The Effects of Nuclear War

U.S. AND SOVIET CIVIL DEFENSE

Soviet Civil Defense

Soviet civil defense has faced the same technical challenges as the United States — atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs fallout, ICBMs, limited warning, and so on. The Soviet Union has consistently devoted more resources to civil defense than has the United States, and has been more willing to make and follow long-term plans. However, it is not known how Soviet leaders evaluate the effectiveness of their civil defense.

The Soviet civil defense organization is a part of the Ministry of Defense and is headed by Deputy Minister Colonel-General A. Altunin. Permanent full-time staff of the organization is believed to number over 100,000. Some civil defense training is compulsory for all Soviet citizens, and many also study first aid. There has also been a large shelter-building program.

The Soviets reportedly have an extensive urban evacuation plan. Each urban resident is assigned to a specific evacuation area, located on collective farms; each farmer has instructions and a list of the people he is to receive. If fallout protection is not available, it is planned that simple expedient shelters would be constructed quickly. Soviet plans recommend that shelters be located at least 40 km [25 miles] from the city district to provide sufficient protection against the effects of a 1-Mt weapon exploding at a distance of 10 to 20 km [6 to 12 miles].

In July 1978, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released its unclassified study, “Soviet Civil Defense.”³ In brief, the report finds that Soviet civil defense is “an ongoing nationwide program under military control.” It notes several motivations for the Soviet program: the traditional Soviet emphasis on homeland defense, to convince potential adversaries they cannot defeat the Soviet Union, to increase Soviet strength should war occur, to help maintain the logistics base for continuing a war effort following nuclear attack, to save people and resources, and to promote postattack recovery. It observes that Soviet civil defense “is not a crash effort, but its pace increased beginning in the late 1960’s.” It points to several difficulties with the Soviet program: bureaucratic problems, apathy, little protection of economic installations, and little dispersal of industry.

According to the report, the specific goals of Soviet civil defense are to protect the leadership, essential workers, and others, in that priority order; to protect productivity; and to sustain people and prepare for economic recovery following an attack. In assessing Soviet efforts to meet these goals, the CIA found:

The Soviets probably have sufficient blast shelter space in hardened command posts for virtually all the leadership elements at all levels (about 110,000 people) Shelters at key economic installations could accommodate about 12 to 24 percent of the total work force

A minimum of 10 to 20 percent of the total population in urban areas (including essential workers) could be accommodated at present in blast-resistant shelters

The critical decision to be made by the Soviet leaders in terms of sparing the population would be whether or not to evacuate cities. Only by evacuating the bulk of the urban population could they hope to achieve a marked reduction in the number of urban casualties. An evacuation of urban areas could probably be accomplished in two or three days, with as much as a week required for full evacuation of the largest cities

Soviet measures to protect the economy could not prevent massive industrial damage

(Regarding postattack recovery), the coordination of requirements with available supplies and transportation is a complex problem for Soviet planners even in peacetime, let alone following a large-scale nuclear attack

Assessing the effectiveness of Soviet civil defense, the CIA study found that a worst-case attack could kill or injure well over 100 million people, but many leaders would survive; with a few days for evacuation and shelter, casualties could be reduced by more than 50 percent; and with a week for preattack planning, “Soviet civil defenses could reduce casualties to the low tens of millions.”

The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (AC DA) released “An Analysis of Civil Defense in Nuclear War” in December 1978.⁴ This study concluded that Soviet civil defense could do little to mitigate the effects of a major attack. Blast shelters might reduce fatalities to 80 percent of those in an unsheltered case, but this could be offset by targeting additional weapons (e. g., those on bombers and submarines that would be alerted during a crisis) against cities. Evacuation might reduce fatalities to a range of 25 million to 35 million, but if the United States were to target the evacuated population, some 50 million might be killed. Furthermore, civil defense could do little to protect the Soviet economy, so many evacuees and millions of injured could not be supported after the attack ended.

The sharp disagreement about Soviet civil defense capability revolves around several key issues:

Can the Soviets follow their stated civil defense plans? Some believe that the Soviets would fill their urban blast shelters to maximum occupancy rather than leave unevaluated people without protection and would evacuate all persons for whom no urban shelter spaces were available. Others believe that administrative confusion and other difficulties might render the Soviets far more vulnerable in practice.

