Were the Federal Civil Defense programs really a good faith effort to save people?
ETM: They were definitely a good faith effort to save people. Frankly, government agencies didn’t know how bad it might be…These were also times when there were practice evacuations of entire cities and communities, to see how quickly people could get out of a center of a city. The idea being, if you were far enough away and if you were living in a suburb (and the suburbs are expanding, of course, dramatically during these years), in part to avoid concentrating the population in one place that could be easily destroyed. So if you were far enough away, if you could get far enough away, if you weren’t right exactly at ground zero, then maybe these efforts at training housewives and preparing families could lead to the possibility of surviving. And people took those ideas very seriously. And very soon, home bomb shelters and fallout shelters became available for purchase, and they were marketed in very much the same way: You can protect your family. The worst can happen, and you can sti
