ONCE A YEAR America dances in a comic ballet against the backdrop of a world of terror. The dance masters call their creation, Operation Alert, fitting it snugly into a continuous show entitled, Civil Defense. This year’s show took place May 3.

In New York, Civil Defense authorities qualified the Men’s Bar at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel as a shelter area, and 100 men continued to sip their highballs as three mythical nuclear bombs hurtled toward the city. At Yankee Stadium, bleacherites cowered under the stands while more affluent customers remained in their comfortable grandstand seats.

Several Manhattan firms stopped work, but one company declared its 400 employees “automatically dead” and kept them on the job.

In Washington, Congress ignored the drill, and President Eisenhower spent the day elsewhere. Only one top government official scurried from the city to his secret command post in Virginia - Leo A. Hoegh, Director of the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization. The State Department set a new record as 4,000 employees tucked their secret papers into safes and rushed from the building in eight minutes (previous record: twelve minutes). Fifty-five schools stayed out of the drill, serving as polling places for the District of Columbia’s Presidential primary.

At 2 P.M., the sirens in Camden, N. J., alerted citizens to prepare for a possible second signal to take cover. Across the river, in Philadelphia, where the Civil Defense system does not include such an alert, residents heard Camden’s sirens and hurried off the streets. At 2:15 P.M., Philadelphia’s sirens blared away for the first time - the signal to take cover. But Philadelphians assumed it was the all clear and rushed back into the streets.

In Los Angeles, the drill included the evacuation, on paper, of 150,000 residents of western San Fernando Valley. If the drill had been real, Police Inspector Lee German announced, the result would have been “the greatest traffic jam ever created on the face of the earth.” But Pinckneyville, Illinois, simulated the real thing and had no such problem. As a gesture of patriotism, the town evacuated its entire population of 3,299. During an actual nuclear attack, of course, Pinckneyvillites would be expected to stay put.

BUT NOT everyone danced on May 3. Little bands of protesters refused to perform in several places, most conspicuously in New York, where it is a criminal offense to ignore a Civil Defense drill. Five hundred persons demonstrated in City Hall Park; when 150 defied police orders to take cover, patrolmen moved in and arrested twenty-six at random [see editorial, The Nation, May 14, page 415]. City College, Brooklyn College, Queens College, Hunter College and several New York high schools also were the sites of protest demonstrations. College officials reacted with hints of possible disciplinary action.

Student protests were not confined to New York City. Eight students from Wesleyan University and three from Hartford College paraded before the state capitol in Hartford, Connecticut, bearing signs that cried: “Civil Defense Breeds Militarism” and “There is Still Time, Brother.” Thirteen students from Haverford and Bryn Mawr colleges joined marchers in front of Philadelphia’s City Hall. In Schenectady, New York, twenty Union College students refused to take shelter.

Operation Alert 1960 probably had more protest and comedy than the six previous national Civil Defense drills, but, for the most part, Americans once again acquiesced and performed the few steps assigned them. Yet the increase in protest and comedy reflected a swelling, inner grumbling within the nation, a growing feeling that whether or not Civil Defense makes sense in theory, the Civil Defense we have in practice makes none. To even the most stalwart defender of the principle, American Civil Defense must seem sometimes ludicrous, sometimes maddening, and most times non-existent.

IN THE first place, the goals of our Civil Defense planners are hidden by confusion. The average American is not quite sure whether he is expected to hide in his basement or run from his house, and neither is the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization. For years, the government emphasized evacuation from target areas: maps with escape routes were distributed, highway markers were nailed up, evacuation centers were designated. But, in the past two years, it dawned on planners that the thirty-minute flight of a missile from Russia to the United States would not give eight million New Yorkers, for example, enough time to drive calmly into Connecticut and New Jersey. Planners hit on a new device of defense - the fallout shelter.

In theory, the shelter would save all those who had not been directly hit by a bomb. The theory supposes that the living, after two weeks, could creep out of their shelters and survive in an area without edible food or potable water. “What kind of world would they come up to?” Gov. Robert B. Meyner of New Jersey has asked. “What would they use for air? What would they use for food? What would they use for hospitals? What would they use for streets? What would they use for people?” The government acknowledges the difficulty, but hopes that after several weeks state and federal forces could move in with supplies.

