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Is Our Civil Defense Too Civil?
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Is Our Civil Defense Too Civil?
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Monday, June 24, 2002
The softer appellation "homeland security" has replaced the old Cold War moniker "civil defense" in the American lexicon. Baltimore, Md. is one of the few cities left where you can even find the latter loaded term in the phone book. What's more, the federal government has disarmed its key publication on how the ordinary citizen can keep safe in these modern dangerous times, making it read like a children's busy book to take along on car trips.
Nothing like the no-holds-barred "Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Cresson Kearny or the pragmatic "Civil Defense Begins at Home" by Laura McEnaney, the government's new official "Citizens' Preparedness Guide," touted by Tom Ridge's Office of Homeland Security provides vanilla suggestions for "preparedness in our homes, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, places of worship, and public areas. These recommendations stem from the attacks against our country."
That reference to "attacks against our country" is about as rugged and frank as it gets in the citizen's guide. There is absolutely no specific mention of nuclear threat, insidious creeping radiation fallout, or even those little potassium iodide pills that help keep your body from storing the glowing stuff in the thyroid.
And incidentally, there is nothing in the guide on those lifesaving "Cipro" antibiotic pills in case of an anthrax attack.
Certainly not like the good old days when the now-defunct federal Office of Civil Defense distributed to the population albums entitled "Complacent Americans." The background of this grim warning disc was chock full of wailing sirens and thunderous explosions - all embellishments to the stark message to take civil defense as seriously as death.
Hyperbole was the essence of the thing, including a lament from the grave of a careless atomic bomb victim, wishing he could go back in time and learn the civil defense that would have spared his happy-go-lucky life.
'Go About Your Business'
Laura McEnaney, author of Civil Defense Begins at Home sums it up this way: "The government isn't really defining the threats. In the 1960s, they did. They said where they wanted people to go, what they wanted them to do. Now it's everyone go on high alert, but go about your business, go to the ballgame, go to the mall."
The Citizen's Preparedness Guide, available with just a click of the mouse on Tom Ridge's Homeland Security website, for example, outlines a busy-bee chore - organizing an emergency preparedness kit.
"Check batteries, change the stored water, and rotate the food supplies every six months. Your kit should contain the following supplies:
A three-to-five-day supply of water (one gallon per person per day)
Food that will not spoil and requires no cooking
A first-aid kit and needed medicines (consult your physician or pharmacist about storing medications and keep copies of your prescriptions)
Emergency tools like a battery-powered radio, cell phones, flashlight, and extra batteries, personal items like toilet paper and plastic garbage bags
A portable emergency generator, if possible.
The guide goes on to advise, "Many Americans do not know that their computer systems are used to launch attacks against government and industry..." Key advice: choose a password that is not obvious.
Waving a Rag
Never mentioning the messy details of what might have provoke the destruction, a citizen trapped in the rubble of a building is advised, "Stay where rescuers can see you and wave a light-colored cloth to attract attention."
After quickly dispensing with how to prepare for nameless emergencies from nameless sources, the guide moves on to other helpful suggestions for citizen travel, including an admonishment to remove that lethal metal nail file from those nail clippers; pack an extra pair of glasses or contact lenses, and, best of all: "Try to seem purposeful when you move about, even if you are lost."
"The Homeland Defense Web site is just a set of links leading nowhere," concluded physician Jane M. Orient, head of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness.
Perennial fallout shelter advocate Orient came briefly back into vogue after 9-11. She penned a dark article called "Civil Defense: the Forgotten Defense" in which she beeches the government to find buildings to use as shelters and stock them with food, water and potassium iodide.
Orient is a big fan of the rare 1987 edition of "Nuclear War Survival Skills," which features among other things a chapter on the hazards of "transpacific fallout." Apparently, the colorfully named fallout would eventually hit the U.S. mainland in the event of an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange.
Terrorists with suitcase nukes in New York aside, experts say that small nuclear blasts in far off Asia can produce fallout, which is lower in the atmosphere and capable of raining down on America during its first wind-borne pass around the world.
The 1987 edition of The Book also comes with a foreword by Dr. Edward Teller, who wrote, "with relatively inexpensive governmental guidance and supplies, an educated American public could defend itself."
Teller and others never tire of warning that even a makeshift terror nuke is something to be reckoned with. They warn that the explosion of even a relatively dinky 10-kiloton nuclear device would create a circle of destruction perhaps two miles in diameter.
What's more such a scenario is perhaps more likely than at any time during the stalemate years of the Cold War - years marked by an active civil defense and poised shelters such as one in Baltimore, Md., which for years promised safety to the city's mayor and other executives behind 17-inch concrete walls.
In those salad Cold War days of preparedness, the city had more than 1,000 public fallout shelters stocked and ready to provide safe haven.
The Leaking Bunker
Nowadays the mayor's bunker lets in leaking water, features stores of rotting bandages and musty survival brochures, neglected for decades.
"Back then people got a certain amount of reassurance from knowing the fallout shelters were there," said Richard McKoy, the Baltimore's director of Disaster Management and Civil Defense.
McKoy said that since 9-11 he has been off and on receiving calls from citizens asking which shelter they should use in an emergency. Some of them, he said, get perturbed when he gives them the news that the shelters are no longer provided.
