From the Archives - A Moral Argument for Civil Defense: Advice to America’s Catholic Bishops (1983)

This article appeared exactly 35 years ago today, in the January 1, 1983, issue of Crisis Magazine, a Catholic journal of opinion (previously known as Catholicism in Crisis).

CRISIS MAGAZINE - JANUARY 1, 1983

A Moral Argument for Civil Defense: Advice to America’s Catholic Bishops

RICHARD E. SINCERE, JR.

“Justice demands that those who do not make war not have war made upon them.” This is a central teaching of the Catholic Church that is repeated emphatically in the second draft of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter on peace and war. Just war doctrine demands discrimination in battle and both the United States and the Soviet Union in part meet this moral requirement in their strategic plans, which do not target nuclear weapons against civilian populations as such. However, to meet it fully, both nations must also protect civilian populations from the effects of enemy weapons.

The bishops do not adequately address the question of civil defense in their draft letter, nor is it likely that they will do so in the final version next May. In spite of that oversight, I would like to set forth here the moral principles which compel a government to protect its people from weapons of mass destruction, principles drawn in part from the bishops’ own document.

Moral Foundations: Just War and Vatican II

Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, condemned indiscriminate warfare by saying: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.” This moral judgment has obvious applications to gruesome examples of modern warfare: the obliteration bombings of Coventry and Tokyo, the blitz against London, the firebombings of Dresden and Hamburg, the use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan, Laos, and Kampuchea. By extension we can apply it to the extermination policies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — even though these were not acts of war in the conventional sense.

A mistaken interpretation of the Council’s judgment maintains that any use of nuclear weapons would be “indiscriminate” and therefore damnable. Yet the evolution of modern technology made possible pinpoint attacks on purely military targets. Weapons such as the neutron bomb have been designed primarily with the principle of discrimination in mind: enhanced radiation warheads arrest the aggressive movement of tank forces without affecting innocent civilian populations nearby. Their lethal effects are short-lived and narrowly targeted.

However, intercontinental strategic weapons are still so destructive that even pinpoint bombings of missile silos can spread harmful radioactive fallout indiscriminately to civilian areas. Simple measures can be taken to protect against these effects. These must be examined in the light of moral reasoning.

Defense Against Nuclear Weapons

The American bishops write, contrary to the facts, that “the presumption exists that defense against a nuclear attack is not feasible.” They ignore extensive and presumably effective air defenses deployed by the Soviet Union, along with the available technology for ballistic missile defense (BMD) — whether in the form of antiballistic missiles (in place in the Soviet Union, abandoned by the United States), space-based laser — or conventional-BMD, or sophisticated anti-weapon weapons like particle beams. Moreover, the bishops all but overlook the possibility of passive civilian defenses — except in this passage:

“In discussing non-violent means of defense, some attention must be given to existing programs for civil defense against nuclear attack, including blast and fallout shelters and relocation plans. It is unclear in the public mind whether these are intended to offer significant protection against at least some forms of nuclear attack or are being put into place to enhance the credibility of the strategic deterrent forces by demonstrating an ability to survive attack.”

The bishops here unwittingly present two strong reasons to support civil defense: emphatically, significant protection against the effects of nuclear weapons is possible; secondarily, the ability to survive indeed increases the credibility of the deterrent strategy of the United States government. Clearly this is the most peaceful component of nuclear deterrence: it requires no weapons and possesses none of the moral ambiguity of nuclear weapons. If the bishops someday see fit to condemn the mere possession of nuclear weapons, they shall have no justification to condemn the peaceful means to protect innocent civilians against an aggressor.

The bishops recommend that an independent panel of scientists, engineers, and physicians examine the feasibility of civil defense as a means to survive a nuclear war. Yet many such studies have been done over the past thirty years. The consensus is that nuclear war is indeed survivable and, in the words of one of the latest studies, “no insuperable barrier to recovery exists.” It would indeed be horrible, but preparations for the potentially horrible can significantly mitigate its consequences. If targeting civilian populations in your enemy’s territory is morally unjustifiable, acquiescing in the unnecessary death of innocents in your own country is morally repugnant. It deserves unhesitating condemnation.

Civil Defense: A Life or Death Issue

“Questions of war and peace,” write the bishops, “have a profoundly moral dimension which responsible Christians cannot ignore. They are questions of life and death.” War is evil not in itself but because it is the cause of human suffering and death. To alleviate suffering and prevent death is ipso facto a moral good. That is why an increased American commitment to civil defense is a moral imperative. Every reason exists for the bishops to express their support for such a commitment: (1) Above all, civil defense saves lives. Estimates vary, but in the event of nuclear war some civil defense will save more lives than no civil defense. (The Swiss have a slogan: “Better civil defense without nuclear war than nuclear war without civil defense.”) (2) As I argued earlier, civil defense is an integral component of a deterrent strategy, the only component that is objectively peaceful. It is also, many experts argue, the most effective part of a deterrent strategy. Soviet military planners and their leaders in the Kremlin are cautious. If they have no guarantee of victory — that is, if the United States can demonstrate an ability to survive, recover, and challenge Soviet hegemony — they will not be as ready to risk a strategic conflict.

