WI: The West Takes Civil Defense Seriously in the Cold War?

For the most part, the West seems to have avoided significantly preparing the civilian population for a nuclear exchange, despite considering it a dangerously likely risk. It's understandable that continuity of government, command & communications were more urgent priorities, but it's shocking to me that nations such as France and West Germany made so few preparations, the latter especially. West Germany expected to become a battleground, and very probably one with widespread use of nuclear, chemical, and even biological weapons. But (from what I can tell) it seems to have had an apparently fatalistic attitude that if the balloon went up, they were all dead anyway.

Contrast this with Switzerland, which could expect to avoid being either a high priority target for either side or a focus of an offensive; and yet Switzerland developed considerably more shelter space than was required for its entire population. Or consider Israel, for an example in a more threatening environment.

Obviously not every nation can be Switzerland, even if they tried, but it surely can't be outside the realm of possibility for the NATO nations to have (comparatively) robust plans for civilian protection and survival. In the United States at least I could imagine such preparations also being used for disaster response and recovery. To be sure, a full-scale Cold War nuclear exchange would be difficult to survive even with Swiss-scale preparations, but it would increase the likelihood that there would still be a nation on the other side of it.

Is there an elegant POD that would ensure substantial and consistent investments in civil defense and civilian survival by Western governments in the Cold War?
 

CalBear

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Most Western states realized early on that the possibility of moving millions of people out of major urban centers in the case of a conflict was impossible.

A really simple example of the issue (continuing with your Swiss example).

Population in 1960:

Switzerland (15,940 square miles): ~5.4M

New York City (315 Square miles): ~7.8M

Chicago (224 square miles): ~3.5M

Paris, FR (40 square miles): City ~2.7M, Urban (1,000 square miles) ~7.2M

London, Inner (123 square miles): 3.3M

It is literally impossible to evacuate the populations of these cites in a week, probably not in a month. While today's communication technology would permit a permanent lower density in some industries, that would not have been the case, even at the end of the Cold War (when fax machines were still using thermal paper and cell phones were rare). Many other businesses need to have their workers on-site.

The only practical Civil Defense would be decentralization. Just as evacuating 7 million people out of NYC would be impossible, so would creating and stocking usable shelter space that could protect the population from nuclear detonations. I have been in areas that were designated as shelters in a major urban area, they would have been marginal, at best, in 1940 London with the Luftwaffe dropping 250kg GP bombs. Against five or six PSI of overpressure or a heat pulse of a couple thousand degrees? Might as well be hiding behind a sheet of aluminum foil.

Once you figure out the shelter situation, now you need to provide food and water for weeks, if not months for all those people (assuming one MRE style meal a day the shelters are going to need space to store 3.4 million cases of food per week and at least 35 million gallons of water per week). That is just for New York City.

Can't be done.
 
Although to some extent at least the United States and a lot of Western Europe DID decentralize.. Building all those 4 lane (later 6, 8 and even 12!) lane roads made the suburbs possible, along with cheap cars and cheap gas.

Some industry and a lot of economic activity moved out of the central cities as well.

But if you want to see how hard it is to evacuate a major American city on short notice... watch what happens when it is ordered when ever a major hurricane threatens one.

My own reading on the subject indicates to me that the sheer scale and cost of the problem of building fall out shelters for all Americans (to use the example I have read on) is staggering, in the dozens of billions in 1960s dollars, and far worse now. Also take into account that a thermonuclear blast will simply kill you, fall out shelter or not, if you are in the thermal pulse and high intensity blast zone, and a 1 megaton weapon has very large zones for that, it became clear that only truly fortified shelters could survive such a thing. Those are even worse in terms of expense

Finally, factor in that really a nuclear war was a relatively low probability event, and the cost of preparing for such becomes very hard to justify.

But there were times, like the Missile Crisis, when the population starting digging their own shelters when they got scared enough.
 
There's an argument that civil defence makes nuclear war more likely.

Firstly it indicates to the other side that you are preparing to fight a war rather than deter one.

Secondly, if your opponent thinks your civil defence will keep your casualties to an acceptable level, he may think that he can start a war that doesn't involve all out attacks on civilian (countervalue) targets, i.e. He can fight, and maybe win, a military vs military (counterforce) war.
 
Counterforce strategy was what it was at...

...Area bombing as a way to defeat an enemy failed with Nazi Germany - boots on the ground are the only way to get a surrender.

Proper Civil Defence is about saving lives and creating a survival system in the aftermath. Shelters are a short-term solution that saves lives. A shelter is anything that increases survival chances - standing against a wall to avoid flash burns and flying debris is as much a shelter as an underground concrete box, varying only in the degree of protection. What is more important is fallout protection - but it'll be a lecture if I go on, and one per night is my limit. The blanket term 'Recovery' was applied by government to the period when people use local resources to survive, feed and later rebuild, farm and breed... And it's a period I got interested in...
 
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...Area bombing as a way to defeat an enemy failed with Nazi Germany - boots on the ground are the only way to get a surrender.

Countervalue targeting presented a high probability of leaving no one left to give or accept a surrender in the nuclear age.
 
From my observations, it seems that the West didn't take civil defense seriously, because they believed that a major conflict could only be a nuclear war, and a nuclear war is unsurvivable.

In contrast, the East Bloc believed that there is a way to survive a nuclear war, and if the soldiers aren't available at a specific key city or location, guerilla warfare conducted by the civilians could defeat or at least hold back the enemy until the soldiers arrive.

For example, in Kádárist Hungary, every child around the age of 14 was taught how to shoot with pistols and rifles, although ordinary people could not possess firearms, except hunters.
I recently toured a nuclear fallout shelter in Budapest, where propaganda and information posters from the Cold War survived. There were many posters there reminiscent of the 1950s posters from Old Aperture in Portal 2. One depicted a family holding hands in front of a mushroom cloud, and proclaimed in Hungarian: "A NUCLEAR WAR IS SURVIVABLE!"
 
I live in the North west of England and in a 50 mile radius there was 2 dockyards that built Nuclear subs, 2 nuclear power stations, 2 major and 2 smaller ports, an Ordnance works, 3 army barracks, 4 airforce bases, British Aerospace factory, Menwith Hill listening station and on and on.

If things had gone hot and the Soviets had dropped some big ones there wouldnt have been much point in the 4 and a half minutes warning we would have got to do anything more than kiss our backsides goodbye. If we had got to a shelter there wouldnt have been much left and the living would have envied the dead.
 
Let's look at this question from an economic perspective: Switzerland, Norway and Sweden were among the few European nations that were not bombed flat during WW2. So while their neighbours were rebuilding from rubble, SNS had surplus construction capability to build luxuries like bomb shelters.
Swiss were already in the habit of digging long railway tunnels, so may have put miners to work (digging bomb shelters) between transportation construction projects.
Also consider that mountainous countries like Norway and Switzerland do not have excess flat land that allows reducing population density (casualties) by building suburbs or evacuating cities. Ergo Swiss and Norwegians had nowhere to flee, so they dug bomb shelters.
A third factor is the impossibility of supplying food to a city in a mountain valley after the sole bridge collapses. It does not matter whether the bridge collapsed because of a fire, riot or mudslide, prudent mountain dwellers keep a few weeks worth of canned food.
Finally, the Swiss only relaxed defence spending after the Soviet Union collapsed (1990). During the late 20th century, Switzerland feared Soviet invasion more than any of their neighbours.
It would be informative to study living conditions in Soviet-occupied Austria (late 1940s) to better understand Swiss fear of the Russian Army.
 
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