Total atomic defense

DEFENSE

SYLVIAN G. KIN DA Li

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

by
SYLVIAN G. KINDALL

Greatest discovery since the discovery of fire, mil-
lions of times more powerful than fire — that's atomic
energy. Soon it may be supplying the world with all
the energy needed for light and heat and for turning
all its machinery. Unfortunately, though, the earliest
principal uses of atomic energy probably will be in
the services of war.

This book grimly warns that air-raid shelters, corps
of volunteer fire fighters and stretcher bearers, and
other measures of TNT-bomb defense borrowed from
London will be woefully inadequate to cope with the
savagery of the atomic bomb — a missile more power-
ful than all the thousands of tons of TNT bombs
dropped upon London during World War II. If our
civilian atomic defense is not ready by the time the
next great war starts, all our cities exceeding 15,000
population, of which there are exactly 837, are likely
to be rewarding targets for bombing. In these cities
25 million people can be killed and the cities them-
selves blasted into mounds of ruin.

But in spite of the almost incredible power of the
atomic bomb the author strongly insists that cities can
become unrewarding targets for its use, and conse-
quently in no danger of being bombed, if they will
expand their areas adequately and remove target
plants and factories to their perimeters. In short, he
advocates a defense concerned with keeping cities
from being attacked rather than with trying to put
out fires and bind up wounds after the cities have
been all but blasted from the face of the earth.
(Continued on back flap)

RICHARD R. SMITH PUBLISHER, INC.
120 East 39th Street, New York 16, N. Y.

$3.00

From the collection of the

m

Prelinger

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Uibrary

San Francisco, California
2006

TOTAL

ATOMIC

DEFENSE

TOTAL

ATOMIC

DEFENSE

BV

SYLVIAN G. KINDALL

RICHARD R. SMITH PUBLISHER, INC.

NEW YORK

1952

COPYRIGHT, 1952, BY SYLVIAN G. KINDALL

Published by Richard R. Smith Publisher, Inc.
120 East 39th Street, New York 16, N. Y.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be repro-
duced in any form without permission of the publisher.

TYPOGRAPHY BY BROWN BROTHERS LINOTYPERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

1 Greater Than Fire 7

2 Power from the Atom 32

3 The Principle of Dispersion 54

4 Dispersion of Cities 83

5 The Wheat Lands of the West 120

6 The Forests of the West 129

7 When the Big Dams Go Out 1 3 8

8 Stockpiles of Minerals 155

9 Perpetual Homesteads 160
10 An Indestructible Capital City 185

Table Showing 1950 Census Report of

City Populations of 15,000 or more 200

GREATER THAN FIRE

I

T is HARD to imagine how the human race lived before
the age of fire. The cooking pot and water jug molded
from soft clay and baked to durable hardness in a fired pit,
the axe-head and arrow-tip of fire-splintered flint, the
metal knife blade, the hammer, the saw, the clock, the
navigator's compass, the printing press, the steam engine,
the machine reaper and on up to the robotistic machinery
of the modern age— all are products of the first great basic
art given to man, the art of producing a fire by artificial
means. Without fire to change the texture of substances,
no apparatus, tool or utensil could ever have been made.
And now, after thousands of years since the age of fire
began, there has been placed in the hands of man a second
great basic art, one which may prove even greater than the
art of kindling a fire. It is the art of smashing atoms, to get
from them an energy millions of times more powerful than
the energy released from any substance by the action of
fire. If we cannot form any clear and wholly acceptable
idea of how man lived on earth before the age of fire be-
gan, because of the dense darkness overspreading his antiq-
uity, for the opposite reason— the blinding light from ahead

8 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

—we cannot even begin to foresee what achievements he
may attain before men now alive have passed.

For the second half of this whirling century of ours we
can set our imaginations to almost any goal, and no one can
say that it will not within that time be reached. A man is
not to be called a fool who believes that before our earth
has been thrown another fifty times about its colossal star,
the sun, such things as space ships will be exploring the
other side of the moon. Neither is he to be called a fool
who believes that if intelligent beings exist on any of the
other planets we shall some day have a chance to hear their
voices and see their faces, and profit from whatever untold
mysteries of the universe they have fathomed. With useful
atomic energy already a fact these things no longer belong
entirely in the realm of fantastic dreams. A down-to-earth
and less hazardous guess, though, is that within only a dec-
ade atomic energy will be driving palatial ships across the
ocean and sending airplanes on non-stop flights to the
corners of the world and back. And within another decade
after that atomic energy will probably be the means for
gathering the power now spilling into waste at remote
waterfalls, bringing it to light and heat and cool our homes,
and to turn all the wheels of machinery.

But if the future follows the examples of the past, the
earliest principal uses to which atomic energy is put will
be for the purpose of willful destruction. Man, Caucasian
man in particular, has never lost much time turning his
latest invention or discovery into an implement of war, if
it has a value for tearing human soul from flesh and bone.
Among the first articles of metal he forged after he had

GREATER THAN FIRE

learned the art of smelting were spears and daggers for the
battlefield. The Assyrian soldier was slashing down his foe
with an iron sword three thousand years before the tiller
of soil was given a piece of iron to improve the forked
stick which, since time immemorial, he had used for plow-
ing the field. Christian voyagers of the Middle Ages had
not long brought back from China the knowledge that a
mixture of charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter forms a com-
bustible mass which the Chinese exploded in small paper
cylinders to make a big noise on joyous occasions, before
these three substances were being stirred together and used
to fire a cannon ball. Indeed, the new name gunpowder
selected by the Europeans for the discovery imported
from China, indicates for what use they believed it most
profitably could be employed in Christian hands. The
fledgling airplane was scarcely able to lift itself in short
flights above the ground before it was being studied for a
military weapon. The radio served on the battlefield before
it came to entertain in the home. And the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 proved that the first prac-
tical use of atomic energy would be as a weapon of war.

For the present, then, while scientists and technicians
are perfecting the means and methods for harnessing
atomic energy for all the many purposes to which it even-
tually will be put, the crucial duty for the rest of us — and
this is the concern of this book — is to learn how we can
prevent this energy from ever being turned loose upon us
as an instrument of death and devastation.

It is generally assumed that when the next world war
comes our transports by the hundreds, escorted by our

10 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

navy, will again be plowing across the oceans, as they did
during the first two world wars. In fact, the public has
already been told by persons high in public office that our
nation again at war will have the task of ferrying overseas
not less than five million soldiers, and everything with
which to arm, equip, and feed them.

Unless we wish to believe that other nations are taking
no notice of our much discussed overseas commitments
and the billions of dollars appropriated for them, we must
expect that when the war does start the strategy of the
enemy will be to attack with atomic bombs all of our
important cities and other vulnerable major targets in a
supreme effort to cripple us so badly that not for many
months will our ships be able to leave our ports with any
considerable number of soldiers and amounts of military
equipment and supplies. The enemy will know, of course,
that if he can set back by six months or a year our time-
tables for mobilizing, training and equipping the number
of divisions we have planned to send overseas, his own
land armies in the time thus gained will have a good chance
of battering down the thin wall of Allied forces trying
to hold the initial front.

Indeed, because the atomic bomb is the ideal weapon for
immobilizing and delaying, and is the only weapon that
can reach and destroy us in our homeland, we can be sure
that any potential enemy who has learned how to manu-
facture the bomb will spare neither resources nor money
to build a stockpile of several thousand. And his factories
and munitions plants will be busy day and night turning
out the long-range planes, rockets and other craft and

GREATER THAN FIRE • II

devices by which his bombs can be dropped on targets
throughout our country.

Among the thousand or more spots and objects in our
country that will become major targets for the atomic
bomb — unless we have achieved atomic defense before
the next great war starts— it is useless to speculate as to
which the enemy will single out for his initial attack, for
in all probability his bolts will be thrown during the first
day of war at a score or more of widely separated places.
Indeed, it is as unlikely that only a single plane will make
the first attack as that the war on land will start with
only a single platoon leader blowing his whistle and lead-
ing off with his one platoon. Wars no longer start with a
skirmish at Concord Bridge. Many will remember that
Germany in 1914 crossed the frontiers with whole armies
and groups of armies within the first few days of war.
Again in 1939 Hitler started World War II with fifty-six
divisions pouring into Poland from three sides. In 1940
with an even larger force he sprang the invasion of Nor-
way and the Lowlands, and next year he opened the war
against Russia with one hundred and seventy divisions
clanking across the frontier. If our atomic defense is not
ready, a similarly heavy attack, this time from the air, is
what we can probably expect as the opening act of war.
In that event the very first day of the new world war
could be a hundred times more terrible than any day of
slaughter and ravage the world has yet known.