Nuclear war would no doubt be the most tragic disaster ever to befall mankind. There is no need to make it any worse by ignoring its consequences. There are, of course, some problems with civil defense as it exists today: crisis relocation is far from perfect, shelters are not invulnerable, panic and confusion may still occur. Yet to refuse to plan for these contingencies is as sinful as launching a nuclear weapon in the first place.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “it is the concrete individual who lends meaning to the human race. We do not think that a human being is valuable because he is a member of the race; it is rather the opposite: the human race is valuable because it is composed of human beings.” The responsibility of the nation is to preserve and protect as many human beings as possible. To neglect that responsibility reveals a moral turpitude worse than the Nazi Holocaust, worse than the Stalinist purges, indeed worse than any conceivable use of nuclear weapons. To commit ourselves to civil defense is to reaffirm a choice God made available to us several thousand years ago: “I set before you life or death, a blessing or curse. Choose life then, so that you and your descendants may live in the love of Yahweh your god, obeying his voice, clinging to him; for in this your life consists …” (Deuteronomy 11:26)


Richard E. Sincere, Jr., is research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a member of the visiting faculty of the Georgetown University School for Summer and Continuing Education, and president of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the American Civil Defense Association.

From the Archives: 'School Training for Civil Defense' (1981)

Some background may shed light on this 1981 article, retrieved from my paper archives.  Fortunately the story behind it has already been told, in a remembrance of celebrated debate coach James J. Unger, which I posted in April 2008:

The high school debate topic the previous year (1981-82) was "Resolved: That the federal government should establish minimum educational standards for elementary and secondary schools in the United States." I came up with the idea, based upon research I was doing in the real world -- if the world of Washington think tanks can be described as "real" -- that we should write a case about civil defense education in elementary and secondary schools.

The problem with this idea was that there was little, if any, information available about civil defense education. (There was some material from the 1960s, but nothing recent and little that was usable by debaters.) But I was convinced this could be a winning case.

So I asked Professor Unger, "What do you do when something is topical but so obscure that there is nothing written about it that you can use as evidence for inherency?" He replied that there was not much to do in that situation, other than to intensify your research and find the evidence you need.

My solution: since I had already had one article published on the topic of civil defense -- appearing in the Washington Star on October 10, 1980, months after I submitted it and based on research I did during the summer 1980 forensics institute -- and had subsequently become an officer in the American Civil Defense Association, I could just write another one, with a focus on education, that could be used as evidence to support our case.

And that's what I did. I submitted the article to several newspapers, and it was published in the New York Tribune (a sister newspaper to The Washington Times), just days before the institute tournament. We inserted the appropriate quotations into the case (not citing me by name), held others in reserve for second affirmative and rebuttals, and moved forward.

The case was relatively successful, with two of my teams making it into the elimination rounds. After the last round that one of the teams lost, they told me that my qualifications as a source had become an issue in the debate. The judge from that round added: "Your boys defended you valiantly, but they lost on other issues."

This is a long tale meant to be background of something that happened a couple of years later. As it was told to me, late one night while preparing for a tournament, members of the Georgetown debate team had hit a brick wall, unable to find the evidence they needed to complete a brief they were working on. Professor Unger popped up and said, "Well, why don't we just pull a Rick Sincere?" -- meaning, why not write an article and get it published in a reputable newspaper or journal? I don't think they ever followed through on that suggestion, but just the idea that my name became associated with a new debate tactic was enough to warm my ego.

This article was published in The News World, a New York City daily newspaper (later called the New York City Tribune), on July 28, 1981:

Richard Sincere

School Training for Civil Defense

Perhaps no aspect of the strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union is ignored more than civil defense and emergency preparedness. Americans waste too much effort in debates which obfuscate strategic issues by statistical manipulation of throw-weights, megatonnages, and MIRV capabilities. Public and policymakers alike are blind to the reality of the strategic balance: Deterrence of nuclear war depends as much on the willingness and ability to survive such a conflict as it does on the technical capacity to fight the battle.

Soviet political and military policies do not reflect a frightened belief in the universal destruction of nuclear war. Instead, they maintain that nuclear weapons are instruments for war-fighting. In many ways, Soviet leaders view nuclear weapons as extensions of conventional war-fighting techniques; Soviet military literature categorizes war by who does the fighting, not by the weapons which they use. Most importantly, Soviet military strategy is fundamentally a survival-oriented strategy.

One result of this thinking has been the establishment of a nationwide civil defense network. The chief of Soviet civil defense is an army general, filling an office equivalent to our own secretary of the Army. The Soviets treat civil defense as a co-equal branch of the military. On the other hand, in the United States responsibility for civil defense lies buried in an obscure bureau of the Department of Commerce called the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Which country takes its self-protection more seriously?

In accord with the principle of protecting their people from the ravages of nuclear war, the Soviets have launched an extensive training program in all public schools from elementary to university levels, and as continuing education industrial plants and communities. Towns and villages celebrate “civil defense days” as holidays, with sports competitions and games geared toward teaching the citizens survival techniques. And if some Soviet citizens scoff at these methods, they will at least have some skills to draw on in an emergency.

A widely-circulated Soviet civil defense manual state: “Civil defense training in the public schools occupies an important place in preparing the people of our country for protection against weapons of mass destruction.” In contrast, the editor of the Journal of Civil Defense told me recently that “civil defense education has been badly neglected in the United States in the past few years. With no initiative from the higher levels, it apparently has fallen off to almost zero.”

This attitude seems unlikely to change. The shame of this neglect is that civil defense survival methods are so easy to teach. Generally, Soviet schools spend no more than 15-20 minutes each week on it, mostly in conjunction with sportsmanlike competition. One civil defense game involves nearly 20 million children each summer. The final match of this game, called “Summer Lightning,” is played in Leningrad as an object of intense national interest.

In the United States, inaccessibility to civil defense literature is the greatest obstacle to survival training. A good beginning for civil defense instruction in America’s public schools would be for the Department of Education to sponsor distribution of survival handbooks (such as Dr. Cresson Kearny’s “Nuclear War Survival Skills,” published in 1979) to all school libraries. Such a minimum requirement would allow individual school districts to expand civil defense education as much as they like, especially if assistance from the Department of Defense and FEMA were available.

