CIVIL DEFENSE: Buzzers Mean Bombs

Aside from stacks of unread pamphlets, federal civil-defense programs for coping with a nuclear attack on U.S. cities have so far produced little more than a warning system. And even that warning system, warned a report buzzing through the honeycomb of the Pentagon last week, is “basically unsound.”

Prepared by Johns Hopkins University’s Operations Research Office, a civilian outfit that does paid think work for the U.S. Army, the report argues that in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles a civil-defense warning system should be capable of warning 90% of the population within 30 seconds after the national civil-defense center in Colorado Springs gives the signal. The present Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization warning program comes nowhere near meeting this “minimum requirement.” Many people in U.S. cities do not even hear civil-defense sirens, and very few pay any attention to them. The Conelrad radio-alert plan for using the 640 and 1240 frequencies to broadcast civil-defense information is inadequate because reception in some areas of the U.S. is weak, and because it takes broadcasting stations too long to switch over to the special emergency frequencies.

Instead, the report urges installation of special buzzer devices in homes, offices, factories and public buildings. The devices, plugged into electric outlets, would be set off in an emergency by a specific voltage transmitted by the local power companies. Such a buzzer system, named NEAR (National Emergency Alarm Repeater), has already been devised and tested. The indoor buzzers would be supplemented with outdoor loudspeakers scattered throughout every city. In case of attack, these loudspeakers would carry a warning signal, followed by instructions on what to do.

An effective warning system, says the O.R.O. report, is an indispensable first step toward an adequate civil defense. It is “impractical” to expect a nuclear-attack shelter program to get under way “as long as it is uncertain or unlikely that the shelters could be reached in time.”