Internal Document Proposing an Organization to Establish Post-Nuclear Exchange Damage Assessment (1956)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2885

I've written many times on the technical and political end of the creation and deployment of the atomic bomb, along with some posts on the use and manipulation of language in controlling the sense impressions of nuclear war and survivability.  What I have found so extraordinary about this second part is the creation of ordinariness, or mechanization, or acceptance, of the aftermath of nuclear warfare--and what we're talking about here is the
"exchange" of not just a few 20 kiloton Hiroshima-type weapons, but thousands of megatons of explosives and massive amounts of radiation. But this is the function of familiarity, I guess--given the situation it was essential to plan for eventualities A-Z, and for that you need structure, and vocabulary. 

All things being equal, such things as an Terrestrial Afterlife in the United States needed to be contemplated because that is what we do--we make the situation possible for end-of-the-world stuff to happen, and so we have to plan for building things up again with radioactive detritus once all of the keys get turned and buttons pushed, as  it is just a natural course of that historical river. That the bomb would be built was a given; that the Soviets would develop the a bomb and delivery capacities was just a matter of time, and that they would be our sworn death-enemies was also a fait accompli. To develop a way to somehow survive a nuclear war may have been a major deterrent to not launching an attack, especially when linked with a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) arms build up (where everyone and everything would be obliterated if there was a nuclear war, or at least so by 1965 (and probably earlier than that). All this insane stuff may have worked, and somehow we managed not to ignite the world, because (to paraphrase Frank Zappa) there would be no real estate left.

On the other hand, building all of these weapon systems and planning for attack and the post attack world could have pushed us into a final confrontation, making all of this sound "winable", "doable" somehow, that once the bombs had all exploded and nothing worked anymore, that there would be enough to pull together of our civilization to declare that we had indeed "won'". 

And the only way to declare a winner was to have something to stand on besides pieces of green glass and Earth, and so  plans for communications and a military, police force, fire brigades, medical care, food distribution, banking, and all the rest--the pieces of a recognizable backbone of American society--would have to be undertaken.  All of this could very well accomplish the creation of an illusion in the mind of the adversary that you are capable of surviving a nuclear war, and so there would be no great gain in attacking; or it could send the message that by doing this preparation that you were preparing a first strike scenario, and so the adversary would attack while the odds were still not horribly out of balance.  And on and--it all looks like a lose-lose endgame to me, which is hardly a "game" at all when all players are losers.

But still there was a need to staff the thousands of positions that went into the theoretical end of figuring out the non-weapon-end world after nuclear war, and the above "position description" is an example of that, a necessarily pro forma form, just another job in a ea of jobs.  This one's job descriptions read like any other, except of course that the content was much different.  Form the same, sentence structure the same, vocabulary basically invariable. 

One aspect of this planning for the Afterlife was the planning part itself, planning to plan, how to make sense of the answers and the questions, a form into which the parts of a process are poured before they become the process itself.

This all came up this morning because of a document that surfaced here—it is a working proposal to establish one such agency/group studying post-nuclear war scenarios. Its title is Proposed Organization and Staffing, National Damage Assessment Center, 1 June 1956 , and comes from the estate of Dr. Joseph Coker, who helped form this center and who did become an assistant director when it became engaged. I've included some snaps of the document to give you an idea of the thinking that went into this process--I don't know enough to say much more.