Civil defense education will immeasurably increase the maintenance of a peaceful deterrent to nuclear war. As long as no civil defense training is available to United States citizens, our country remains a willing hostage to Soviet weapons with little hope of survival or recovery. Survival plays a major role in Soviet strategy and plays almost no role in our own. To neglect such a vital aspect of the strategic nuclear balance is to assure our own destruction.

Richard Sincere is research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. A member of the American Civil Defense Association, he also holds a degree in international affairs from Georgetown University.

Subsequent to this and other newspaper articles on civil defense, I testified on the topic before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, discussed it on many television and radio shows, and published a journal article that was reprinted in pamphlet form by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which included a foreword by actor Lorne Greene. It was a central focus of my professional life in the 1980s but faded into the background after I finished my master's degree at the LSE and the Cold War came to an end. Civil defense and nuclear weapons policy took a back seat to Africa policy.

As an added bonus, here is a 1950s-era government training (propaganda?) video about school-based civil defense education.

Despite the jokes about it, civil defense in the schools was much more than "duck and cover."

My Brush with Greatness: Edward Teller (1908-2003)

Today would have been the 106th birthday of nuclear physicist Edward Teller, who has often been called the "father of the hydrogen bomb."  Teller was also an advocate against government secrecy who probably would have relished the opportunity to engage in the debate about the NSA that has resulted from the revelations of Edward Snowden.  He was also a principal advocate for the development of what came to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars."

When Teller died in 2003, I wrote an article for a local Charlottesville newspaper, The Hook, which at the time had been running a series called "My Brush with Greatness."  My piece appeared as a back-of-the-book commentary piece.

For some reason, I have not previously rescued this piece for re-publication in this space, although it has been available on The Hook's archives.  (Sadly, The Hook ceased publication late last year, so how long and how available its archives will be remains an open question. The photo of Teller and me, reproduced below, that accompanied the article is already missing from the paper's web site.)

This article appeared in the print edition of The Hook on September 18, 2003.

Edward Teller: My brush with greatness

While the entertainment world reels from the loss of Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash, and John Ritter, the world stage will long remember the controversial cold warrior bomb-builder Edward Teller, whose September 9 death got lost in the shuffle. One local remembers the man who built the horrifying "super." –editor

RICHARD SINCERE

It would be a lie for me to say that Edward Teller and I were friends. It would even be a stretch to call us acquaintances, although we were colleagues on one side of a vital public debate at the height of the Cold War.

Edward Teller and Rick Sincere, c. 1983

The best I can say is that Edward Teller and I crossed paths on about a dozen occasions in the 1980s, participating in conferences together, and engaging in short but substantive conversations on nuclear weapons policy, U.S.-Soviet relations, and international politics.

Teller, who died on September 9 at his home in California at the age of 95, was known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb." He participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, and for many years was head of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which pursued fundamental research in nuclear physics and applied sciences.

My most memorable encounter with Teller was not the first one, in 1981. Rather, it was one of the last meetings we had, on November 16, 1988, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in the nation's capital.

On that occasion, Edward Teller, the American "father of the hydrogen bomb," met for the first time Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet "father of the hydrogen bomb." Sakharov, who as a dissident and human rights activist was forced by the Soviet regime to live in internal exile for many years, was in Washington on his first trip to the United States. (This was in the era of glasnost and perestroika-­ openness and reform-­ ushered in by former Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev.)

The meeting between the two famous physicists was arranged by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think-tank for which I worked at the time. On that night, Teller was to receive the Shelby Cullom Davis Award for "integrity and courage in public life" at a dinner attended by some 750 people in government, business, the academy, and journalism. A few days before the dinner, we learned that Sakharov would be in town and that he had a desire to meet Teller.

As the crowd mingled at the cocktail reception several floors below, the president of the Center, Ernest Lefever, and I waited anxiously for Teller and Sakharov to arrive. Teller came first, accompanied by the massive walking stick he always carried with him. The three of us made some small talk when there was a knock at the door: Sakharov, accompanied by a Russian-English interpreter.

Andrei Sakharov and Edward Teller

They greeted each other like old friends, although the two had never met before. They sat together on a sofa and chatted amiably about the issues that motivated them: international stability, human rights, and, above all, nuclear physics. They spoke in soft tones, and we left them alone. What passed between them that night, in private, was known only to Teller and Sakharov.

Teller's career was a storied one, and he earned both scorn and accolades in his long life. Never one to mince words, he criticized government officials regardless of political party or ideology when he thought they were on the wrong path. He led a lonely but articulate crusade against U.S. government secrecy, arguing that it was pointless to classify, for example, reports on nuclear weapons research, because the Soviets were able to obtain these reports by stealth and espionage anyway.

The only people left in the dark were American voters, who were then unable to make sensible, fully informed decisions about public policy.

This approach was consonant with Teller's lifelong trust in democracy. In 1950 he wrote: "It is not the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives."

Teller earned the enmity of "peaceniks," appeasers, nuclear freezers, left-wing ideologues, and Communist fellow travelers. In the 1980s, he was hounded by operatives of Lyndon LaRouche's political cult, who heckled him at public speaking events and tried to embarrass him for his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the anti-missile project known derisively as "Star Wars."

It was said that the only human casualty of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 was Edward Teller: So exhausted by traveling around the country, speaking out calmly against the Chicken Littles who declared Three Mile Island a disaster, Teller suffered a heart attack and was incapacitated for several weeks.

Teller, of course, had his admirers, too-­ not least among them those who felt that a strong defense posture was necessary in the face of Soviet expansionism, and especially those who felt that true defensive strategies (including civil defense programs and anti-missile programs like SDI) were morally, strategically, and politically imperative.