And that scene is repeated all over the country. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/6/23/174945.shtml
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Monday, June 24, 2002
The softer appellation "homeland security" has replaced the old Cold War moniker "civil defense" in the American lexicon. Baltimore, Md. is one of the few cities left where you can even find the latter loaded term in the phone book. What's more, the federal government has disarmed its key publication on how the ordinary citizen can keep safe in these modern dangerous times, making it read like a children's busy book to take along on car trips.
Nothing like the no-holds-barred "Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Cresson Kearny or the pragmatic "Civil Defense Begins at Home" by Laura McEnaney, the government's new official "Citizens' Preparedness Guide," touted by Tom Ridge's Office of Homeland Security provides vanilla suggestions for "preparedness in our homes, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, places of worship, and public areas. These recommendations stem from the attacks against our country."
That reference to "attacks against our country" is about as rugged and frank as it gets in the citizen's guide. There is absolutely no specific mention of nuclear threat, insidious creeping radiation fallout, or even those little potassium iodide pills that help keep your body from storing the glowing stuff in the thyroid.
And incidentally, there is nothing in the guide on those lifesaving "Cipro" antibiotic pills in case of an anthrax attack.
Certainly not like the good old days when the now-defunct federal Office of Civil Defense distributed to the population albums entitled "Complacent Americans." The background of this grim warning disc was chock full of wailing sirens and thunderous explosions - all embellishments to the stark message to take civil defense as seriously as death.
Hyperbole was the essence of the thing, including a lament from the grave of a careless atomic bomb victim, wishing he could go back in time and learn the civil defense that would have spared his happy-go-lucky life.
'Go About Your Business'
Laura McEnaney, author of Civil Defense Begins at Home sums it up this way: "The government isn't really defining the threats. In the 1960s, they did. They said where they wanted people to go, what they wanted them to do. Now it's everyone go on high alert, but go about your business, go to the ballgame, go to the mall."
The Citizen's Preparedness Guide, available with just a click of the mouse on Tom Ridge's Homeland Security website, for example, outlines a busy-bee chore - organizing an emergency preparedness kit.
"Check batteries, change the stored water, and rotate the food supplies every six months. Your kit should contain the following supplies:
A three-to-five-day supply of water (one gallon per person per day)
Food that will not spoil and requires no cooking
A first-aid kit and needed medicines (consult your physician or pharmacist about storing medications and keep copies of your prescriptions)
Emergency tools like a battery-powered radio, cell phones, flashlight, and extra batteries, personal items like toilet paper and plastic garbage bags
A portable emergency generator, if possible.
The guide goes on to advise, "Many Americans do not know that their computer systems are used to launch attacks against government and industry..." Key advice: choose a password that is not obvious.
Waving a Rag
Never mentioning the messy details of what might have provoke the destruction, a citizen trapped in the rubble of a building is advised, "Stay where rescuers can see you and wave a light-colored cloth to attract attention."
After quickly dispensing with how to prepare for nameless emergencies from nameless sources, the guide moves on to other helpful suggestions for citizen travel, including an admonishment to remove that lethal metal nail file from those nail clippers; pack an extra pair of glasses or contact lenses, and, best of all: "Try to seem purposeful when you move about, even if you are lost."
"The Homeland Defense Web site is just a set of links leading nowhere," concluded physician Jane M. Orient, head of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness.
Perennial fallout shelter advocate Orient came briefly back into vogue after 9-11. She penned a dark article called "Civil Defense: the Forgotten Defense" in which she beeches the government to find buildings to use as shelters and stock them with food, water and potassium iodide.
Orient is a big fan of the rare 1987 edition of "Nuclear War Survival Skills," which features among other things a chapter on the hazards of "transpacific fallout." Apparently, the colorfully named fallout would eventually hit the U.S. mainland in the event of an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange.
Terrorists with suitcase nukes in New York aside, experts say that small nuclear blasts in far off Asia can produce fallout, which is lower in the atmosphere and capable of raining down on America during its first wind-borne pass around the world.
The 1987 edition of The Book also comes with a foreword by Dr. Edward Teller, who wrote, "with relatively inexpensive governmental guidance and supplies, an educated American public could defend itself."
Teller and others never tire of warning that even a makeshift terror nuke is something to be reckoned with. They warn that the explosion of even a relatively dinky 10-kiloton nuclear device would create a circle of destruction perhaps two miles in diameter.
What's more such a scenario is perhaps more likely than at any time during the stalemate years of the Cold War - years marked by an active civil defense and poised shelters such as one in Baltimore, Md., which for years promised safety to the city's mayor and other executives behind 17-inch concrete walls.
In those salad Cold War days of preparedness, the city had more than 1,000 public fallout shelters stocked and ready to provide safe haven.
The Leaking Bunker
Nowadays the mayor's bunker lets in leaking water, features stores of rotting bandages and musty survival brochures, neglected for decades.
"Back then people got a certain amount of reassurance from knowing the fallout shelters were there," said Richard McKoy, the Baltimore's director of Disaster Management and Civil Defense.
McKoy said that since 9-11 he has been off and on receiving calls from citizens asking which shelter they should use in an emergency. Some of them, he said, get perturbed when he gives them the news that the shelters are no longer provided.
And that scene is repeated all over the country. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/6/23/174945.shtml
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878