Duck and Cover, RIP

Gone to the big old fallout shelter in the sky

By Will Collette

Those of us of a certain age still react viscerally to matters nuclear – whether it’s nuclear saber-rattling by North Korea or Iran, or trouble at our local nuclear power plant, Millstone, near New London – by remembering the bad old days of the Cold War.

Steuart Lansing Pittman died very recently at age 93 in rural Maryland. You probably don’t remember his name, regardless of your age, but he was one of the key individuals responsible for imprinting those memories of nuclear Armageddon.

Pittman was a colorful World War II hero and was a key government executive during the execution of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt post-war Europe.

Pittman in the 60s when he was spreading the joy about
how to survive a nuclear holocaust

In 1961, Pittman was tapped by President John F. Kennedy to head America’s civil defense program. He was the driving force behind the craze during the 1960s to build bomb shelters to prepare the country to ride out a nuclear war with Russia. All those thousands of bomb shelters that were built in the basements of buildings all over the US were his brainchild.

It was his job – and he did it well – to convince Americans that we were under dire threat and needed to face the possibility of having to go underground for some indefinite period to survive. And he also needed to convince us that, if we listened for the warnings and in a calm and orderly fashion then proceeded to the designated shelters, we could all survive.

It was madness on an international scale, but it was the program we all followed, seeing little other choice. Duck and cover, and after the blast and you hear the “All Clear” siren, everything will be all right.

The plan was to build enough shelter space by 1967 to accommodate 233.5 million people. How they arrived at that number is a mystery, since it exceeded the total population of the United States at the time. 173.5 million people would be housed in public shelters and another 60 million in home shelters.

The budget was $3 billion which would equal $22.7 billion in today’s dollars.

Duck and cover drill in school

Pittman seemed to believe this plan would work. At least that’s what he told Congress in 1963: “If it is appropriate to use moral epithets, such as cowardly and selfish, I personally believe they are more aptly applied to those who loudly proclaim their willingness to lie down and die while our country is under attack….All objective and detailed studies of the impact of nuclear war conclude that there will be a significant measure of survival and that recuperation would take place.”

After he left the government in 1964, he and his wife lived in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC. His wife told the New York Times that he decided they needed a fallout shelter in their backyard (as if Georgetown would have survived the multiple warheads that targeted the nation’s capital).

But, she said, “After half a day’s digging, we gave it up.”

Ozzie & Harriet ride out the holocaust

Pittman left his mark etched on the national psyche. I still vividly remember those days, still think in terms of where the warheads might land relative to where I am, and didn’t really feel like we would make it until the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But we still spend hundreds of billions of dollars preparing to fight the war that Pittman thought we could survive. Our local economy depends in large part on building nuclear submarines. We are building a fleet of new F-35 fighter jets that don’t work and don’t have targets to fly against. At the cost of $400 billion – enough to balance the federal budget for years.

Pittman spent much of the final decades of his life devoted to his farm, family and preserving the environment, in particular the Chesapeake Bay.

Was he a hero or was he a villain? Or was he, as some of his obituaries described him, a forgotten failure. I don’t know if he was just a good soldier carrying out a mission or really believed that putting a few feet of dirt and cinder blocks and a few cases of bottled water in a shelter would allow people to survive nuclear annihilation. 

If he didn’t do what he did, probably someone else would have been picked to do it.

Through the benefit of historical hindsight, I believe that if he hadn’t planted the seed that there was at least some chance to survive a nuclear war, if he hadn’t sold that ridiculous fairy tale as well as he did, the American people may have demanded an end to the insanity that brought us to the brink of annihilation. 

And perhaps if that had happened, we would not have squandered the national treasure as we have to become the most intensely militarized nation on the planet.