On that November night in 1988, President Ronald Reagan said that Teller was "a sterling example of what scientific knowledge, enlightened by moral sense and a dedication to the principles of freedom and justice, can do to help all mankind." The President added that Teller was "one of the giants of American science, and one of the bulwarks of American freedom."

Richard Sincere is co-editor of Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative, and author of Civil Defense: A Moral, Political, and Strategic Approach, both published in 1986 by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as well as of other books.

It wasn't until I decided to write this blog post that I discovered how Edward Teller shared a birthday with my own father and also with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Same day, different years in all three cases, however.)

Preparing for the Coming Viral Apocalypse (Please Retweet!)

More than 30 years ago, I was involved in the preparation of an anthology called The Apocalyptic Premise, which was edited by Ernest W. Lefever and E. Stephen Hunt and published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center.  The book gathered 31 essays about the then-current nuclear arms debate.

In an introduction, Lefever and Hunt define what they mean by the anthology's intriguing title, noting that, in public policy debates, "some ideas obscure desirable ends and confuse the means for reaching them."  They go on to say that

One such influential idea is "the apocalyptic premise," which has always flourished in times of trouble and uncertainty.  Both the Old Testament and the New Testament have vivid apocalyptic passages portraying how the world will end for both the righteous and the unrighteous....

But in current secular usage, an apocalyptic event is one that spells doom for a nation,  a civilization, or the human race itself...  In the nuclear era some secular apocalyptic prophets proclaim that the world will be destroyed by fire and brimstone unless their particular prescriptions for avoiding catastrophe are adopted.

In the context of the early 1980s, apocalypticism -- if I might coin a word (or not) -- dealt almost exclusively with fears of an imminently (immanently?) impending nuclear holocaust.  (See, for instance, my commentary on the ABC-TV movie, The Day After, which was broadcast the same year as The Apocalyptic Premise was published.)

End-times hysteria is nothing new.  It spread across Europe like hellfire in the years before the turn of the first millennium (around 1000 A.D.).

More recent years have seen a slew of end-times prophecies that have come and gone.  In 2011, for instance, radio preacher Harold Camping predicted the Rapture would take place on May 21 and then, when it didn't happen, said his calculations were off and the end of the world as we know it would instead take place in October.  Disappointed that the world did not end as he prophesied, Camping withdrew from public life and died a few weeks ago.

On January 9, Gon Ben Ari wrote about some recent apocalyptic predictions for The Jewish Daily Forward:

This may seem odd, but a surprisingly large chunk of the Western World believed we wouldn’t get to see 2013, purely because that’s what the Mayans thought. Most of these people never did anything else that Mayans did — never ate human flesh, for example, or at least never offered to pay for it. So why did they rush to embrace that specific bit of Mayan faith? Eschatology proves to be a human urge, just like hunger, sleep or love. We need to know that there’s at least a hint of a chance that the world is in danger, perhaps because it is too hard to care for anything that isn’t, or because it is easier to believe in a disaster that is inflicted on the planet from above than to admit to the one we cause daily. Secular media is fueled by eschatology — the Y2K bug, meteor scares, terrorist threats — with Hollywood blockbusters competing for the chance to feed it each summer. Who by fire? By water? By zombies?

If there is one thing in common among all the conflicting beliefs in the world, it is the belief that the world will come to an end. Hindus count down to the completion of Kali Yuga; Muslims await the arrival of Mahdi; Christians fear the Day of Wrath. Jewish participation in “hisuvei kitzim” — “end calculations” — is as harshly forbidden as it is widely practiced. Every great rabbi has an end date: The Vilna Gaon, Rashi, Maimonides. In 1927, Rabbi Avraham Yalin published a book in which he claimed that Zionism would be the end of the world and that it would reach its goal in 1948. He died in 1934 and never got to see which part came true. The Gemara itself claims that the world will get to be only 6,000 (Jewish) years old. In Gregorian Calendar time, this means 2,240.

Ben Ari went on to note that a prominent 18th-19th century rabbi prophesied that the end of the world would come in the Hebrew calendar's year 5775, which begins in September 2014.

In other dire warnings, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church last year said that permitting gay people to marry will either (depending on your interpretation of his remarks) be a sign of the apocalypse or will hasten the world's end.

Patriarch Kirill stated in a cathedral sermon:

This is a very dangerous apocalyptic symptom, and we must do everything in our powers to ensure that sin is never sanctioned in Russia by state law, because that would mean that the nation has embarked on a path of self-destruction.”

To take a current example that expresses our contemporary apocalyptic premise in a single word, Lou Dobbs, a popular and sometimes controversial TV host on Fox News, has written a new book published this week and called Upheaval, in which he argues that

the chief threats to the stability of our social order and economic well-being, indeed the very essence of our American way of life, go well beyond leagues of nation-states and ideologues who mean us harm.  The greatest threat of upheaval is a combination of those nation-states, ideological extremists, religious zealots, and the confluence of internal forces that are weakening our notion of who we are, diminishing our confidence in the American dream itself, and leaving many of our citizens and many of our leaders questioning American exceptionalism, our way of life, and our relationship to one another and to the world itself. The very idea of America is under great stress, from within and without.  The prospect of a great upheaval rises with each passing day that we decline to examine the consequences of the choices  we are making as a people and as a nation.  And these forces are allied, not in conspiracy, but in their contemporaneous array against us, our ideals, our values, and our nation's future.

Amidst this climate of dread and apprehension, even a possible shortage of Velveeta processed cheese within weeks of Super Bowl Sunday is being called a "cheesepocalypse," either mocking or reflecting the eschatological mood of the country.

