ustxtxb_obs_1963_03_07_50_00011-00000_000.pdf

has no real shelter program, roughly speaking, it follows that such an attack now would kill 170 million Americans, or about 17 out of every 20 of us. “30 million would survive, one way or another,” in such an attack, Wilson said. T HE MEMBERS of the legislature have a specific responsibility for the ten million people who have their abodes inside an area enclosed by lines drawn on maps for certain ancient purposes. Recognizing this, Wilson gave “gross figures” for Texas. In a nuclear attack on military targets, he said, one million Texans would die in the explosions, 5.5 million could be saved from dying from radiation by shelters, and 3.5 million would “not be affected one way or another” by shelters. That is, at present, about 6.5 million Texans would die. In an all-out nuclear attack, he said, 5.5 million Texans would die from the explosions, three million would die from radioactive fallout without shelters or would be saved by them, and 1.5 million would survive without them. Wilson said that with shelters, there would be “four million survivors” in Texas, whereas the figures he gave total four and a half million. About a year and a half ago, Wilson said, the department of defense decided to try to provide fallout shelter spaces for 240 million people by 1968. One of Wilson’s slides bore the slogan, “Fallout Shelters for All `the People,” reflecting the new liberalism in Washington. REP. DAVID CREWS, Conroe, said that during the Cuban crisis, some of his friends were digging shelters and preparing to use guns against neighbors to keep them out. What would be done when ‘people demanded to get into full shelters? Until enough of them are built, there will not be enough of them, Wilson replied. The very conservative member from Pecos, Richard C. Slack, asked Parmer’s second witness, a Houston architectural consultant, “When the two weeks is over and assuming all this works and you run outside and everybody’s gone, everybody’s dead except the teachers and the school children. . . . Do you have a plan to save the family unit?” The woebegone consultant did not. Parmer came to his rescue. “The point,” said they freshman legislator, “is that if they come out, they’re gonna die.” Being conservatives, the legislators were concerned about costs. Rep. Gene Hendryx, Alpine, asked how the schools would pay for the shelters. Rep. Hudson Moyer, Amarillo, made the point that even though the food stocked in the shelters would be a gift from the federal government, “the taxpayers are going to bear that burden.” What, Moyer asked, if the attack came on Saturday or Sunday? The schools could be opened, Parmer said. In a way the most impressive witness was Col. Henry A. Crosby, U.S. Army, the military adviser to the assistant to the secretary of defense for civil defense. He was uniformed, his chest well decorated, the fourragere at his left shoulder. He spoke like an Englishman, clipped and subdued. All he did was state the reasons why the military wants fallout shelters: To “provide credibility for graduated response and selected targets” ; to “provide credibility for our deterrent posture”; to see that “in a deteriorating military situation” the public can respond calmly; to create a situation so that in military action, “we can do what we need to do” ; and to “limit loss of life and provide protection for the population.” There were no questions. It was getting late. ONLY ONE PERSON spoke against Parmer’s bill, a student at the University of Texas, Charles Laughlin, Jr. He doubted that shelters would deter attack, since Russians seeing Americans digging holes might think we were preparing to bomb them first. If shelters will save lives, ‘he asked, what will the living come out to? “What do you do with 120 million bodies? . . . And then you’ve got the rotting.” Who knows how many people will try to get into which shelters in event of attack? Nor, he said, does it make sense to build shelters in the cities, as the government proposes, because cities will be bombed \(fallout shelters do not protect against blast “some sanity” in building fallout shelters in West Texas, but quoted Harrison Brown and James Real that a rational shelter program would start by writing off the cities as doomed. Laughlin asked why the department of defense pushes shelters so vehemently. He is convinced, he said, that the program is designed to “lull the people into an increased sense of security” and to quiet their fears about nuclear war. Rep. Jim Segrest, San Antonio, asked quietly, but in a voice that seemed to suggest deliberate self-control, “Then you think that possibly we should surrender tomorrow?” That was not the alternative at all, Laughlin said. What was? Segrest asked. Chairman Allen, looking at the your alternative?” “Dr. Osgood wrote a book about it,” Laughlin said \(alluding to Charles Osgood’s proposals for a program of unilateral, first littlesteps by the U.S. toward disarmawould be better not to go into it. Laughlin concluded, therefore, by saying that the bill would help cause people to give up to the inevitability of nuclear war. “Peace is going to be our only shelter,” he said. As midnight approached, Parmer said Laughlin had probably been reading “such books as” one called Is America in Hiding?, the writer of which, Parmer said with heavy sarcasm, is “a frequent contributor to that sound fiscal magazine, New Republic. . . . I don’t think I’m going to take the trouble to answer the typical ban-the bomb, peace at any price argument against the civil defense program.” What we need to do, he said, is tell Washington that “We in Texas, the sons and daughters of the Alamo, take care of our responsibility of taking care of our own.” March 7. 1963 11