Over the top of the world, across the arctic wastes,
across Canada, past our northern boundary and on through
the Mississippi Valley will race fast planes, almost invisible

12 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

to the eye, streaking toward marked targets. From other
directions will come more planes and out at sea submarines
will surface to launch inland long lean rockets. Los An-
geles, Glendale, Long Beach with its miles of man-made
harbor, Santa Monica, Pasadena stand clustered in a single
area of destruction. None of it will escape. Where now
there is so much of enterprise and bustle, beauty and
adornment, fabulous luxury and extravaganza, there will
be scorched earth and charred ruin. Houston, the port on
the prairie, which presumes to build a skyline rivaling
New York's, will be among the first of the cities to perish.
With it will go Galveston and Texas City, together with
dozens of smaller cities, hundreds of refineries, chemical
plants and terminals fringed about Galveston Bay. In a
day all will be smothered in destruction, with billowing
clouds of black and yellow smoke and the suffocating
fumes of burning chemicals drifting inland for miles
across the coastal plain.

The automobile that built Detroit, Dearborn, Pontiac,
Flint, will cause their destruction. In a day their belching
smokestacks and miles of crawling assembly lines will be
twisted and bent into tangled masses of iron junk. Steel
will be the end of Pittsburgh, the Calument region in
Indiana, Birmingham. The congestion of Boston and the
ring of cities around it will make them a target. Immensi-
ties of population and crowded industries will destroy the
metropolitan areas of Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland,
Baltimore. Port facilities will draw the bombardiers to
Norfolk, Charleston, New Orleans, Mobile, Seattle, both
Portlands, the cities of San Francisco Bay, San Diego,

GREATER THAN FIRE • 13

Lake Charles, Corpus Christi. Chaos complete will be
achieved by the destruction of Washington, seat of our
federal government.

On that first day at least twenty other cities will suffer
the annihilation now being predicted for New York alone
as the Number One city for the atomic bomb. But the
fates of these other cities will not soften the blow upon
New York. The whole of its metropolitan area, extend-
ing across the river into Jersey City, Newark and the
Oranges, and in the other direction into Connecticut and
far out on Long Island will be rocked and jarred from one
bomb explosion after another. The tall buildings will shed
their facings of brick and terra cotta. The bridges span-
ning the rivers and bays will splash into the water. The
tunnels beneath the rivers will crush like egg shells. Be-
fore the end of that day where now stand Manhattan,
Brooklyn, the Bronx, Jersey City, Newark, New Ro-
chelle, will be mounds of rubble, with the steel skeletons
of the stripped skyscrapers standing out from the smok-
ing heaps like forests of dead snags.

When the sun sets in the murky sky at the end of that
first day of the new world war, 25 million people will be
dead, all of our cities of super-size or first in industries
will be in smoking ruins. Our federal government will be
gone, our major ports wrecked and a good part of our
giant industrial plants broken and crushed and in flames.
It will be like the day after the end of the world.

But the destruction will not end with that one day of
slaughter and wreckage. From the second day on the
enemy's fast, huge planes bearing atomic bombs will con-

14 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

tinue to streak across the skies. All of our large cities that
escaped the surprise attack of the opening day of the war
will be destroyed. St. Louis, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Minne-
apolis, Cincinnati, both Kansas Cities, Dallas, Indianapolis,
Denver, San Antonio, Memphis, Columbus, Louisville,
Rochester, Atlanta, St. Paul, Toledo, Fort Worth, Akron,
Providence, Omaha, Miami, Dayton, Oklahoma City,
Richmond, Syracuse, Jacksonville, Worcester, Salt Lake
City, Tulsa, Hartford, Des Moines, Grand Rapids, Nash-
ville, Youngstown, Wichita, New Haven, Springfield,
Spokane, Bridgeport, Yonkers, Tacoma, Paterson, Sacra-
mento, Albany, Charlotte, Fort Wayne, Austin, Chatta-
nooga, Erie, El Paso, Trenton, Shreveport, Scranton, Cam-
den, Knoxville, Tampa, Baton Rouge, Cambridge, Savan-
nah, Canton, South Bend, Peoria, Wilmington, Evansville,
Reading, Allentown, Phoenix, Montgomery, Waterbury,
Duluth, Utica, Little Rock— all will be totally de-
stroyed.

The middle-sized cities will share the same fate as the
large cities. Many of these middle-sized cities are impor-
tant ports or have factories equipped to turn out essentials
of war. Some, like Oak Ridge and Hanford, have special
significance. For the others, their stores of foodstuff, their
housing and the potential military manpower and indus-
trial manpower they represent still will make them profit-
able targets.

If the season is right, or when it does become right, the
ripening fields of wheat of the semi-arid West will be
strewn with incendiary fires. Thousands of square miles of
the nation's breadbasket will be lost. And like the fields of

GREATER THAN FIRE • 15

ripening wheat, the magnificent forests of firs and pines
of the West, so difficult to protect even during seasons
of ordinary heat and dryness against only the accidental
fires, will go up in smoke and flame.

Moreover, the great dams across the rivers are doomed.
The greatest of these represent the mightiest works ever
built, surpassing in tons of masonry even the pyramids of
the Egyptians. But their massiveness and strength will not
save them. What man has built man can also destroy. Be-
fore the might of atomic power the solid walls of concrete
fibred with rods of steel will be only plaster and lath.
Grand Coulee will be split asunder. Three trillion gallons
of released water will race down the Columbia River. City
after city along the overspread banks will be swept away.
Hanf ord, if not already destroyed by blast and fire, will
be destroyed by wash and flood. Portland, already in
flames, will be flooded in a backwash of the Willamette.
Onward the deluge in a towering wave will rush to the
sea, bearing upon its frothing crest a chaos of houses and
sheds lifted from their foundations and whole forests torn
up by the roots.

Like Grand Coulee, Hoover Dam on the Colorado will
be split apart, and, in chunks as big as courthouses, tumbled
into Black Canyon. All of Lake Mead, a man-made inland
sea impounding ten trillion gallons of Colorado River —
enough water to cover an area the size of New Jersey to
a depth of six feet— will be turned loose in seconds, to rush
to freedom with a roar that will set the hills miles away
trembling to their cores. At its lower reaches the ram-
paging river, as it has succeeded in doing during more

1 6 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

than one seasonal flood, will break into the torrid Salton
Sink, that strange piece of land whose sunken surface lies
below the level of the sea. But this time it will fill the basin
to its brim, covering with flood dozens of towns and vil-
lages and destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of
vegetables and fruit groves.

As go the dams of Grand Coulee on the Columbia and
Hoover on the Colorado, so also will go Fort Peck on the
Missouri, Wolf Creek on the Cumberland, Kentucky on
the Tennessee, Fontana on the Little Tennessee, Denison
on the Red, Shasta on the Sacramento, Norris on the
Clinch, Kingsley on the North Platte, Elephant Butte on
the Rio Grande, Saluda on the Saluda, Garrison on the
Missouri and at least forty more of the largest of the
dams.

Vast areas of the West, reclaimed by dams from the
desert, that now in season are green with crops and or-
chards, alive with water in irrigation ditches glistening in
the sun, and dotted with rural homes and thrifty villages,
will go back to gray desert. Crops and orchards will
wither; cattle will low at the dry pools and empty troughs.
A million people who now are living by the gift of water
lifted above the natural beds of the rivers and carried by
gravity through canals and ditches, will be wandering the
highways in search of places to live, even in search of
food, through regions already overrun with hordes of
hungry, desperate refugees who have fled the doomed
cities.

The mines from which come most of the iron, copper,
zinc and lead that our manufacturing plants require, will

GREATER THAN FIRE • IJ

have their pits and ore-lifting machinery blasted to ruin
and their areas sown with deadly radioactivity. If there is
anywhere in the land a large ore mill that escapes destruc-
tion by bombing, it will be left standing idle because no
sources of ore will be available to it for months, perhaps
years.

But the aim here is not to try to name every spot and area
in the United States that will be destroyed unless njoe have
total atomic defense ready by the time the next World
War comes. In fact, it scarcely is possible to name every
target our potential enemy probably has already explored,
found vulnerable and made a detailed plan for its destruc-
tion. Without much doubt he is able even from his own
continent to discern spots of vulnerability on ours which
we ourselves may not readily see. He can do this, in the
first place, because it is his business to put trained personnel
to the work of searching and probing our country for its
spots of greatest weakness; and, in the second place, he has
the advantage of looking upon us at a distance, from which
we can be seen in perspective. It is always that way when
one nation seriously searches another nation for its vul-
nerable spots.

Pearl Harbor is a good example. Japan with the advan-
tage of looking upon us from a distance was able to see
our entire Pacific fleet squatting on that one tiny basin
of water, a sitting duck for a perfect pot shot. But ap-
parently no senior officer in our navy, not even after
Washington had given notice that war with Japan could
come any day, had had so much as a premonition that all
the battlewagons and their auxiliary ships in Hawaiian

1 8 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

waters might be sunk or seriously crippled in one blow
from the air if they were not dispersed.