How widely would evacuees be dispersed? It is obvious that the more widely dispersed an urban population is, the fewer casualties an attack on cities will produce. It is equally obvious that the more time there is for an evacuation, the more widely people can disperse. Nevertheless, there is great uncertainty over how well an evacuation would perform in practice. A Boeing study estimates that if urban dwellers walked for a day away from the cities, the population of cities would be more or less distributed over a circle of radius 30 miles [48.3 km].⁵ If they did not dig shelters, a U.S. attack would kill about 27 percent of the Soviet population; if they dug expedient shelters, the attack would kill about 4 percent. If the Soviets fully implemented their evacuation plans but the evacuees were not protected from fallout, then 8 percent of the total population would die; if they constructed hasty shelters, 2 percent would die. ACDA, however, argues that even if the Soviet Union is totally successful in implementing its evacuation, the United States could, if the objective is to kill people, use its reserve weapons against the evacuated population and ground burst its weapons, thus inflicting from 70 million to 85 million fatalities.

How well would evacuees be protected from fallout? Some believe that Soviet evacuees could be fully protected against very high radiation levels if they are allowed a 1- to 2- week preattack “surge” period. (Tests conducted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have shown, for example, that American families can construct adequate fallout shelters in 24 to 36 hours, if they are issued the necessary tools and instructions.)⁶ The ACDA study assumes that from one-third to two-thirds of the evacuees would have little protection against fallout. The two cases are not necessarily exclusive, since the ability to dig in depends on assumptions, especially time available for preparations before an attack. Some assume a lengthy and deepening crisis would precede nuclear strikes. Others believe that error or miscalculation would lead to nuclear war, leaving the United States or the Soviet Union unprepared and not having ordered evacuation. In addition, should an attack occur when the earth is frozen or muddy, construction of expedient shelters would be difficult.

How effective is Soviet industrial hardening? Soviet civil defense manuals provide instructions for the last-minute hardening of key industrial equipment in order to protect it from blast, falling debris, and fires. A considerable controversy has developed in the United States as to how effective such a program would be. The Boeing Company and the Defense Nuclear Agency carried out a number of tests that led them to conclude that “techniques similar to those described in Soviet Civil Defense manuals for protecting industrial equipment appear to hold great promise for permitting early repair of industrial machinery and its restoration to production.’”⁷ Others have challenged this conclusion: for example, the ACDA civil defense study concluded that “attempts to harden above-ground facilities are a futile exercise, and that even buried facilities which are targeted cannot survive.”

To understand this issue, one must recognize that it is virtually impossible to harden an economic asset so that it would survive if it were directly targeted. By lowering the height of burst, the maximum overpressure can be increased (at a small sacrifice to the area covered by moderate overpressures), and even missile silos can be destroyed by sufficiently accurate weapons. However, many economic targets are relatively close together (for example, separate buildings in a single factory), and it iS possible and efficient to aim a single weapon so that it destroys a number of targets at once. If each target is adequately hardened, then the attacker must either increase the number or yield of weapons used, or else accept less damage to the lower priority targets, However, the practicability of hardening entire installations to this extent is questionable, and the more likely measure would be to harden key pieces of machinery, The uncertainties about the Soviet program include the following:

1. How much hardening could be done in the days before an attack?
2. Would the United States target additional or larger weapons to overcome the effects of hardening?
3. To what extent would the survival of the most important pieces of machinery in the less important Soviet factories contribute to economic recovery?

3. Soviet Civil Defense (Washington, D.C. Director of Central Intelligence, July 1978), the text quotation below is from pp 2-3
4. “An Analysls of CIVII Defense In Nuclear War” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, December 1978)
5. T. K. Jones, “Effect of Evacuation and Sheltering on Potential Fatalities From a Nuclear Exchange” (Seattle Wash.: The Boeing Aerospace Co,, 1977),
6. S. J. Condie, et al , “Feasibility of Citizen Construction of Expedient Fallout Shelters” (Oak Ridge, Term,: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, August 1978), See also R. W, Kindig, “Field Testing and Evaluation of Expedient Shelters” (Denver, Colo,: University of Colorado, February 1978)
7. Edwin N, York, Industrial Survival/Recovery (Seattle, Wash.: The Boeing Aerospace Co., undated).

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