ustxtxb_obs_1961_02_25_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

Our Cartoonists View the 59th Legislature Pictures From an Institution 11,011,00′ `You Cannot Tax a Corporation A Corporation Is All of Us.’ `You Can’t Legislate Safety.’ Wild-Eyed Liberal `I Appear in Defense of the Sanctity of the Banker Depositor Relationship.’ `I Speak for Family, Home, Mother, and Thumbscrew.’ \(Witness Against Criminal 1 r ‘Equal ‘Rights Trn f o or women.. ‘We of the Legislature Are ‘ Groping for an Answer. Neanderthal Science Heads Home Fear, the greatest Pied Piper of them all, has led away another Texas community. This time it is Austin and Travis County, hiring for the first time a civil defense director. For $6,000 a year they obtained the earnest services of retired Marine Col. William A. Kengla. This completes the picture. Now every metropolitan area in Texas has a full-time civil defense director. In addition, the state itself is spending $82,708 a year to support its civil defense activities, activities which, according to Douglas Kyle, administrative officer, “are continuously increasing.” What will Col. Kengla do for his $6,000 to make the capital of Texas safer in the event of thermonuclear attack? What are the 14 state civil defense workers, headed by James H. Garner, doing? S EN. STEPHEN YOUNG of Ohio recently said on the floor of the U.S. Senate, “The wasteful, fantastically muddled Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, with its satellites in state and local governments, has managed to squander over a billion dollars during the past nine years.” Can the OCDM show otherwise ? Can it show safety gained through expenditure? Can it deny the further statement by Young, that “the conditions of modern warfare, coupled with the colossal ineptitude of the civil defense planners, have made civil defense as now operated as obsolete as tallow dips, Civil War cannonballs, and the gatling gun.” The obsolescense of civil defense, as presently promoted, is supported by both common sense and the statement of numerous scientists. Anyone who has driven in Dallas or Houston, or even Austin, at 5 p.m. on a weekday must know that there is no possible way to achieve mass, orderly evacuation of these cities. Civil defense officials in Texas, as elsewhere, are pushing for more extensive building of shelters. Sen. Young quotes officials of the National Planning Association as estimating that a national shelter program would cost at least $60,000,000,000 \(bilAnd how much good would the shelters do? Harrison Brown, the outspoken geochemist of Cal Tech, recently wrote in a booklet received in the Observer office: di WERE IT NOT for the fact that a substantial fraction of our country is, at all times, covered with clouds, an enemy could completely scorch our earth by exploding about 600 ten-megaton bombs, evenly spaced, at an altitude of about thirty miles. On a clear day forests, grasslands, and crops would ignite or wither, as would the flammable structure of the cities, towns, and villages. All exposed creatures, except those living in the water, would perish. A substantial fraction of the human beings who were protected from the initial thermal flash would perish in the resultant thermal holocaust. Others would perish as the result of such secondary effects of the catastrophe as lack of food and adequate medical care.” Brown further estimates that the United States and Russia have, together, explosive material corresponding to about 20 tons of TNT for every inhabitant of the world. Certainly this must already be enough for “the job.” Still the arms race continues. In the twisted face of its threat, Texans are not urged by their officials to unify and direct their moral force to stop it. Instead, they are supplied with civil defense directors who advise how best to get along with the race: lay in food, lay in medical supplies, build surface shelters, but best of all, dig subterranean shelters. A vast subterranean shelter is now in the planning for the capitol area. The best advice our civil defense directors have to offer is : Dig. THE TRAGIC TRUTH of this moment in history is described by Brown : “The Soviet Union has apparently, in the last few years, instituted a civilian defense program of substantial magnitude. It is probable that within the next two or three years the United States will embark on a crash shelter program for a large proportion of its citizens and some of its industry. Once the shelter program is underway, it will constitute a significant retreat from the idea of the obsolescence of war. “Once the people are convinced that they , can survive the present state of the art of killing, a broad and significant new habit pattern will have been introduced and accepted, one grotesquely different from any we have known for thousands of years that of adjusting ourselves to the idea of living in holes. From that time onward it will be simple to adjust ourselves to living in deeper holes. “Tens of thousands of years ago our Mousterian and Aurignacion ancesters lived in caves. The vast knowledge which we have accumulated during the intervening millennia will have brought us full cycle. The epic of man’s journey upward into the light will have ended.” E.S.