An even better example is Singapore. After World
War I Britain stood in need of a great naval base in the
Far East to give security to parts of her empire lying
east of Suez. Singapore at the tip of the long club-shaped
Malay Peninsula was selected for the location, because of
its position on the flank of all the sea routes from Europe
to the Eastern Asiatic countries. Work was started upon
the great base as early as 1923, and when finished a decade
and a half later, complete with emplacements, guns of the
heaviest and most modern types, dockyards, shops, store-
houses and barracks, it was declared the world's strongest
fortress. Yet Singapore fell to the Japanese on February 1 5,
1942, after only six days of fighting. With it went one
hundred thousand British and Colonial troops in what
Churchill calls the "worst disaster and largest capitulation
in British history." What happened at Singapore was that
the Japanese, instead of attacking the impregnable fortress
from the sea in the kind of engagement it had been built
to drive off, landed ground troops upon the peninsula well
above Singapore, marched them southward through the
jungle, and fell upon Singapore from the rear.

It was as simple as that. The great fortress, it was sud-
denly discovered to the dismay of its defenders, was not
prepared to deal with an attack by land. No land forts
had been built to cover the rear and none of the great
guns covering the sea side had been so placed that, if nec-
essary, they could be swung completely about to bring
their fire to bear upon the mobile guns of an enemy trying

GREATER THAN FIRE • 19

to sneak up on the fort from the land side. Churchill,
who, like his associates, had never given a thought to the
fortress having a weakness on the land side, says: "It
never entered my head that no circle of detached forts of
a permanent nature protected the rear of the famous
fortress. I cannot understand why it was that I did not
know this. But none of the officers on the spot and none
of my professional advisers at home seem to have realized
the awful need. I do not write this in any way to excuse
myself. I ought to have known. My advisers ought to have
known, and I ought to have been told, and I ought to
have asked."

After what happened at Pearl Harbor and Singapore,
let no one think that, if we do not talk above whispers
among ourselves about our overcrowded cities, our de-
fenseless great dams, the wheat fields and forests of our
West and our exposed pockets of valuable ores, the enemy
will never know about them. If we could look at the wall
maps of his war room we probably would find all of these
features already located and stuck with beaded pins, some
marked to be destroyed and some to be neutralized among
the first of the targets attacked and the others to be set
upon after all targets of earlier priority have been dealt
with. It is also likely that on his war maps of our continent
are located many other important features whose vulner-
ability to atomic attack stand out boldly and distinctly
as seen from his distant observation post, but which we
ourselves, because we are standing on top of them, are
scarcely able to see.

After the surprise attack upon our super and strategic

20 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

cities on the opening day of the war the millions of families
living in the hundreds of other large and middle-sized
cities that escaped the destruction of the first day will
naturally start seeking safety in the open country. They
will be escaping with their lives, the clothes on their backs,
a few articles grabbed up in haste and tossed into their
automobiles, and nothing more. Left behind in their
houses, to be destroyed by fire or flood, will be furniture
and furnishings and all extra clothing. Also left behind
in their cities and completely abandoned by everyone will
be tons of foodstuffs at the grocery stores and warehouses,
meats at the markets and packing plants, livestock at the
slaughtering pens, wheat and flour in elevators and mills,
gasoline and oil at the storage tanks and clothing of all
kinds at the clothing stores. Joining all these millions of
people fleeing from the abandoned cities will be another
million desperate souls driven from the areas left waterless
by the destruction of the big irrigation dams.

At the end of an estimated thirty days of blitzkrieg
from the air, when the enemy has struck down with atomic
bombs all the cities marked on his maps for destruction
and the skies are calm once more from the month-long
slash of planes and rockets through the skies, probably not
less than 25 million refugees from the doomed cities and
withering lands will be living as homeless as gypsies.
Among the farmhouses and among the small villages and
towns, which by then it will be known that the enemy
does not intend to attack with atomic bombs, this mass
of wretched humanity will have to search for temporary
shelter. Many will need luck to find as much as a single

GREATER THAN FIRE • 21

room, a garage or a woodshed that can be furnished with
a bed and a stove. Food will be an even greater problem
than shelter. With the loss of the wheat fields of the semi-
arid West and the loss of the millions of tons of foodstuffs
in the stores, warehouses, mills and plants of the destroyed
cities, and the loss of practically all transportation facilities,
our people for the first time in our history will know what
real hunger is.

In the meantime our country will be at war but this
time we will not be the grubbasket for nations fighting
on our side, nor the arsenal of democracy. Instead, for
months to come we will be fortunate if we can distribute
our lean supplies of food among our own people by any
enforceable means of rationing that can save thousands
from starving to death and can prevent whole armies of
desperately hungry mobs from turning to wholesale pil-
ferage and robbery. With the loss of large stocks of mili-
tary equipment when the large army posts, arsenals and
armories are destroyed, we will also need for ourselves
all the arms and ammunition that can be gathered any-
where in order to guard our continent against the possi-
bility of an airborne invasion.

Naturally, the public will ask and has a right to be told
why it is that our army, our navy and our air force are
not prepared to save the country from being threatened
with a calamity so heartsickening as this. The public
rightly assumes that the mission of our armed forces is to
protect our country from its enemies, and surely protec-
tion will never be more needed than on that day when
atomic bombs start the destruction.

22 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Our army, even with its Lewis, Knox, Benning, Bragg
and other large forts and establishments blasted into ruins
from atomic bombing, with its troops scattered about
tent camps in the field, a regiment here and a battalion
there, most of its military stores destroyed, its personnel
scrambled — our army, yes, even in the state of confusion
into which it will be thrown by the sudden onslaught of
atomic warfare, can be counted upon to pull itself together
under the discipline of its leaders and repel any early at-
tempt the enemy might try for an airborne invasion. But
definitely what our army cannot do is to prevent enemy
planes and rockets, bearing atomic bombs and incendiaries,
from destroying our important cities and large industrial
plants, burning to bare hills the regions of wheat and
forest in the West, knocking into pieces our great river
dams and immobilizing our mines. It simply is not within
the capabilities of our army and its types of weapons to
defend the nation against special acts of war of this
kind.

Never in the history of the world has there been a navy
equal in strength to the present American navy. Indeed,
in tonnage of modern surface ships it is rated stronger than
the navies of all the other powers put together. Nor is
this commanding rank in surface ships likely to be lost
soon, for great fleets of ironclads cannot be hammered
together in one year, nor even in five. In fact, no nation
is known to be building or planning to build a fleet of
capital ships strong enough to challenge our navy to a
decisive battle in the open sea.

Because of our overwhelming sea power, when the next

GREATER THAN FIRE • 23

war does begin our navy will have the wilderness of the
waters of the whole world for its area of operation. It can
protect our merchantmen and the merchantmen of all
friendly nations and keep their cargoes moving toward
our shores through all the lanes of the seas. Meanwhile, it
can sweep from the seas any surface fighting ships and
merchantmen of the enemy. It can break up, certainly,
any foolhardy attempt the enemy might make to send an
invasion army to our mainland and it can send the ships
of his convoy to the bottom with all on board. It can deal
with enemy submarines that wander into our waters and
into the waters of the nations friendly to us. But notwith-
standing its uncontested supremacy on the sea our navy,
no more than our army, can prevent the enemy from
sending, from hidden bases, his planes and rockets across
the ocean to our continent.

The planes of our air force at bases along our coastlines
and boundaries will be able to rise quickly into the sky
and challenge the approach of any armada of enemy
planes. Moreover, the offensive power of our air force
is tremendous. Its planes are modern and type for type,
we must hope, will be the fastest and most dependable
planes in the world. This means that there will not be
any one-way fog hanging off our shores, such as hung
over Europe during the early days of World War II,
which can prevent our planes from taking off from their
bases with loads of atomic bombs of their own. It is a
sure bet that our air force will destroy every crowded
large and middle-sized city in the enemy territory, wreck
all of the enemy's port facilities, all of his large river dams,

24 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

all of his large industrial establishments whose buildings
have not been widely scattered or built underground and
put out of commission all of his important mines. It can
destroy his plants and other facilities for making atomic
bombs. But with all this, our air force cannot be depended
upon to find and destroy the enemy air bases that are dis-
persed among dozens of small, well-camouflaged fields, nor
to find and destroy the hundreds of acre-size rocket bases
hidden in the deep forests. Unless it finds and destroys
these fields and bases our air force cannot prevent the
enemy's bombs and incendiaries from reaching our con-
tinent.