But, even assuming that shelters will perform a limited function, the plain fact remains that almost no one is building them. Rogers S. Cannell and Richard B. Foster of the Stanford Research Institute recently estimated that it would cost $50 to $100 billion a year for the next ten years to build enough shelters for survival. The Eisenhower Administration has been in no mood to spend that kind of money on Civil Defense, and it is doubtful that its successor would contemplate spending it either. “There will be no massive federally financed shelter construction program,” OCDM Director Leo A. Hoegh announced two years ago. Instead, he proposed that the government build a few prototype shelters and convince Americans to use private funds to build their own. But few, if any Americans, are spending weekends bricking together dark, wet shelters (although, in the wake of the Summit debacle, a few construction firms have launched a sales campaign for their services as expert shelter builders; see reproduction of advertisement on next page). Hoegh has received from Congress only a little more than a third of the $29 million he has asked for this program during the past two years. Rep. Albert Thomas (D., Tex.), chairman of a House Appropriations subcommittee, told Hoegh quite bluntly: “The great trouble with Civil Defense is . . . the people back home are not too interested in the proposition.”

As a result, Civil Defense officials have found themselves with an acclaimed shelter theory, but no shelters, and a discredited evacuation theory, but lots of evacuation facilities. So, to take advantage of what it has, the OCDM, in essence, now advocates both theories, It urges the public to evacuate if there is time and to seek shelter if there isn’t.

The resultant confusion can be detected by glancing at the Civil Defense guide issued last year for the Washington, D.C., area. The guide first offers a huge map detailing the various evacuation routes into Virginia and Maryland. Then it offers directions on how to obtain designs for a home shelter. Some attempt is made to comfort confused readers by promising that, during an attack, the government would sound a steady, five-minute alert siren only if it felt residents had enough time to evacuate. If it felt there was no time, the government would immediately sound a warbling, three-minute take-cover siren. But a disquieting note is added the course of a discussion of driving on the evacuation route. “When the take-cover signal sounds,” the guide says, “pull your car off the road quickly. Leave keys in the vehicle. Take such essential survival items as you can carry. Go to shelter immediately in the nearest building. Carry your portable radio with you.” The note implies that Civil Defense officials envision many persons ending up halfway between their home shelters and their evacuation centers.

In the view of Sen. Stephen M. Young (D., Ohio), you could expect little else. “Anyone who has seen or been in the everyday rush-hour traffic jam in Washington can easily imagine what would happen if every car in the District of Columbia were simultaneously to begin the trek out of town,” Sen. Young said after reading the guide. “The idea is too ridiculous to contemplate. It is doubtful there would be time enough to reach one’s car, much less to drive it out of the city.” Faced with OCDM’s own doubts and Sen. Young’s logic, the Washingtonian would have an awesome decision to make if the sirens or CONELRAD advised him he had enough time to run away. Should he leave the possible safety of his fallout shelter to seek the certain safety of the evacuation center? Should he rush toward certain safety knowing there was a chance he would end up in the middle of the street with no safety at all? Did it really matter what he did?

Wastefulness and inefficiency have bogged down Civil Defense workers almost as much as the lack of a clear program. Their most vocal critic by far has been Sen. Young. Last year, the Senator noted, John Pokorny received $12,834 a year as Cleveland Civil Defense Director and “his main achievement, if not the only one, is to have the sirens sounded every Monday at 12:15 P.M. to the annoyance of people living in my community.” On March 15, a subcommittee of the Newark, New Jersey, City Council, after a year-long study, concluded that “the record of our Civil Defense agency is a sad one of inefficiency and waste. It is our considered opinion that to continue the present Civil Defense operation in Newark is indefensible from any reasonable viewpoint.”

But the most amazing record of bumbling has come from Washington, D.C., where the local Civil Defense people work under the noses of the President, the OCDM and Congress. The situation finally prompted the Senate Investigating subcommittee last year to step in and hold hearings. “To sum up what appears to me from what I have heard this morning,” Sen. Henry M. Jackson (D., Wash.), the acting chairman, concluded, “we really don’t have Civil Defense here in the District of Columbia.” And he quickly added: “Maybe we don’t have it in other communities throughout the country.”

Robert Emmet Dunne, assistant counsel of the subcommittee, testified that during a December, 1958, inspection he discovered that of 524,800 pamphlets, leaflets and comic books on civil defense the local Civil Defense agency had acquired a year to two years earlier, 442,000 had not been distributed. In addition, the local agency had bought 100,000 air-raid warden armbands several years before, and still had 81,000 lying around. Dunne also found that the agency had spent $42,750 for walkie-talkies in 1951 and 1952 and most of them were now beyond repair.

STRANGE tales of ineffectiveness also crammed the day’s testimony. In one example, John E. Fondahl, the Washington Civil Defense director, revealed what an unexpected twist in practice drill can do:

Back around 1955 or 1956 [the subcommittee counsel asked], you had an alert insofar as Civil Defense, a practice, in which the President of the United States took part. Am I right in that? ...

‍Fondahl: Yes. The President did take part in one national exercise; yes, sir.

