suffered in an atomic attack would come from fallout radiation—and it is against radiation that shelters can be most effective. Given between 30 minutes' and an hour's warning of a 150-city thermonuclear attack, an adequate national system of fallout shelters might well cut the death rate from 160 million to 85 million; add an effective blast-shelter system, and the number of deaths could drop to 25 million.
The Second Deterrent. If the casualties from an atomic attack could be so dramatically reduced, the U.S. could almost surely arise from the rubble, fight back, survive, put together a society again and, ultimately, prosper once more. That ability in itself might well serve as a deterrent second only to the nation's retaliatory military might in preventing an aggressor from launching his attack. It is in that realization that the U.S. Government, after years of paying lip service to civil defense, has begun to move.
Shortly after his July speech, President Kennedy transferred the main duties of the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization to the Department of Defense, leaving only a small advisory cadre, the Office of Emergency Planning, under the direction of Frank Ellis, former OCDM chief. An aroused Congress—which for years had regarded civil defense almost as a laughing matter and had annually cut its appropriations to the marrow—quickly gave the Administration the $207 million it requested for the revitalized program. In the Pentagon, the new Office of Civil Defense civilian staff was beefed up by engineers and technicians from the armed forces, and a vast new blueprint for safeguarding the U.S. public is being drawn up. Assistant Defense Secretary Steuart Pittman, 42, an ex-marine who was appointed chief of OCD, set the goals for the first phase: "It's an opportunity for people to take part in a vital defense program, to demonstrate the will to face up to thermonuclear warfare. This program carries a message to our Allies, neutrals and potential enemies."
Under Pittman, who has been on the job for less than two months, civil defense leaders last week were readying a program of surveying, marking and stocking every existing public building in the nation that could serve as a shelter. Merely marking and identifying these sites, said Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, "could, without additional effort, save at least 10 to 15 million lives." Next month the first teams of trained experts will begin the eight-month survey.