Blueprints for War

Locked up in Uncle Sam’s cupboard were all the potions and powers needed to put the U.S. economy on a full war basis. And last week it looked as if they would stay there, at least for a while.

“To be perfectly frank about it,” said a White House aide, “you could not get a war powers bill through Congress today containing the powers we would actually need in wartime. You would just create dissension. The President won’t ask for them until and unless he thinks … we are in a real emergency and I wouldn’t say we are now.”

The man with the keys to the cupboard is handsome, hard-driving W. Stuart Symington, 49, who resigned as Secretary of the Air Force last spring to take over the chairmanship of the National Security Resources Board (composed of seven Cabinet members and himself). In Stu Symington’s keeping is the latest draft of an Emergency War Powers bill which, if approved by NSRB and enacted by Congress, could stop overnight the manufacture of life-size Hopalong Cassidy dolls and set auto workers to making tanks. It would give the President all the vast powers he had in World War II.

Twenty Powers. The 20 sections of the bill would empower the President to set up Government corporations, install priorities and allocations for industrial materials, seize factories, suspend antitrust laws (to facilitate production pools), freeze wages and prices, set up job controls and provide for censorship of communications (telephone, telegraph and the mail, but not U.S. publications). It would also broaden Selective Service to require registration of all males between 18 and 46 and put a clamp on excess profits.

Phantom Orders. Already out of the cupboard is a high priority program known as “phantom orders.” These orders, with a current value of $900 million, are full purchase contracts, written up to the last detail, explained to the manufacturer and then locked in his safe. It would take only a telegram from Washington to convert the phantom into a real order and start the goods—machine tools —moving down the production line.

Symington’s 250-man staff makes no secret of the fact that its blueprints for economic mobilization are by no means complete; some of the toughest decisions have yet to be argued out, e.g., what industries will be the first to be deprived of steel? Will there be a real labor draft?

Civilian Defense. The planning program that lags most is civilian defense, partly because planners only began taking it seriously when they learned last September that the Russians had an Abomb. No one has even decided whether cities, states or Federal Government should pay for staffs and equipment. No city in the U.S. is ready for an A-bomb attack—though test programs are under way for Washington, D.C., Chicago and Seattle. Warned_Symington in Detroit last week:

“Efficient civilian defense planning could well be the difference between a serious and a fatal disaster. For example, it is estimated that with only twelve minutes’ warning as against no warning, and under efficiently planned civilian defense, the casualties in a city hit by an atomic bomb could be reduced 50%.”