The obsession with the apocalypse and the foreboding end of the world as we know it came to the attention of a Charlottesville financial advisor, David John Marotta, who described in last Sunday's Daily Progress how an off-hand remark on one of his blog posts ended up being distorted in a game of Internet telephone and, because of this distortion, ended up with a link to his post on the Drudge Report, bringing him a cascade of traffic and new visitors to his web site.

Marotta's December 11 blog post about preparing for possible emergencies is what stirred this apocalyptic pot. As he explains it,

Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner picked up the story first in his Dec. 26 Washington Secrets column titled, "Be prepared: Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse."

Three parts of the headline are misleading.

I am not a Wall Street advisor; I am in Charlottesville. My only connection to Wall Street is having my photo taken at the Bull and eating at the Deli. The article does mildly clarify, describing me as a "Wall Street expert" — true if that means investment advisor. However, future articles referencing Bedard's article were misled by this description.

Furthermore, I did not exactly recommend guns and ammo. I suggested that two-dozen items on the list are more important. This is mentioned in the article when Bedard quotes me as saying, "Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list."

I did not suggest there would be a collapse. I had written in the first of the series, "There is the possibility of a precipitous decline, although a long and drawn out malaise is much more likely."

Bedard was accurate in stating, "Marotta said that many clients fear an end-of-the-world scenario. He doesn't agree with that outcome, but does with much of what has people worried."

The very popular Drudge Report picked up the story next and featured it above its banner: "Wall Street advisor recommend guns, ammo for protection in collapse." The original Washington Examiner article was also copied on multiple sites without comment. Over three days, we had a record 30,946 unique visitors to our two sites.

After suggesting that the viral nature of his otherwise non-descript blog post may reveal something about the changing mood of the country and a reversal of traditional left/right political roles, Marotta said the solution to this apocalyptic thinking may simply be to reduce the size and scope of government. This, he asserts, will have a calming effect on political tempers:

Moving in a more libertarian direction blends the concerns of the right and the left on the abuses of governmental involvement in everything from marriage to spying. A smaller government could focus on what we all agree is its rightful purpose.

Journal of Civil Defense - April 1981

The lesson I take from Marotta's experience isn't that I should emphasize libertarian ideas more. After all, I've been doing that for years, especially since the launch of this blog in December 2004.

Instead, I think I should draw more on my years in the civil defense movement -- years in which I rubbed shoulders with fallout shelter-builders, survivalists, nuclear physicists, and even TV's Ben Cartwright himself, actor Lorne Greene -- and write more about how to prepare for the coming apocalypse.  If I could do it in the 1980s, why not do it today?

Scary headlines that say "Grab your guns and gold and run for the hills!" may stimulate the kind of blog traffic that Marotta experienced, and -- one would hope -- a corresponding increase in advertising revenue (and maybe a few cray-cray comments to enhance our entertainment value).

The end of the world as we know it is more than just a song title. It's a way of life.

So -- grab your gas masks, stock up on Bitcoin, and bunker down in the nearest mountain. Rediscover your inner Boy Scout ("Be prepared!"). The eschaton is imminent and it begs for your enthusiastic participation.

And please don't forget to leave a tip for your blogger and share this article on social media.

From the Archives: 'Act Now to Save Lives After a Nuclear War'

Thirty years ago tonight, ABC-TV broadcast The Day After, a movie about the aftermath of nuclear war set in the American heartland. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, the film featured John Cullum, Steve Guttenberg, Wayne Knight, John Lithgow, Amy Madigan, Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, and other familiar actors.

Henry Kissinger in 2006

That Sunday night, I was in the audience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for a special screening of The Day After that was followed by a live post-broadcast discussion about the movie, hosted by Ted Koppel and featuring George P. Shultz, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State at the time, as well as National Review founder William F. Buckley, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, astronomer Carl Sagan, and Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel.

I was seated in the auditorium next to a traditionalist Catholic who, when called upon to present a question by Koppel, asked the puzzled policymakers on stage whether nuclear war would be a fulfillment of the prophecies made by the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, during the First World War. As I recall, none of the panelists made an attempt to reply to his question; I'm sure only Buckley actually understood it. I slunk in my chair, aware that the TV cameras were aimed in my direction at that moment.

Several days prior to the broadcast, because of my affiliation with the American Civil Defense Association (TACDA), I had seen a preview screening of The Day After, so I knew what to expect. The movie had been hyped in the weeks preceding its on-air debut, so I expected many people would be watching. (It turns out to have been seen by as many as 100 million home viewers, a record for a made-for-TV movie.)

At the time of the broadcast, USA Today invited me to submit an opinion piece about The Day After, which appeared a week later with the dateline of St. Louis, Missouri. (I was actually in Washington, D.C., when I submitted the draft but was about to leave St. Louis the morning the article was published, having attended a conference there on war and peace and nuclear weapons policy. The editor told me he did not like too many datelines from Washington on the same page, so it looked like I wrote from St. Louis.)

Here is "Act now to save lives after a nuclear war," which was published on Monday, November 28, 1983 -- almost 30 years ago -- in USA Today.  This is the first time the article has been made available on the Internet.

- - -

ST. LOUIS, Mo. – During the opening sequence of the ABC-TV movie, The Day After, the camera pans through scenes of Kansas City and its surrounding countryside. Then we see a plaque reading: “Be Prepared.”

To thinking and concerned citizens, that was the clear message of this film. The threat of nuclear war requires us not only to hope and work to avert war, but to prepare for the failure of nuclear deterrence and the consequences of nuclear devastation.

It is significant that, despite the attempts of some groups to persuade the public that no medical help would be available after a nuclear war, a hospital is still standing in The Day After – as would likely happen in real life.