Our air force may, and probably will, be able to grab
the initiative and continue to hold over the enemy what
is known as air superiority. But air superiority has never
meant that one nation can absolutely prevent planes from
the enemy nation coming within its own territory. It is
particularly true that a plane of great speed flying at high
altitude can cross from one side to the other almost at will,
regardless of which nation claims superiority in the air. If
forced into an exchange of savage destruction with the
enemy, therefore, the best that can be hoped for from our
own air force is that it will be able to reach the enemy
in his homeland with more planes and pour more destruc-
tion upon him than he will be able to return. But the blast-
ing of a thousand cities into nothingness in the territory
of the enemy is not going to save a hundred of our own
large cities and perhaps six or seven hundred smaller cities
from being destroyed by bombs. Nor will the killing of
thirty or thirty-five million civilians by bombs dropped

GREATER THAN FIRE • 25

by our air force save twenty-five million of our own
civilians from meeting death in the same horrible way.

As sighted antiaircraft guns have been made all but
obsolete by the fast jet planes, our nation and other nations
will naturally be striving to create radically new types of
air defense weapons. Among these new weapons it is prob-
able that there will be a missile controlled by radar or some
other kind of beam, which can be guided through clouds
or darkness toward an enemy plane, even toward a rocket
splitting through the skies at supersonic speed. Were it
within the bounds of human ingenuity to create a ray-
guided missile that would never miss its target, no matter
how fast that target may be streaking through space or
how many intercepting devices the enemy might employ
to interfere with the piloting ray and deflect the missile
from its appointed path, then, of course, such missile
would be the end of bombing planes and rockets. This
would be true not only in the case of enemy nations but
also our own country and our allies, because there could
be no hope that the mechanical principle of the missile
could long be kept secret by any one nation from the
others. When our Department of Defense requests no
further appropriations for the construction of bombing
planes and rockets, and asks for authority to inactivate
all strategic bombing groups, that will be the day our
inventors, or inventors in some other country, will have
succeeded in producing a ray-guided missile or some other
type of air defense weapon that spells the end of both
bombing planes and rockets.

But the chances are a million to one that no such fan-

2 6 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

tastic missile will be created in this century, if ever. It has
always been the history of weapons discharged by explo-
sives that the more mechanically efficient they become,
paradoxically, the greater are their percentages of misses
to hits under battle conditions as compared with the older,
simpler weapons. This is true because targets have in-
creased in elusiveness faster than mechanical imperfections
can be overcome and human errors in handling a weapon
can be eliminated. For example, during the recent war we
had in our Browning machine gun, Browning automatic
rifle and Garand semiautomatic rifle three of the most
accurate and dependable automatic and semiautomatic
weapons ever invented. Any one of these three weapons
on the target range can put bullets through a cloth target
hour after hour without a miss. Yet on the battlefields of
Europe these three weapons among them made at least
twenty-five thousand misses to every German they fatally
hit! In contrast, the American-made long barrelled flint-
lock of the Revolutionary War won its fame because of
the few misses it did make. Furthermore, any weapon that
is to depend upon operation or control by a ray will always
be in danger of being rendered completely worthless by
having its ray neutralized, or at least interfered with, by
a counteracting device in the hands of the enemy. That
is what happened to the Germans' magnetic underwater
mine during World War II. Brought out as a secret
weapon, its initial success was tremendous, and Hitler was
throwing one fit after another in wild rejoicing that the
weapon would be the end of British shipping. Then the
British started equipping their ships with a de-gaussing ap-

GREATER THAN FIRE • 2J

paratus. This British invention, born of desperation, made
a dud of the magnetic mine, and it passed out of the war
picture as quickly as it had entered.

In spite of all this, let it be supposed that some day
there will be developed an air defense missile of such
lightning speed that it can overtake the fastest plane or
rocket, and of such fantastic accuracy that it will never
miss its target. Could this mechanical falcon be depended
upon to prevent atomic bombs from being dropped upon
our crowded cities and other major targets? The answer
might be yes for a time, but eventually the enemy's tech-
nicians would probably adopt the design of this missile
of matchless speed to a carrier for their own atomic
bombs.

This is not to protest against the development of super-
weapons, but only to urge that we scrutinize critically all
claims that, before the next war, there will be weapons
which will never miss their targets and which can be
trusted one hundred percent to prevent atomic bombs
from reaching any target in our country. The citizens of
the large, crowded cities, who presently are grasping for
any word of hope about the atomic bomb, are in danger
of being misled by such wildly exaggerated, irresponsible
claims. Once misled into believing weapons can save them,
it will be difficult to get them to turn a hand in helping
to develop measures for civilian atomic defense.

Although it is true that today our three armed services
combined do not have the power to provide adequate pro-
tection against atomic bombing, it is known that every
resource of science, of research, of ingenuity and inven-

28 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

tion is being brought to bear on the problems of devising
the means for effective defense. Our armed forces are
being greatly enlarged, their training modernized and
special skills developed for the handling of new types of
weapons and equipment. But this is not enough; it cannot
be expected that every corner of our land can be made
secure by the armed services alone. To meet the threat
of atomic destruction the efforts of our military forces
must be supplemented by the creation of an adequate
civilian defense.

So far there have been put into practice almost no
measures for civilian atomic defense that deserve to be
called such. The warning sirens, air raid shelters, corps of
volunteer fire fighters and stretcher bearers that the cities
are presently being told to hurry to readiness are nothing
more than measures borrowed from the TNT-bomb de-
fense employed in London during England's darkest days
of World War II. How woefully inadequate will be these
London measures to deal with atomic bomb defense should
be apparent from the fact that a single atomic bomb of a
size of those already used in test explosions has within it
more power than all of the thousands of tons of TNT
bombs that were dropped upon London during the six
years of World War II. To equal the power of this one
atomic bomb in standard TNT bombs would require a
load of standard TNT bombs that would fill a column of
military trucks stretching on the highway from New York
to North Carolina. To make one other comparison, the
model A-bomb is as much more powerful than a TNT
bomb of the type that was more frequently dropped upon

GREATER THAN FIRE • 29

London as that bomb was more powerful than an ordinary
stick of dynamite.

Indeed, the incredible power of the atomic bomb puts
to shame the idea that because certain measures of civilian
bomb defense were, on the whole, successful against the
TNT bomb these same measures should also be adequate
to protect us from the threat of the atomic bomb. Had
the Londoners of 1939, before the first TNT bomb was
dropped upon their city, anticipated it as something like
a miner's suck of dynamite, to be defended against, when
it fell among street crowds, by crouching behind parked
automobiles, or by ducking into doorways, they could not
have been one bit more absurdly underestimating its power
to harm them than are those among our own people at the
present time who have an idea that air raid shelters, warn-
ing sirens and other measures borrowed from TNT-bomb
defense will be sufficient to protect us from the atomic
bomb.

After the bomb of Hiroshima was exploded the ques-
tion was asked as to how long it might be before another
nation might be able to put together a similar contrivance
and reach parity with us in manufacturing it in stockpile
quantities. The answer, a consensus of opinion gathered
from many persons, put the time at 1955, ten years after
Hiroshima. Admittedly some of the figures that went into
the composite estimate probably were no better than
rough, inexpert guesses. But many of the estimates were
from persons qualified to evaluate intelligently the time
which might be required for a nation not in our confidence
to assemble the necessary scientific knowledge, to build

30 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

the first plant and get it operating dependably, and after
that to build additional plants and get quantity production
rolling on a basis limited only by the manpower, materials
and money this nation could afford to give to this one
project of war preparation.

The sixth of these ten years has already passed, and
there has been no sustained hopeful news from any source
to warrant moving the date line further into the future.
To all appearances at this moment 1955 is still the year
when we may have to admit that our stride in the pro-
duction of atomic bombs is being matched by another
nation. After that time, other things being equal, in a
war between our nation and another nation armed with
an ample stockpile of bombs the advantages of battle will
lie with the nation that has made as much progress in the
development of civilian atomic defense as it has in de-
veloping the offensive powers of the weapon.

The four years remaining of the ample ten we once
had do not leave us with much time in which to build
an atomic defense, yet we can make these four years
count preciously if we can ever be stirred to that effort.
If we begin this very year and month upon projects de-
signed to accomplish adequate civilian atomic defense, to
the exclusion of every other project that can reasonably
be put aside until brighter days ahead, we can hope to
have at the end of 1955 an atomic defense that will save
us from harm in any catastrophic proportion. We can
accomplish most of this security in eighteen months, if
we are willing to put forth to this end an effort equal
to the splendid might of effort we put forth as a nation,

GREATER THAN FIRE • 3!

during any period of eighteen months, toward winning
the Second World War.

Before atomic defense is taken up a chapter is being
interposed. It will attempt to explain in simple terms the
fundamentals of atomic energy. Of course, nothing will
be said about the atomic bomb that our government has
not already seen proper to release to the public. In truth,
no claim is made to any knowledge on the subject beyond
that which comes from government sources of informa-
tion, properly released, or which can be found in books
and magazines available to all.

