nuclearwar

SUMMARY In designing any military system it is import.int to consider large ranges of criteria and objectives. In practice, however, it is often difficult to gain acceptance for the system unless a single "design situ- ation," embodying a particular choice of criteria and objectives, is selected, while the remaining situations are treated as "important but off-design" cases. It is argued that civil defense planning in the past has in effect accepted surprise attack out of the blue, with substantial megatonnage directed at cities, as its "declaratory design case." Surprise attack out of the blue with the initial salvo directed at stra- tegic forces has been the "action design case" for important recent studies. It is suggested that a better "design" situation would be the tension case which allows extensive emergency readiness procedures (with either a counterforce or mixed attack). While this choice might lead to some neglect of the off-design surprise-attack cases, it is argued that the consequences of such neglect can be guarded against and partially offset. If this point of view is adopted, highly effective civil defense systems could be designed on almost any reasonable budget level (for example, as low as $1/10 billion a year), so long as the effectiveness of such programs is evaluated primarily on the basis of performance in what we consider to be the most likely, or most important case, that is, one in which extensive movement of the urban population is possible. For such a case, the design of the system would se. a goal of z c, even against moderate-sized mixed attacks. However, the plans and prep- arations would be such so as to make appreciable protection available in the case of other attacks and 3ff-design situations. Of course the ideal implementation would not be obtained even in the case of the design at- tack, because of the many uncertainties, imponderables, and inefficiencies that must be expected to occur. Thus, these systems might be de- scribed as "low-casualty" interms of expected results, or as "zero- casualty" in terms of design criteria. This paper is concerned with the performance of such low-casualty or zero-casualty designs in terms of the basic strategic situations mentioned above.Basic to any design would be plans and preparations (consistent with the budget) which, if one of the design scenarios occurred and the plans were implemented in a timely and proper fashion, would offer every civil- ian almost complete protection against a spectrum of nuclear attacks in "which both military installations and urban centers were targeted. In this philosophy the higher budget programs are useful because they (a) reduce the sensitivity of the design to required warning, (b) extend the range of possible nuclear attacks against which the system would be effective, and (c) increase the number of options for handling unanticipated needs for protection. At higher budgets the estimated number of casualties for a design situation and a reasonable implementation would be considerably smaller and there would be a correspondingly higher con- fidence in the probability of obtaining an effective implementation across a wide range of off-design scenarios Thus, this study concludes that while a current federal program pro- vides higli-qualiiy protection agaiist purely counterforce attacks, an ex- j tension of this program and its ongoing research effort to CD designs which exploit warning against urban attacks riow appears to be feasible. Such an extended program could achieve an astonishingly low vulnerability against the known effects of nuclear attack. After an initial discussion of the philosophy behind low-casualty de- signs, the subsequent sections of this paper develop the following themes in greater detail: The range of interesting international crisis contexts and their applications for the design of CD programs. The vulnerability of fallout shelters in urban centers during future crises when there is believed to be insufficient protection. The possibility of spontaneous movement out of urban centers during future crises when there is believed to be insufficient protection. The use of a balanced fallout protection concept for decreasing vulnerability to residual radiation. A "dynamic" civil defense concept based on the idea of planning to improve protection at every time period before, during, and after an attack.Some ways in which current estimates of the efffectiveness of civil defense measures can be improved.