CIVIL DEFENSE

in war or national defense, all nonmilitary actions taken to reduce loss of life and property resulting from enemy action. It includes defense against attack from conventional explosive bombs or rockets, nuclear weapons, and chemical or biological agents. During World War II the threat of aerial attack on cities became sufficiently great to call for organized civil defense planning. Although a few special air-raid shelters had been built in Great Britain and Hawaii, civil defense tactics during the interwar years consisted principally of utilizing improvised shelters, such as basements and subways. Germany built special bunkers for a small fraction of its population, and these proved to be effective in saving lives. Other World War II civil defense tactics included blackouts to reduce the glow from city lights that could guide enemy pilots. The British government provided its people with gas masks, and practically all countries involved in the war trained citizens in fire fighting, rescue, and medical first aid. The relatively small weapons used in World War II had afforded time for people to learn by experience that shelters were safer than ordinary buildings, and for civil defense volunteers to be recruited and trained after the war had begun. But with nuclear weapons that can destroy whole metropolitan areas at one blow, there is no opportunity to learn from repeated attacks because the first attack, in all probability, will accomplish its mission. These radical increases in destructive force caused equally radical changes in civil defense policies. Although almost any shelter provided reasonable protection against conventional bombs, nuclear weapons required a policy of locating and marking sites that offered the best possible protection in the area. Consideration was also given to the evacuation of urban centres if an attack seemed imminent. With the advent of shorter warning times and with better understanding of the radiation hazards of fallout, however, this policy lost its appeal except as a possible pre-first-strike measure to be employed by an aggressor nation. From the 1960s on, the attitude of the public in the West ranged from apathy to a crusading zeal for national defense and survival. Some peace organizations opposed all civil defense measures as futile and likely to encourage the acceptance of war as inevitable. The Soviet Union organized the most comprehensive civil defense program, with compulsory public training and drills, periodic alerts, and widespread dissemination of information and propaganda. Significant civil defense measures that may be taken in peacetime include provision of warning and of communications; training of the populace in first-aid means and in radiological monitoring; reduction of fire hazards; and modification of building codes and general urban planning to incorporate such features as increased structural strengths and fireproofing of buildings, duplicate and emergency public utility services, community shelters, and wide streets and adequate parks to provide firebreaks.