POWER FROM THE ATOM

IT LAIN water is as good a substance as any with which
we may begin to explain atomic energy. Suppose we start
with a pint of it.

If a pint of water is poured in exactly equal amounts
into two containers, in each there will be one half pint,
or eight ounces. If the water in one of these containers
is then thrown away, and the water in the other exactly
divided between the two containers, in each container
there will be four ounces. If this performance were kept
up continually the amount of water left to be divided
between the two containers would be two ounces, one
ounce, one half ounce, and so on. When the amount of
water became too small to handle, one could, nevertheless,
keep on dividing it mathematically with the aid of a pencil
and paper. Soon there would be left less than one one-
millionth of an ounce, less than one two-millionth of an
ounce, and so on. Like the frog that found it could never
get to the end of a log by decreasing each succeeding hop
by a half of the length of the one taken before, so would
a man trying to divide a pint of water find that, mathe-
matically, he could never get the amount down to absolute
zero.

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 33

Thus, if a quantity of water could, by physical means,
be divided accurately many times, the original amount
would eventually be reduced to a single tiny cluster of
atoms known as a molecule. This molecule could not be
divided and the substance keep the form of water. The
water molecule consists of three atoms of which two are
hydrogen and one oxygen.

A pint of water, then, is composed of countless mole-
cules, each a cluster of two hydrogen atoms and one
oxygen atom, one cluster exactly like another, and these
molecules are so small they cannot be seen with the naked
eye, nor even with a powerful microscope. The atoms of
hydrogen and oxygen are held together in each molecule
by a strong force acting like magnetism among them, but
by various means available to the chemist they can be
compelled to break apart. When this is done with any
given amount of water and all of the released hydrogen
is caught in one container and all the released oxygen in
another, it is found that both substances are gasses, in-
visible and very light, neither one having any resemblance
to water. But if the contents of one container are poured
into the other container, each two atoms of hydrogen
will reunite with one atom of oxygen, forming a molecule
of just plain water.

Instead of using water for the experimental division,
suppose another ordinary substance, salt, is taken. If
divided again and again in the manner described for water,
a pint of salt would at last become reduced to a single
salt molecule. Beyond that the division could proceed no
further and the substance remain salt. The salt molecule

34 * TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

is made up of two atoms, not of three as in water. One
is the sodium atom and the other, the chlorine atom. Like
the atoms of the water molecule, or like the atoms of any
other substance, the atoms of the salt molecule have great
affinity for each other, but by means available to the
chemists they can be compelled to break apart. When this
is done the one, sodium, is a silver-white metal, and the
other, chlorine, is a greenish-yellow highly poisonous gas.

When a man sprinkles a dash of salt over food on his
plate he never considers that he is about to put into his
stomach billions of atoms both of metal and poisonous
gas. Yet he should have no fears, because so tenaciously
do the pairs of sodium and chlorine atoms cling together
in the salt molecules that there is no danger of their be-
coming free particles in any quantity. If they should ever
break apart, then, of course, the man would be in trouble.

Hydrogen, oxygen, sodium and chlorine are all simple
substances. By this it is meant that a mass of each is com-
posed of only one kind of atom. Within recent years sci-
entists have increased the known number of these simple
substances, or elements as they are usually called, by the
synthetic creation of several new ones, but before that
time there had been identified in nature a total of ninety-
two. Of some of these ninety-two elements everything of
our natural world, whether rock, soil, ocean, sky, plant
life, animal life or human being is composed. They are
seldom found in nature as pure substances, however-
most of them, in fact, never— but are combined with one
another in various combinations to form the soil, rock,
wood, grass, oil, sugar, leather, rubber, paint, glass and all

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 35

the thousands of other compound substances we see about
us. Furthermore, as illustrated above by water and salt,
when two or more of these ninety-two elements are com-
bined to form the molecule of a compound substance, the
chances are that the substance has no physical resemblance
whatever to any element composing it.

But by smelting, refining, precipitating and various
other processes available to the chemists and metallurgists,
all of the elements can be separated from their compounds.
After this has been done, however, only with difficulty
can most of them be kept pure. Given a chance, one of
them will unite with one or more other elements to form
a compound substance. A piece of iron, for example, if
not protected with paint or oil will, upon exposure to the
oxygen in moist air or moist soil, form ferric oxide, com-
monly known as rust, in which two atoms of iron unite
in a molecular cluster with three atoms of oxygen.

With these few brief facts from elementary chemistry
to serve as an introduction to the subject, an attempt will
now be made to explain the elementary principles of
atomic energy to the layman.

Almost all energy that keeps things moving on this
planet of ours can be traced to the sun. It is therefore
called solar energy. The molten sun, glowing with an
internal heat hundreds of times more intense than the
heat on the earth's surface, sends its rays to us across the
cold celestial spaces as it has been doing for billions of
years. As these rays strike the earth some of them are
immediately radiated, some are transformed into heat and
the rest absorbed in other ways. Every living thing,

36 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

whether plant, animal or human being, owes its life to
this light from the sun.

A field of wheat which has grown from sprouts to
stalks of golden ripeness in a few months' time can catch
fire from a carelessly thrown cigarette and become a roar-
ing tornado of smoke and flame. Now the question is, from
whence comes the energy that, after a few months of
vegetable growth, can produce a fire with flames reaching
into the skies? The answer is solar energy, the energy
sprayed upon the field from rays of sunlight and absorbed
into the stalks of wheat.

Similarly, but not in a single season, a forest is grown,
and the energy stored within the tree from the sun can
be used as firewood, or it can be consumed in a devastating
forest fire. The coal which furnishes fuel for most homes,
offices and industrial plants, is decayed vegetation which
millions of years ago was laid down as coal measures in
hot, steaming jungles. All of the fuel power in a lump of
coal is energy that was absorbed from the sun during the
process of vegetable growth. So, too, oil pumped from
the ground was once vegetation, and all the energy re-
leased from it, whether through burning it as fuel oil or
exploding it as gasoline, is solar energy that was stored
millions of years ago.

The horse eats grass and the energy stored in the grass
from the sun is absorbed into the tissue of the animal,
some of it to be transformed into heat and some of it into
motion. A coyote does not eat grass because it is not
equipped with the kind of digestive organs that can ab-
sorb energy directly from grass. The coyote, instead, must

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 37

catch a rabbit, and the energy in the meat of the rabbit
which the rabbit got from the grass, and which the grass
in turn got from the sun, is passed on in the meat to the
coyote. But neither the rabbit (the grass eater) nor the
coyote (the meat eater) can get any energy directly from
the sun. The energy comes to both of these animals in-
directly from the grass, which like all plant life has the
ability to absorb energy directly from sunlight. It is not
only impossible for the animal to manufacture its energy
directly from sunlight, but the sun when it is too hot
may actually slow the animal down a bit. Illustrative of
this is the story of a man in Texas, who says he once saw
a coyote chasing a jack rabbit, and so very hot was the
day that both coyote and jack rabbit were walking.

Man, along with the grizzly bear and crow and a few
other creatures with mixed appetites, has a digestive sys-
tem which can take energy both from vegetation and
meat, but man can absorb energy directly from sunlight
no better than can horse, coyote or rabbit. It is a shame,
too, that he cannot. If he could, these are the days when
he surely would rather be recharged with energy by
standing in the sun for an hour or two than pay $1.25 a
pound for beefsteak.

The sun shining upon the ocean daily evaporates bil-
lions of gallons of water. Wind moves the vapor clouds
in from the ocean upon the continents, abundantly in
some places and hardly enough in other places, and the
condensed moisture falls as rain or snow. The water soaks
into the ground and the excess runs away as rivulets,
then streams and finally as rivers, to rejoin the ocean

38 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

whence it came. Where one of the rivers flows over a
precipice or where its flow is rapid, a dam can be built
and a hydroelectric plant installed, and the harnessed
power of the water can be carried over high-tension lines
to cities many miles away. But the energy still is solar
energy, derived in this case not through the chemistry of
fuel or foodstuff , but from the gravitation of water which
the sun has lifted from the ocean.

The wind that drives sail-rigged ships across the ocean
and sportmen's yachts up and down the coasts, and whirls
the screeching windmills out in Wyoming and western
Nebraska is caused by air flowing from a region of high
pressure to one of low pressure, and the pressures are
caused by the sun.

All of this energy, whether it comes to us through fuel,
food, rain or wind, starts with the sun. From that molten
mass, glowing with an intensity of internal heat beyond
anything we know about here on earth, the sunlight is
thrown off. The rays travel across the millions of miles
of space between the sun and the earth in less than nine
minutes, a rate of speed so fast that it has been estimated
that, neglecting resistance from the air, if a ray of light
were a bullet shot from a pistol held horizontally in front
of a man, it would repeatedly circle the earth and hit the
man holding the pistol seven times through his back be-
fore his body could fall to the ground.

