Ready to Act

Nikita Khrushchev's war of nerves was plainly having an effect on the U.S. citizenry. Across the nation last week, there was endless conversation about the threat of nuclear war. There was apprehension and an edge of sadness as men and women looked at their children and wondered about their chances of survival. There were the usual neurotics. In Chicago, public officials received a spate of calls from women complaining that their hair curlers were radioactive, from men suspicious of the olives in their martinis (Chicago Psychiatrist Milton A. Dushkin named the ailment "nucleomitophobia"--fear of the atom). A motorcade of 30 food faddists set out from New York to find new, safe homes in the northern California town of Chico--blandly ignoring the fact that a Titan missile pad, which would presumably be a prime Soviet target, was less than seven miles from their sanctuary.

But the total impact of Khrushchev's rocket-rattling offensive upon Americans was precisely the opposite of anything the Soviet dictator might have desired. For the vast majority of U.S. citizens remained resolved to face Communist pressure without yielding an inch--and many were preparing, in their own individual ways, to meet Khrushchev's worst.

Digging In. Much of that preparation was a matter of just plain digging in. The U.S. was preparing for a gopher existence, if necessary, and the national bestseller was a 32-page Department of Defense pamphlet, The Family Fallout Shelter. Until August, monthly requests for the free booklet had averaged 260,000 copies. But during the next four weeks, 2,400,000 copies were distributed, and in the first half of September, even that rate doubled.

Detroit's Kelsey-Hayes Co. got ready to step up shelter production from 100 to 250 units a day. In Cincinnati, the Bendix Corp. reported a 1.000% increase in orders for its "Family Radiation Kits"--fallout-detection devices. In California's San Fernando Valley, Joseph Nathanson, a Los Angeles public relations man, gravely watched a flatbed trailer truck thunder down Sepulveda Boulevard carrying a giant, tar-coated concrete cylinder with apertures for vent pipes and doors. "It gives you a jolt, seeing that shelter going down the road," he said. "A year ago I'd have snickered."

Entire communities were moving into action as never before. The Kingston, N.Y., common council called for bids to equip 15 acres of limestone caves, in which mushrooms are presently grown commercially, as atomic shelters. The city council of Livermore, Calif., voted to build seven giant shelters, enough to hold all of the town's 17,250 citizens. In Washington

State, Governor Albert Rosellini ordered food-rationing cards for some 750,000 heads of families, to be used in the event of war. Milwaukee Real Estate Man Dick Bourgignon was in the midst of a land boom in two Wisconsin summer resorts where urban residents were buying up property to use as retreats from the target cities.

In Chicago, the plush Lake Shore Club tested its $35,000 fallout shelter, held a practice alert that sent 150 members and employees to the basement bowling alleys, where they obediently stretched out supine across the lanes. Said Manager Byford Troutt: "Our members have been asking us to do something like this. So have our employees. We've already stocked enough food for 500 people for 15 days, 13,000 gallons of drinking water in one of our basement swimming pools, plus medical supplies, chiefly morphine and burn medications."

Cancer Insurance. Everywhere in the U.S., the possibility of war was the top topic of discussion. Said Atlanta Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson: "Now people who call me, people who write letters, people I talk with on the street, speak mostly about war and bomb shelters and where they ought to go and what ought to be done and what's going to happen. These are gut concerns.''

But concern and panic are far different things, and there were none of the usual signs of panic, such as food hoarding, job absenteeism and dramatic stock market plunges. Neither was there any unusual rush to the psychiatrist's couch. Reported A. G. Cook, director of San Francisco's Disaster Corps: "I'd say that people's attitude is very serious, but not frightened. The people who come into our office for information have the attitude of, well, if we're going to have trouble, let's be ready for it."

Said Washington, D.C., Housewife Jane Cleveland, inquiring about how to build a fallout shelter: "It's like cancer insurance. I don't expect it to hit my family, but I'm going to be prepared." Said the Rev. Francis L. Filas, head of the theology department of Chicago's Loyola University: "My students talk about these things every day. It seems the news keeps getting worse. But these students aren't basically pessimistic. There's a lot of goodness and strength in them."

Last week just such strength expressed the nation's will in even more activist forms. In Santa Barbara, 23 "survival groups" joined the "Minute Man" vigilante organization, swelled its membership to 2,400, enthusiastically began an elaborate program to train themselves as guerrilla fighters. They have caches of water in the California hills, 100 rounds of ammunition for every weapon they own. Their aim: to survive, and to fight the Russians if they should attempt to land in the U.S. after a nuclear attack. Tree-loving scientists recommended supplies of pine seeds in every shelter, to reforest the post-atomic world (see SCIENCE). In that same spirit, 15 young Chicagoans, aged 18 to 20, recently fell into a bull session at the Brentano playground. The talk came round to Berlin and the whole war crisis--and by last week, as a direct result of that session, all 15 had enlisted in either the Army or the Marine Corps.

And while a few pundits wrung their hands or threw them up altogether, the nation's press as a whole expressed the nation's mood in the tones of a Hartford, Conn., Courant editorial: "We must be ready to act, no matter what the cost. We must be ready to act alone if need be. And we must act swiftly, with strength and purpose."

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