Q: During a portion of the exercise, the President all of a sudden declared martial law; am I right?

Fondahl: There was a declaration of martial law involved in that exercise; yes, sir.

Q: Did your office know that martial law had been declared by the President?

Fondahl: We, as I recall, in that exercise, we got the message on that towards the close of the exercise.

Q: Do you know why the President declared martial law?

Fondahl: I presume for the purpose of testing out what would actually happen in the event that such a thing were to come about.

Q: I am not asking for any presumption. Do you know why he declared martial law?

Fondahl: No, sir.

Q: Do you know why your communications broke down and you didn’t find out about it?

Fondahl: Well, our facilities didn’t break down. I don’t know why we didn’t find out about it earlier.

Q: Well, do you know? Can you tell me now... ?

Fondahl: I can’t recall at this date ... just what did happen.

Q: In other words, you can’t tell me today why your agency wasn’t notified that martial law had been declared, can you?

Fondahl: . .. No, sir.

The comedy, the waste, the bungling have their root, of course, in public refusal to accept Civil Defense wholeheartedly. It may be, as New York’s Governor Rockefeller has implied, that this refusal comes from an unwillingness to face the tensions of the world realistically. If so, a vital question must be answered. Would Civil Defense make sense if people pitched in, Congress appropriated billions, the President set intelligible goals, and all the comedy, waste and bungling withered away? The answer lies in logic, not in laughter, in examining theory rather than practice.

Rockefeller, the most intellectual advocate of strong Civil Defense, detailed his argument in the April, 1960, issue of Foreign Affairs. Since Russia can attack any place in the United States within minutes, Rockefeller wrote, American offensive power is not enough to deter aggression. Instead, he continued, deterrence must depend on four factors: “a. capacity to retaliate; b. ability to protect our allies; c. willingness to use these capabilities; and d. knowledge on the part of the potential aggressor that both our retaliatory force and our civilian population have the protection to survive an attack.” The fourth factor involves Civil Defense, and Rockefeller maintained it is based on a moral and a strategic position.

“We properly recoil before the horrors of nuclear war,” he said in his discussion of the moral issue. “But we cannot afford to assume that it could not happen - all the less so as our whole strategy is based on the threat of it... It is our heavy responsibility as public officials and as citizens to save the lives and to protect the health of our people. A lagging effort cannot be excused by our conviction that nuclear war is a tragedy and that we must strive by all honorable means to assure peace.” Strategically, he continued, we must remove temptation from an aggressor who might risk an all-out war if he thought he could destroy our most valuable asset - the people. Since, in Rockefeller’s view, advance preparation, particularly shelters, would reduce casualties from fallout, the nation must take these preparations to eliminate the temptation.

But Rockefeller’s argument concerns itself so thoroughly with the psychology of an aggressor that it ignores the psychology of the United States. How would all-out Civil Defense affect the American people? Americans obviously would develop a false sense of security; they would create what Sen. Young, Gov. Meyner and Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, on three separate occasions, have called a Maginot Line concept. Shelters, as we have seen, would protect an individual only from fallout. Using Civil Defense estimates, the three mythical bombs that struck New York City during Operation Alert would have killed 3,935,490 persons and injured 1,098,410 persons instantly. Theoretically, not one of these persons could have been saved by a shelter; they would have been killed by the initial blast and heat. Later radiation, according to the estimates, would have killed 1,405,000 more people and injured 1,345,000 others. Even in theory, these are the only victims who might have been saved by shelters. When Rockefeller suggests a shelter may save your life, he actually means, as these figures demonstrate, that it may insure the survival of some part of the species Man, a very different and much less comforting concept.

A terrifying assumption underlies Rockefeller’s argument. While focusing on deterrence, the Governor’s theory assumes that, if war came, victory through survival might be possible. Rockefeller’s words harmonize with the ponderous theorizing of other Foreign Affairs contributors who talk in terms of numbers and percentages instead of horror and anguish, as if war were a chess game. At the moment, these attitudes control only political leaders and military strategists, but a gigantic Civil Defense would implant them into the civilian population. When we concentrate on numbers, survival and victory, as Rockefeller does, and drive from our minds visions of writhing bodies and screaming flesh, then war becomes thinkable. In the nuclear age, war must be unthinkable. “There is one and only one defense against nuclear war,” Gov. Meyner has said, “‘and that is peace.”

We have a farcical and harmless - if expensive - Civil Defense these days. But should our government listen to the cry of Rockefeller and create a lavish, efficient Civil Defense, an acceptance of war and a faith in survival would storm the consciousness of America. The annual dance called Operation Alert would be less comic then.

STANLEY MEISLER is a wire service newsman in Washington.