So nearly completely, in fact, does every motion here
on earth depend upon energy from sunlight that it is
difficult to name one that does not. There are, however,
a few. For instance, an earthquake such as the one that

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 39

shook San Francisco to the ground in 1906 can be very
destructive to life and property, and yet so far as is known
an earthquake does not owe its power to the sun. At
Pagosa Springs in Colorado and at a few other places
homes and offices are heated by water piped from springs
which boil from the bowels of the earth. This heat from
the center of the earth is a form of energy that cannot
be called solar energy. The fisherman who lets his skiff
move in and out of the harbor with the turn of the tide
is making use not of solar energy but of lunar energy, the
power from the moon which causes the tides of the seas.
A project started a few years ago for harnessing the tides
on the Maine side of Passamaquoddy Bay is interesting
because, if ever completed, it will be the first successful
important attempt to obtain electrical power from lunar
energy.

But of the forms of power that, so far as is now known,
owe nothing to the rays of the sun, the greatest of all is
one of which, strangely, no serious notice was ever taken
until about fifty years ago. It was just before 1900 that a
small group of scientists became interested in uranium,
one of the heavy elements, observing that apparently it
was radiating an energy from within itself. A short time
later the same characteristic was found both in thorium
and radium. It is now known that these three heavy ele-
ments and some others possess a strange quality called
radioactivity, the spontaneous emission of certain rays of
light caused by the disintegration of atoms within the ele-
ment. The presence of these few radioactive substances
in nature made scientists wonder whether inside the atoms

4O • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

of all matter, a chip of rock, a splinter of wood, a drop
of water, there might not reside a stabilized form of en-
ergy, one not put there by the rays of the sun as energy
is put into vegetation. If this were true, and a means could
be found for breaking open atoms and releasing this en-
ergy, as fire had been found to release solar energy, the
world would have a power far greater than that which is
obtained from the burning of wood or coal. Certainly this
was one of the most venturesome ideas ever to start prod-
ding the minds of serious men.

What for several years had to exist as only a daring
theory became, in 1919, a proven fact. In that year, after
many years of frustration in the attempt, was accom-
plished the first successful effort to break open an atom
by mechanical means. When this was done, just as the
scientists had been hoping and expecting it might, the rup-
tured atom turned loose into space an amount of energy
out of all proportion to its infinitesimal size.

The atom having been successfully split, the efforts of
the scientists, encouraged by this success, were intensified
further toward uncovering the mysteries inside the minute
particle. With great strides work and study progressed
right up to the beginning of World War II. But with the
coming of the war, the free exchange of scientific ideas
between all countries of the world unhappily had to cease.
The work of the several national groups became cloaked
in secrecy. In addition, some of the scientists had to leave
their laboratories and classrooms to take assignments in
plants and there do the work that normally should have
been delegated to engineers, because among the engineers

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 41

there was as yet none trained who could give mechanical
shape to the new knowledge the scientists were uncover-
ing about the atom. In the opinion of many scientists, the
period of the war set back by many years the development
of atomic energy.

But now that the nuclear scientists have been released
from their war assignments at which places, understand-
ably, most of them were never very happy, they are back
at work in their special fields of exploration and evalua-
tion, formulating the laws of atomic energy. Although
they cannot work with the complete freedom of discourse
and action they enjoyed before the war, at least they
now have more freedom than they had when they were
regimented into the war machine. By all reports the sci-
entists exploring the fields of atomic energy are making
good progress.

Although many theories about the atom are still in dis-
pute among the scientists themselves, in general there is al-
most unanimous agreement that the atom consists of three
principal components, the electrons, the protons, and the
neutrons. The existence of several other particles may later
be agreed upon among the scientists, but if laymen can
grasp the theories of the three named above, they will
be close enough to a correct understanding of the func-
tioning of the atom to be able quickly to adjust their ideas
to any corrections in formulas that later may be necessary
as a result of more recent discoveries and evaluations.

According to the present view, then, the construction
of the atom may be compared to the construction of the
heavenly solar system. At the center of the atom and com-

42 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

parable to the sun is the nucleus, and in the outer space
at a relatively great distance from the nucleus revolve,
with incredible speed, the electrons, the number of which
for a particular atom depends upon the element — iron,
oxygen, sulphur, or what not— to which the atom per-
tains. These electrons can be compared to the planets of
the solar system. Also, just as in the solar system the sun
is larger, much larger, than all of the planets put together,
in the atomic system the nucleus by weight is very much
heavier than the sum total of all the electrons in the same
atom.

The nucleus of the atom— which again let us compare
with the sun of the solar system— is not a mass of uniform
density but, among other particles, contains one or more
particles called protons, each one very heavy as compared
to an electron, and the number of them in a particular
atom depends upon the element to which the atom per-
tains. Hydrogen, the lightest of the elements, has at its
nucleus a single proton; helium, next lightest, has two;
lithium has three; and so on up the atomic scale to uranium,
which was the heaviest of known substances until scien-
tists were recently successful in creating new elements by
artificially putting into atoms more protons than are found
in nature in any substance. Uranium has ninety-two pro-
tons in its nucleus.

And now comes one of the most interesting facts of all
about the atom. There are exactly as many protons in the
nucleus of the atom as there are electrons revolving about
it, and each proton controls one specific electron and no
other. To continue comparing the atomic system with the

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 43

solar system in this respect would be like saying that inside
the sun are a number of heavy masses, each having the sole
duty of controlling one of the planets revolving about the
sun.

When one grasps the fact that the nucleus of an atom
of any particular element has the same number of protons
as there are electrons circling about the atom, the ele-
mentary nature of electricity, which one must understand
before one can understand atomic energy, is brought to
light. Each of these protons carries in it a positive charge
of electricity, while each of the electrons carries a nega-
tive charge of electricity; or, rather, each electron is a
negative charge of electricity.

Electricity is described as consisting of two kinds of
charges, one of which has been named positive and the
other negative. All who have worked with or examined
an electrical battery, such as a storage battery in an auto-
mobile, know that it has what is called a positive pole,
marked for identification with a positive (+) sign, and a
negative pole, marked with a negative (— ) sign. They
know further, no doubt, that if a wire from the generator
is attached to the wrong pole the battery will not function
properly. Also, those with that much knowledge of elec-
tricity probably have seen, or have at least heard, that two
positive charges of electricity repel each other, as do two
negative charges, but a positive and a negative charge have
attraction for each other, and get along perfectly.

A positive charge stays at home in the proton of the
atom, while the negative charge, the electron, circles round
and round it. If by some disturbance the negative charge,

44 * TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

the electron, is knocked out of its orbit, it flies off into
space, seeking another proton. It is only while an electron
is travelling from the proton of one atom to the proton
of another atom that its force is manifest. We then know
it as electricity.

It is not particularly difficult to knock electrons loose
from atoms and thereby release electrical energy. The
process can be seen taking place in the skies during elec-
trical storms. And for more than a hundred years now
electrical engineers have been artificially knocking elec-
trons loose from their positive charges, or protons as we
now call them, releasing electrical energy. This is the
principle of the storage battery, the dry cell battery, the
generator at hydroelectric plants and of every other de-
vice or piece of machinery that produces electricity. Make
any machine or devise by which electrons can be knocked
loose from their positively-charged protons, and electrical
energy has been created.

The electrons knocked loose from their protons prefer
certain substances to others for their paths while seeking
other positive charges. The metals, particularly, are rated
good conductors of the stray electrons, but the metals
vary remarkably among themselves in this quality. Copper
wire is a much better conductor than iron wire, and is
preferred for telegraph and high-tension lines.

After the scientists working with the atoms had learned
that each atom has a nucleus about which revolve the
electrons, the atom might have remained a comparatively
simple affair had inquiry ended there. But this knowledge
did not explain all. A further search into the atom was

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 45

necessary to explain, among other things, how it was that
the positively-charged protons could remain held together
in a cluster in the nucleus despite the fact that it is the
nature of positively-charged particles mutually to repel
one another. This search led to the discovery of the neu-
tron, a particle believed to rest nearer the center of the
atom than the proton does. In weight a neutron is about
the equal of a proton, which is said to be more than eight-
een hundred times heavier than an electron. The discovery
of the neutron was made in 1932, and is accounted one
of the great steps in the exploration of atomic energy.

There is no electrical force connecting protons and
neutrons, as there is the protons and electrons, and there
is no insistence, as in the case of protons and electrons,
that the protons and neutrons must exactly match in num-
ber in the atom of a particular substance. But while no
electrical charge exists between protons and neutrons, nev-
ertheless there is a strong attraction between them, and
among the neutrons themselves, which acts to hold both
protons and neutrons tenaciously clustered in the nucleus.
This force, however, is not an electrical force.