Also, as in real life, the fictional doctors and nurses put forth better than their best efforts to treat an enormous number of patients – not only victims from near the hospital, but refugees from hundreds of miles away who come looking for help.

Dr. Oakes, played by Jason Robards, responds to the question, “What will we do with all those people outside?: by saying: “We're going to let them in … as many as we can.”

Rick Sincere with Helen Caldicott on CNN's 'Crossfire', 1983

The doctor's dedication, which he carries to his death, stands in stark contrast to the bleak attitude of doctors such as Helen Caldicott of Physicians for Social Responsibility, who argue against preparing ourselves for the horrid consequences of a nuclear war.

Towards the end of the movie, one character says: “We knew the score. We knew all about bombs. We knew all about fallout. We knew this could happen for 40 years. Nobody was interested.”

Those of us committed to increased civil defense preparations indeed “know the score.”

All the people you saw in the film who survived the initial blast did not have to suffer and die before the ened of the story. Simple preparations, elementary education about the effects of nuclear weapons, and caution could easily have prevented the sickness and death

People should be taught that they should not walk around in the fallout, but stay indoors. They should know that simple, everyday hygiene practices can prevent much of the sickness, both from radiation and germs, that would occur after a nuclear attack.

Above all, people should not be outdoors when an attack occurs, and they should not look at the blast or run towards it, like so many characters in The Day After seemed to do.

Civil defense is a moral obligation – it saves lives and alleviates suffering. Without it, all Americans are left vulnerable to deadly attack, if by accident or design nuclear war should occur. The Swiss have a slogan: “Better civil defense without nuclear war than nuclear war without civil defense.”

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is a member of the board of directors of the American Civil Defense Association.

Clean Talk about Dirty Bombs

When the concept of "dirty bombs" first came to public consciousness in the months following the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, I reached back in my memory to my years as an activist advocating civil defense preparations against nuclear attack in the 1980s and realized that a "dirty bomb" posed little or no threat.  (For several years, I was on the board of directors and a vice president of the American Civil Defense Association as well as a contributing editor to the Journal of Civil Defense.  I traveled around the country lecturing about civil defense policy and debating people who disagreed with me.)

At the time, I shared my opinion with friends in conversation but felt no need to write about it, since the idea of an explosive device used to disperse nuclear material seemed so absurd.

People took it seriously, however, because (sadly) most Americans' "knowledge" of nuclear radiation is based on B-movies of the 1950s and later fright propaganda like The China Syndrome.

I mention this because I just came across an excellent piece on this topic from STRATFOR, a respected provider of intelligence and strategic information based in Austin, Texas.  (Coincidentally, the Austin American-Statesman was the first newspaper to publish my 1996 article headlined "Not All Bombs Are Planted by Terrorists.")  STRATFOR's analysts believe, as I do, that the dirty bomb causes more fear than it should, that is more "hype" than reality.

In its analysis, titled "Dirty Bombs Revisited: Combating the Hype," STRATFOR's analysts write:

In spite of the fact that dirty bombs have been discussed widely in the press for many years now — especially since the highly publicized arrest of Jose Padilla in May 2002 — much misinformation and disinformation continues to circulate regarding dirty bombs. The misinformation stems from long-held misconceptions and ignorance, while the disinformation comes from scaremongers hyping the threat for financial or political reasons. Frankly, many people have made a lot of money by promoting fear since 9/11.

Just last week, we read a newspaper article in which a purported expert interviewed by the reporter discussed how a dirty bomb would “immediately cause hundreds or even thousands of deaths.” This is simply not true. A number of radiological accidents have demonstrated that a dirty bomb will not cause this type of death toll. Indeed, the panic generated by a dirty bomb attack could very well result in more immediate deaths than the detonation of the device itself. Unfortunately, media stories hyping the threat of these devices may foster such panic, thus increasing the death toll.

I might add, such panic could be especially troublesome in the absence of a good disaster-preparedness plan.

The STRATFOR analysis continues:

By its very nature, the RDD [radiological dispersal device] is contradictory. Maximizing the harmful effects of radiation involves maximizing the exposure of the victims to the highest possible concentration of a radioisotope. When dispersing the radioisotope, by definition and design the RDD dilutes the concentration of the radiation source, spreading smaller amounts of radiation over a larger area. Additionally, the use of an explosion to disperse the radioisotope alerts the intended victims, who can then evacuate the affected area and be decontaminated. These factors make it very difficult for an attacker to administer a deadly dose of radiation via a dirty bomb.

It is important to note that a dirty bomb is not a nuclear device, and no nuclear reaction occurs. A dirty bomb will not produce an effect like the nuclear devices dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. A dirty bomb is quite simply an RDD that uses explosives as the means to disperse a radioactive isotope, and the only blast effect will be from the explosives used to disperse the radioisotope. In a dirty bomb attack, radioactive material not only is dispersed, but the dispersal is accomplished in an obvious manner, and the explosion immediately alerts the victims and authorities that an attack has taken place. The attackers hope that notice of their attack will cause mass panic — in other words, the RDD is a weapon of fear and terror.

In a nice turn of phrase, STRATFOR says that a so-called "dirty bomb" is not a weapon of mass destruction (WMB) so much as it is a "weapon of disruption." Disruption is damaging in itself, of course, but it is not as damaging as the popular imagination has made it out to be.

