Quotations on nuclear preparedness - Unreasonable Software

Nuclear preparedness

This page collects voices in support of the proposition that, through preparation, most people can reduce the consequences of a nuclear attack of any size on their family or community. Yes, it may be tough. But you come from tough stock.

Society will keep percolating, and my reading of it is that nuclear war — all-out nuclear exchange — is not the end of the world ... It's a real shift in attitude. A nuclear war would pop a lot of hubris in the people in charge here, but it's not going to destroy all humanity or all biology. It's not going to do in the biosphere and the atmosphere....

Apocalyptic scenarios all seem[ed] to assume that nobody ever learns anything; that there's no economic response, no political response, no individual response. Everybody keeps doing the same dumb thing that got them into whatever the catastrophe is. The truth is, as with anything biological, that it just adapts right around whatever you put in its path.

Written about US v. USSR, but just as valid today:

The Doomies [are regarded] as uninformed, hysterical, extremely vocal and dangerous to the survival of the nation. This attitude is due to the Doomie insistence, despite the evidence, that a nuclear war will kill everyone on earth and therefore survival preparations ... are a waste of time. Even worse, according to the Doomies, preparation for survival or an effective civil defense system is evil, because it promotes and encourages nuclear war.

In my view the thing that promotes war is thinking that you can get away with it ... and for the Soviets to see us as totally exposed to their weapons — utterly defenseless — must encourage such thoughts. If this is true, then civil defense is not only a humane, proper and responsible policy, it is essential to discourage Soviet adventurism.

Among millions of our citizens there is momentary concern about civil defense when a world crisis threatens to boil over — but subconsciously these busy citizens also pigeon-hole the matter when their attention no longer is focused on the immediate possibility of non-survival.

Among millions of others there is a mistaken belief that there is nothing they can do about the problem anyway, combined with a blind faith that somehow the government will protect them — an unconscious rejection of the whole complicated, unpleasant issue.

It seems ridiculous to have to 'sell' civil defense.

Walter Cronkite, 1968
Who Speaks for Civil Defense

In a crisis of this sort, people will usually try to maximize their survival chances by running from the danger or getting underground to avoid it. They will do something. What is critical is that they do the right things. Just one example is the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: Californians decided that the place to go was to the high elevations of the Sierra Mountains. They were in the worst radiation pattern. That's the point: They did something, but it was wrong because they did not understand the problem.

Survival to many people isn't exciting, it's frightening.

My own experience with the public is that they are as ignorant of what a bomb does and its effects as they were 35 years ago. For example, most of the public is completely unaware that radiation levels decline after a war.

Leon Goure, PhD
expert on Soviet and Russian civil defense

Just knowing what the effects of radiation are, and what does and what doesn't attenuate it, would enable the average citizen to better provide for his own survival.

Major General John K. Singlaub (USA, retired)

Civil defense is at once the most peaceful and the most effective deterrent of nuclear war. [It] will not eliminate the danger of nuclear war. It will considerably diminish its probability.

Edward Teller, PhD (in physics)
"Father of the Hydrogen Bomb," first director of Lawrence Radiation Laboratory

Will Brownell: "How frustrating have you felt during the last 30 years when you've tried to assert the validity of civil defense?"
Edward Teller: "It has gotten to the point that I am so used to not succeeding, that I am astonished when I succeed in a small way, so I'm not that frustrated. I don't know what I would do if I were to succeed everywhere."

Edward Teller

The United States today is completely vulnerable to the devastating effects of nuclear war. Until our government makes a commitment to survival, we shall be innocent hostages to nuclear blackmail and worse — nuclear attack. It is clear that civil defense against nuclear war is not only technically feasible — it is a moral imperative.

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