There are several kinds of forces. There is the force
of gravitation, which causes objects to fall to the ground
from a higher level. There is magnetic force, which when
present in a piece of steel can lift a smaller piece of iron
from a table and hold it suspended against the force of
gravity. Either by cohesive attraction or by adhesive
attraction, or by the combined action of the two, the
upward flow of sap in a tree is assisted, kerosene rises in
the wick of a lamp and rain water clings in drops at the

46 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

edge of a roof, both forces in these instances acting against
the law of gravitation. There is a force of electricity,
described above, which everyone knows can run up a wire
as fast as down, apparently not in the least influenced by
gravitational force. With these several kinds of forces
already known, it does not seem unlikely that another
might be discovered.

Now back to protons and neutrons. It has been found
that these panicles are held together in the nucleus by
a force previously unknown, and if by any means the
neutrons can be knocked apart from the protons and from
one another in an atom, this newly found force is released,
not at all unlike the way in which the electrical force is
released when electrons are knocked apart from the pro-
tons. But this newly found force in an atom is hundreds
of thousands of times stronger than the electrical force
residing in the same atom. Its popular name is atomic
energy, but as it comes from the nucleus of the atom it
is also called nuclear energy.

All these thousands of years since man first began burn-
ing wood and other combustible substances, releasing solar
energy from them, there has resided in the atoms of the
same substances another kind of energy which, if it were
released, could give millions of more units of power than
that obtained from solar energy. For example, a two-
pound chunk of coal burned and converted into electricity
could not produce enough current to keep lighted a
2 5 -watt bulb more than a few hours, but the nuclear en-
ergy in a two-pound chunk of coal, if it were released,
could keep the same bulb glowing for billions of hours.

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 47

Indeed, a bag of it, such as a boy could carry on his back,
could produce all the power required to light and heat
all the homes and offices and turn all the wheels of
machinery in the United States for a whole year. This,
to be sure, is a staggering thought and reminds one of the
story of the placer miner who has washed down a pile
of gravel to collect a few grains of gold dust, and is later
told that in the tailings which were washed away were
diamonds a billion times more precious than the gold he
recovered.

There follow an explanation of chain reaction and com-
ment upon the possibilities of using atomic energy for com-
mercial purposes.

In the game of bowling the ten pins are placed in such
a manner that both skill and chance play a part in knock-
ing them down. At one time, when the ball strikes a certain
pin in a certain way, all the ten pins will tumble; but
at another time only some will fall and the rest will re-
main standing. The two different results are possible be-
cause the pins are spaced too far apart to make a chain
reaction certain no matter where the ball strikes. If, in-
stead of arranging the pins in the manner the rules call
for, they were placed in the form of a ring with only a
half -inch of space between one pin and another, any
pin of the group in upsetting and touching another pin
would cause all to tumble. The same would happen if a
thousand pins instead of ten were set up in a single ring
with only a small space separating one pin from another.

So it is with a mass set up for atomic explosion. Before
the mass becomes explosive by chain reaction its atoms

48 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

must be packed in such a manner that a chain reaction
can take place among them. Once the bomb is ready, all
that is required to explode it is a means for exploding a
very few of the tiny atoms. This is accomplished by bom-
barding the mass with neutrons, an action comparable to
the spraying bullets from a machine gun. One of these
neutron bullets strikes the nucleus of an atom and rup-
tures it, causing it to give up its neutrons, some of which
fly off with tremendous speed and power, becoming neu-
tron bullets themselves, and in turn strike other atoms,
rupturing them, and causing more bullets to fly off. Once
started, this chain reaction continues until all the atoms
of the prepared mass have been struck with neutron bul-
lets and exploded. In point of fact, the explosion is a series
of explosions, but so fast do they take place that to the
human senses it seems to be a simultaneous performance.

This is a crude way of explaining the explosion of an
atomic bomb, but of course in practice the process hardly
is as simple as that. For obvious reasons the means for
packing the atoms so that a chain reaction will take place
must be a secret from laymen at present. But we should
not complain about it. It is sufficient for us to know that
atoms of certain substances can be set up in such a manner
that a chain reaction will take place among them and when
a striker has been released atomic energy is set free. This
has already been done several times. The first explosion
took place on the sands of Alamogordo, New Mexico, and
the next at Hiroshima.

In an atomic bomb the process of chain reaction acts
with lightning velocity, because a fast chain reaction is

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 49

necessary for a detonation. But for commercial purposes—
to furnish power for ships, planes and industrial plants—
we could not use a mass of atomic fuel that shoots its full
amount of power away all at once. For commercial pur-
poses there is required a type of atomic fuel which will
disintegrate by slow chain reaction. There is no insur-
mountable difficulty in producing such fuel. In fact, it
was a slow chain reaction process in uranium and other
radioactive substances in nature that first brought atomic
energy to the attention of the scientists.

Now that atomic energy has been discovered and found
to be millions of times more powerful than solar energy,
which has served mankind these thousands of years, nat-
urally the big question is whether atomic energy will
replace solar energy when it comes generally into use. The
answer is that it will not. To explain this answer there
must be stated one of the fundamental laws of nature, the
law which states that no more power can be obtained from
a stable system than the work put into it. This law, when
applied to atomic energy, means that no more power, great
as that power is, can be obtained from a mass of atomic
fuel than that which is represented by the work required
to set up the atoms in such manner that a chain reaction
will take place among them.

A thousand tumbling bowling pins would represent a
lot of noise and other forms of energy, yet if the total
amount could be measured it would be found no greater
than the amount of work which was required of the pin
boy to set up the pins in such a manner that they could
be toppled, one and all, by chain reaction. So it is with

5O • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

a mass of atomic fuel. It can never release more energy
than the amount of energy that has been required, whether
from water power or the burning of coal, to pack the
atoms in such way that a chain reaction will take place
among them.

This fact answers the question of those who have been
asking if it is possible for one of the long-haired scientists
to poke into something one of these days and start into
motion a chain reaction that will cause a chunk the size
of the moon to be blown out of the earth. The only mass
a long-haired scientist or anyone else will ever be able to
explode by chain reaction is one that has had its atoms
packed in such a manner that the explosion of one will
cause the explosion of another. That will require an amount
of work equal to the effect produced.

Now comes the most important question of all. What
commercial value will atomic energy ever have for us if,
to manufacture atomic fuel, we must rely on the solar
energy derived from burning coal or hydroelectric power?
It is readily seen that airplanes which can remain in the
air for weeks and submarines which can cross the widest
ocean under water have war values that offset all other
considerations. But how atomic energy will be used for
commercial purposes is not readily apparent. We must
pause to consider this problem because in a few years our
lives are likely to be largely ruled by atomic power. The
answer is that atomic fuel can be transported at negligible
cost and stored for unlimited periods for future uses.

The waterfalls and gushing streams of Oregon, Wash-
ington, Idaho, the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 51

have among them enough energy to furnish the whole of
the United States with all the requirements for its light,
heat and power, if every unit of this energy could be har-
nessed, transported and stored. But there is a limit to which
high-tension lines can carry electricity from hydroelectric
plants. They can carry it a good many miles, but because
of leakage along the wires a point is reached eventually
where trying to carry it further would be too expensive
for ordinary uses. Hence, instead of using electricity from
water plants, most of the cities of the East, South and
Central states are lighted with electricity generated at
local plants burning coal. And in only a very limited way
can electrical power be stored for future uses; for instance,
all the electricity coming into a home at any instant is
electricity which has been generated at a plant less than
a second before.

All of this may be changed in a few years. Much of the
water power from the waterfalls of our mountainous re-
gions can be used for manufacturing atomic fuel. And
atomic fuel can be made at the mouth of the coal mine.
Because of its negligible weight it can be transported at
almost no cost to the cities throughout the country and
transformed as needed into electricity. When that day
comes a factory can be located on the flat lands of Okla-
homa or Florida and have the same advantage of power
as a factory located in a region of waterfalls or a region
of coal mines. The sources of raw materials, nearness to
markets, climate and other factors, rather than nearness to
power potentials, will determine the locations for most
of the factories of the future.

52 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Once the business of manufacturing atomic fuel for
commercial purposes gets under way, the change-over to
its use should not be difficult. Not so many years ago the
electricity for many a small city or town was produced
at a local plant which used coal or cord wood to feed the
engine that turned the generator. Then transmission lines
which were brought in from hydroelectric plants and
large steam plants took over the work of the local plants,
and few people living in a town or small city knew when
the change-over took place. Something like that could
happen when atomic fuel replaces the transmission lines.