I have to agree with STRATFOR's concluding paragraph:

As noted above, we believe it is possible that the panic caused by a dirty bomb attack could well kill more people than the device itself. People who understand the capabilities and limitations of dirty bombs are less likely to panic than those who do not, which is the reason for this analysis. Another important way to help avoid panic is to carefully think about such an incident in advance and to put in place a carefully crafted contingency plan for your family and business. Contingency plans are especially important for those who work in proximity to a potential dirty bomb target. But they are useful in any disaster, whether natural or man-made, and something that should be practiced by all families and businesses. Such knowledge and planning provide people with the ability to conduct an orderly and methodical evacuation of the affected area. This allows them to minimize their exposure to radioactivity while also minimizing their risk of injury or death due to mass hysteria. For while a dirty bomb attack could well be messy and disruptive, it does not have to be deadly.

I don't often make suggestions for "further reading," but this is an issue that, as STRATFOR says, requires education and solid information.

Let me first recognize a piece I wrote originally as congressional testimony that was later published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (with a foreword by Lorne Greene) as Civil Defense:  A Moral, Political, and Strategic Approach.

I would also like to recommend a book (which I reviewed here) by George Mason University physicist Robert Ehrlich called Waging Nuclear Peace:  The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons.

Given the sorts of thinking that lead to misconceptions about "dirty bombs" and other weapons of less-than-mass-destruction, it might be instructive to read The Apocalyptic Premise: Nuclear Arms Debated, edited by E. Stephen Hunt and the late Ernest W. Lefever.

Although all these books were written in the 1980s, they have unusual relevance today, not only because of the insights they might bring to bear on the possible use by terrorists of "dirty bombs," but also because of current debates about the arms treaty recently negotiated between Russia and the United States, and calls by European nations for the United States to remove tactical missiles from their territory, calls that have a remarkable similarity -- mimicry? -- to the nuclear freeze movement of more than 25 years ago.

Is it any wonder that Hollywood is remaking that iconic movie of the 1980s, Red Dawn?

Note:  Excerpts of the STRATFOR report are reprinted with permission of STRATFOR.

Patrick Swayze and 'Red Dawn'

Fox News and other media outlets are reporting the death of actor Patrick Swayze:

After a very long and public battle with pancreatic cancer, actor Patrick Swayze died at home Monday with his family and friends at his side. He was 57.

Swayze, who was diagnosed in January 2008, defied the odds in many ways – living for more than a year-and-half with this extremely deadly form of cancer. During that time, he put together a memoir with his wife and even started filming the new crime drama “The Beast,” in which he refused to take painkillers because he was worried it would affect his performance.

A quarter-century ago, I wrote my first movie review. Written for the Journal of Civil Defense (not known for its arts coverage), the review was about Red Dawn, a Cold War-era drama directed by John Milius and starring, among others, Patrick Swayze (pre-Ghost and pre-Dirty Dancing).

Aware of the embarrassment likely to ensue from the reprinting of any juvenile work of criticism, I'm willing to take the risk and post that review here, as it appeared in the October 1984 (!) issue of the Journal of Civil Defense.

“The Outsiders” Meet Darth Vader:
Schoolkids Battle Red Army in RED DAWN
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Red Dawn — Directed by John Milius. Produced by Buzz Feitshans and Barry Beckerman. Screenplay by Kevin Reynolds and John Milius. Executive producer, Sidney Beckerman. A Valkyrie Film distributed by MGM/United Artists Entertainment, 1984. Rated PG-13.

What would America be like under Communist military occupation? To answer this question, United Artists has released a movie more frightening than The Day After, as suspenseful as The Empire Strikes Back, and as real as the war in Central America. Directed by John Milius (The Wind and the Lion), it is called Red Dawn and stars Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, and Oscar-winner Ben Johnson. Former secretary of state Alexander Haig says of Red Dawn: “It’s a provocative and extremely interesting film which depicts the futility of war without underestimating the essential need to maintain the preparedness to fight war.”

The movie’s premises are stated flatly: Russia has suffered its worst wheat harvest in 55 years. The Green Party has captured a majority of seats in the West German parliament. Cuba and Nicaragua increase their armed forces to more than half a million; El Salvador and Honduras fall to their might. NATO collapses. Mexico has a revolution. Soviet troops march into Poland to suppress a workers’ rebellion. The United States stands isolated in the world …

As the film opens, a high school history class listens to Mr. Teasdale (Frank McCrae) lecture on the methods of conquest used by Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes. They would spread out over hundreds of miles, he said, pushing cattle, villagers, and soldiers towards the center — a policy of encirclement. In the midst of the lecture, paratroopers land in the schoolyard and start shooting anyone who steps in their path. World War III has begun.

Some of the students escape to nearby mountains in a pickup truck. Jed (Swayze) and Matt (Sheen) are brothers who know the ropes of hunting and survival; Jed’s namesake is mountain man Jedediah Smith. Daryl (Darren Dalton), the mayor’s son, is president of the senior class. Rounding out the group are frightened teenagers Robert (Howell), Danny (Brad Savage), and Aardvark (Doug Toby). Eventually they are joined by Erica (Thompson) and Toni (Jennifer Grey), the granddaughters of Mr. Mason (Johnson), a rancher who gives the boys food, horses, and ammunition.

On their first trip into town from the mountains, the boys discover that Cuban and Nicaraguan soldiers have turned the area into a massive concentration camp: the town — Calumet, Colorado — is forty miles behind the lines in Soviet-occupied territory. Beyond the lines lies “Free America,” a rump of the United States, mostly east of the Mississippi.

As they take over the town, the Cuban officer in charge (played sympathetically by Ron O’Neal) orders his Nicaraguan lieutenant to go to the sporting goods store and find all the gun-registration forms, so the guns can be confiscated and their owners rounded up and put into the ‘re-education camp” (what used to be a drive-in theatre). At the drive-in, the residents see movies with messages like “America is a whorehouse that has betrayed its revolution.” In town, the theatre marquee advertises “Alexander Nevsky -- All Day Saturday — Admission Free.” Posters of Lenin plaster the sides of buildings; Russian troops burn books.

