Civil defense

Insanity Personified: America's Crazy Plan to Survive a Russian Nuclear Attack

America emerged from World War II as the most powerful nation on earth. Not only did it produce half of the world’s economic output, but it was also in sole possession of the most devastating weapon ever created. Initially, U.S. officials believed America’s nuclear monopoly would endure for some time. After the war, Gen. Leslie Groves, the brilliant manager of the Manhattan Project, predicted the Soviet Union would not explode its first atomic bomb for two decades.

(This first appeared several years ago.)

The United States was therefore shaken when the Soviet Union entered the nuclear club on August 29, 1949. As harrowing as this experience was, it was quickly overshadowed by the prospect of Moscow acquiring thermonuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to the U.S. homeland.

The implications of this was brought into sharp relief on March 1, 1954, when the United States conducted its first test of a deliverable hydrogen bomb. Known as Castle Bravo , the scientists badly misjudged the yield of the bomb, which was about fifteen megatons compared to the five or six megatons they were predicting. The resulting radioactive fallout went far beyond what the test team was expecting, nearly killing the testing team in the process. The test did contaminate nearby islanders as well as the unlucky inhabitants of a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon , that happened to be in the area at the time of the test. All of the crew became sick, and one person died shortly after returning to Japan.

After the test, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s science advisers superimposed the fallout patterns of the Castle Bravo test on a map with Washington, DC as ground zero. The results were shocking. As Annie Jacobsen recounts in her fantastic book on the history of DARPA...