After the boys see the conditions in the re-education camp, they decide to turn into guerrillas — or, as the Red Army major says, “bandits.” After they kill their first Russian soldiers, the authorities line up about a dozen civilians, who are executed as they sing ‘America the Beautiful.” Fifty other Americans are forced to watch the execution.

This sets the stage for a series of brilliant guerrilla attacks against the Communists, their camps, and their equipment. The plot takes several twists, some comic, some bittersweet, some plain bitter, punctuated by superb performances by Patrick Swayze as the group’s leader and C. Thomas Howell as the innocent teenager turned bloodlusted guerrilla. This is no lighthearted entertainment; its darker, tragic aspects compete vigorously with its inherent optimism.

The movie is bone-chillingly real. The Communist strategy of encirclement — no doubt culled from the experience of the Mongols, Russia’s overlords into the 16th century is in process now. The Cuban colonel, viewing the dead bodies of his troops after a guerrilla attack, says, “I’ve seen this before ... in Nicaragua, San Salvador, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola — but I’ve always been on the other side.” The use of terror against the civilian population — mass executions of innocents — is frighteningly reminiscent of Soviet tactics in Afghanistan, where booby-trapped toys maim and kill small children for the purpose of scaring their parents into submission.

The scenario, too, is realistic — much more so than the one we saw in The Day After. Early in the movie there is no indication of the use of nuclear weapons; later we learn that there was a very limited use of missiles, surgically striking missile bases in the Dakotas, SAC headquarters in Omaha, and communications centers like Washington and Kansas City. The United States fails to respond in kind, and the war stands at a conventional stalemate. The Soviet invasion’s first wave comes by commercial aircraft to California and the mountain states. Cubans and Nicaraguans infiltrate U.S. air and military bases in the South and Midwest, disrupting communications as a fifth column. The effect is Soviet occupation of the Great Plains up to Cheyenne, Wyoming; Denver is suffering a siege as bad as Stalingrad’ in the Second World War.

Pacifist Western Europe “decides to sit this one out.” Only two countries are fighting on our side: Britain and “600 million screaming Chinamen,” according to Colonel Tanner of the U.S. Air Force, who joins the kids in the hills. He’s asked: “The last I heard there were a billion screaming Chinamen.” Well,” he says, “now there’s only 600 million.” Silence.

The sheer terror of the movie, present in the constant watchfulness of the occupying troops, the KGB, the torture, the animal instincts to which our teenage heroes descend, the herding of civilians into concentration camps all this should be a lesson to the Helen Caldicotts of this world who were so moved by The Day After and Testament, two films which showed the aftermath of nuclear war without showing the alternative: slavery and faces mashed by hobnail boots.

Director John Milius is an anomaly on the Hollywood landscape. With films like Reds and Missing being praised so highly of late, it is rare to find a filmmaker who professes a belief in peace through strength and is willing to admit that yes, Cuban interventionism in Central America threatens America’s ultimate interests — our survival as a nation. Red Dawn portrays everyday American kids as heroes -- the Nathan Hales of the twentieth century — and can touch the heart of every American, It undermines belief in the heroism of "progressive revolutionary forces” and it shows the Communist slave-drivers as they really are: vicious, bloodthirsty, vindictive, brutal.

The film does yield to liberal sentiment in its expression of “What’s the fighting all about?”, “What’s the difference between us and them?” Yet the underlying theme remains: We fight because we love. If there’s nothing to die for, there cannot be anything to live for. The film does not shy away from death and gore; its heroes are not immune from suffering; no one tries to persuade us that war is pristine, a romantic, or cathartic. Indeed, one is comes away convinced that this dirty business has to be averted — but that it sometimes is just and obligatory.

Red Dawn echoes, in varying degrees, the Star Wars trilogy (rebels vs. the evil empire), Lord of the Flies (given the right conditions, even children can devolve into savages), The Green Berets, Sands of Iwo Jima, Battle Cry, and other heroic war movies, and The Outsiders (Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell played brothers fending for themselves in a rough, violent world in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film of the popular teen novel). Moreover, it remarkably parallels the concrete experience of the Contras in Nicaragua, the freedom fighters in Afghanistan, and the European resistance movement of the 1940s. With insufficient provisions, no training, but with a lot of courage and chutzpah, even children can fight for the values we cherish: freedom, self-determination, honor, and love.

MGM/UA must be commended for making this film. Far from the vacuousness so characteristic of our San Fernando Valley culture of American filmmakers, this is a jarringly realistic portrayal of the the world as it might be. I predict it will be very popular among Americans in 1984, especially those who have overcome the “post-Vietnam syndrome” and look proudly on one major achievement of American strength, that since 1980 no nation has fallen captive to Soviet adventurism. In fact, American fortitude of has rescued one country — Grenada — from its alien rulers. Nonetheless, Red Dawn has a sharp message: It can happen here. We must prevent it — or suffer dire consequences.

* * * * * * *

Richard Sincere, a member of the board of the American Civil Defense Association, has directed, designed, or acted in numerous plays and musicals, including Fiddler on the Roof, The Hot I Baltimore, God, The Fantasticks, The Brig, and (most recently) Company.

After earning $8,230,381 in its first weekend, Red Dawn went on to gross $35,866,000 in its initial U.S. release. It was not much of a critical success (its only significant award was a nomination for a Young Artist Award for supporting actor Brad Savage), but it has remained a guilty pleasure for many Reagan-era young conservatives. Years later, "Red Dawn" became the code name for the military operation that captured Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.