The plants manufacturing atomic fuel will be located in
regions of water power and coal. From these places the
manufactured atomic fuel can be transported anywhere
at negligible cost for transportation. A plant for convert-
ing the atomic fuel into electricity will be built at the
edge of a city, and when ready to go into operation it
will take over the work of the cross-country high-tension
lines. In homes and offices not a single wire need be
changed, not a single light bulb replaced. In fact, unless
there is some local politician who insists on making the
day of the change the occasion for a speech, probably no
more than a few people living in the city will know about
it. All the great things in life have a habit of coming with
quietness and modesty when they do come, and atomic
energy for commercial purposes probably will be no ex-
ception.

The greatest difference will be the cheapness of electric
current as compared with present prices. That will make
electricity useable not only for lighting homes, but also

POWER FROM THE ATOM • 53

for heating and cooling them. At the factories electricity
can be used both for power and furnace heat. The tall
smoke stacks now standing in the cities, belching clouds
of black smoke and filling the air with soot, dust and in-
jurious gases, and causing us to suffer from respiratory
and sinus troubles, can come down. Everywhere the air
we breathe will be as clean and healthful as mountain
air. When the atomic age comes into full bloom the United
States in all of its regions will be a cleaner land for all.

All this is wonderful to think about and look forward
to, of course, but before our nation can do much about
the development of atomic energy for peacetime pur-
poses it must stop wasting precious time and start devel-
oping a civilian atomic defense which will save it from
the destructive power of atomic energy used as an in-
strument of war.

3

THE PRINCIPLE
OF DISPERSION

I

N OLDEN times the soldiers of a country at war were the
King's troops, and the size of an army was limited mainly
to the number of men the sovereign could support by
squeezing revenues. In consequence the soldiers, pitifully
paid, equipped with battered weapons and ragged uni-
forms and seldom fed from the royal cooking pot, rarely
numbered more than a few thousand. But times have
changed in this respect as in many others. Today's army
in time of war is financed by bonds, which are mortgages
upon the future presumed capacity of the nation to pay.
Cost, therefore, hardly imposes any restraint upon its size.
Instead, the numerical strength of the army of the modern
nation at war is determined largely by its total number
of able-bodied men of military age. For any country this
number is roughly ten percent of its population. This rule
applied to the 150 million population of the United States
gives 1 5 million as the maximum number of men we might
expect to have in uniform at any one time.

There was a time, too, when a nation won a war almost
solely by its combatants, with their simple weapons, de-

54

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 55

stroying or driving from the field the combatants of the
enemy nation. The battlefield was the place where the
issues of war were decided. There the bruised and bloodied
soldiers out in front, hacking at the foe with their broad-
swords and exchanging musket shots with him at point
blank, and the king with his retinue of velvet breeches
peeking over the hilltop behind the battle line, were about
the only persons gravely concerned with the outcome of
the fighting. The tillers of the soil who lived at a distance
from the battlefield were but little touched by its ridings.
They were out of luck only when their strips of tenant-
held land happened to lie in the path of the maneuvering
armies. Then they could expect to have their crops
trampled down and their geese and swine toted off, by
either friend or foe, to go into the pots of the soldiers'
camp-fire messes.

That day, too, has passed. The soldiers of today fight
with weapons, ammunition and machinery with which
only an army of industrial workers even larger than the
army of combatants can supply them. Nor can modern
soldiers feed themselves in the field by foraging for food
along the way, as did the musketeers of the old times. In
the theater of war the modern army feeds from a ration
dump, the food for which another army of farmers, stock-
men, gardeners, canners, packers and shippers at home
must grow, process and transport. When for any reason
there are interrupted the long lines of supply, pushing
forward from home front to war front with a continuous
flow of rations, ammunition, weapons, machinery replace-
ments, motor fuel and medicine, the soldiers at the battle

56 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

front are faced with defeat just as surely as if the enemy
had broken their lines and completely surrounded them.

The quickest means any modern belligerent has for cut-
ting the enemy's supply lines of weapons and ammunition
are by bombing raids carried deep into his territory,
wrecking the factories that produce these materials, killing
and harassing the factory workers. In similar manner his
supply lines of food can be slowed to a trickle if crops
in his homeland can be destroyed by incendiary raids,
canneries and packing plants wrecked by bombing, and
facilities for transportation put out of order.

All of this and related facts add up to one great and
inescapable total fact, which is that in time of the next
great war every important factory, plant, smelter, re-
finery, every mine pit, oil field, every destructible area
of crop and forest, every large bridge, gigantic dam and
long tunnel through a mountain — moreover every dense
mass of people a nation has— will be a target for the bomb-
ing raids of the opposing power. That is the meaning of
total war. It is the kind of war we can expect will be
waged against us. And of course it is the kind of war we
must be prepared to hand back, with something in the
bargain, to the enemy.

The scope of war has not only been widened to include
every person and service that contributes in any way to
the efforts of war, but still another idea— stockpiling— has
given to war a dimension of depth. The idea of stockpiling
is that the industrial and agricultural capacities any nation
has for waging war need not be limited by its current
annual outputs from mines and mills, nor by its current

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 57

annual crops of foodstuffs and fibers, but by the whole of
these supplemented by whatever amounts of ores, raw
materials, manufactured goods, strategic imports and food-
stuffs it has saved from previous years and stored as war
reserves. Thus a small nation which has for many years
put aside some part of its mine, factory and crop pro-
ductions, and some part of its strategic imports to be held
as war reserves, actually may be better prepared to fight
through a war of long duration than will a much larger
nation that has fallen into an unworthy habit of boasting
endlessly of its great natural resources but like the pro-
verbial grasshopper that wasted the summer in frolic and
song, takes no fear of the future to lay by a store.

Our own nation was slow about adopting the idea of
the stockpile as an important measure for national defense.
Several years before World War II, but after the warning
rumblings of that war had begun to be heard, there were
individuals and groups in our country who tried to per-
suade the federal government to bolster national defense
by means of the storage of war reserves. Finally, after
much exhortation, a modest beginning was made in stor-
ing those strategic minerals which were obtained chiefly
from foreign sources. But in the main the advice to stock-
pile war reserves was unheeded.

In the years before World War II, when our nation was
desperately trying to spend its way out of the depression
that had started in 1929, the billions spent upon unemploy-
ment relief and crop relief could just as well have been
spent upon projects which, while accomplishing the pri-
mary purposes of relief, would have contributed to na-

58 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

tional defense through war reserve storage. During those
distressful years we might have put thousands of unem-
ployed miners at work to produce for war reserve storage
vast quantities of iron, copper, zinc, lead and other domes-
tic ores. We should have put into war reserve storage
cotton and woolen fabrics, or at least bales of cotton and
carded wool.

We might have packed and stored for unlimited storage
life thousands of tons of sugar. We could have had tons
of flour properly dried and packed in tin containers for
indefinite storage life. We might have put into storage
tanned cattle hides sufficient for the manufacture of all
the shoes and leather equipment that the armed forces
would need in time of war. Rubber at that time was a
beggar on the market, and although its storage life has a
limit, we should have bought and stored vast amounts of
it, used these before deterioration and again replaced in a
continuing cycle. Thus our national defense would not
have been hampered by lack of this highly strategic ma-
terial. If we had done these things we would have obtained
unemployment and crop relief, and also a very large
measure of national defense. But we did none of these
things.

We failed to import and store adequate quantities of
other highly essential products. One of these was quinine,
so highly strategic, yet so low in cost. Because of this
negligent failure thousands of men of the armed forces
were doomed to have their bodies burnt out with malarial
fever in the Philippines, in the South Seas and in Burma.
Had a few thousand dollars been spent upon a reserve

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 59

stock of quinine, much of the suffering, loss of combat
power, ruin of bodies and even death that malaria caused
among our fighting forces could have been prevented.

What our federal government was failing to do in the
storing of war reserves, the German nation under Hitler
was doing at any sacrifice. During several years before the
start of World War II Germany was stockpiling both
metals and foodstuffs. That nation was to teach nations
much larger than herself, including our own, the value of
the stockpile.

Now the atomic bomb brings realization of the neces-
sity of preparedness through stockpiling. For the huge
plants required to produce atomic bombs cannot be kept
secret or hidden, and certainly they are among the most
rewarding targets the enemy will have. After the first
day of war it is not likely that we shall have left the
facilities by which another bomb can be manufactured
during the rest of the war. Hanford, on the Columbia, if
not levelled with bombs on the opening day of war, surely
will be swept away on the deluge of water that will over-
swell the banks of the river when Grand Coulee Dam goes
out. Oak Ridge, if not directly destroyed by bombing,
almost surely will lose the dams that furnish its required
millions of kilowatts of electricity. It will be the same for
any other establishment built for the production of atomic
bombs. Positively, the ability of our nation to destroy and
cripple the enemy with atomic bombing will depend solely
on the number of bombs we have in our cache on the day
war begins.

And for the nations that are to become our enemies

60 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

the same will certainly hold true. We can rest assured
that our air force with its fast planes, our army with its
guided missiles and our navy with both planes and missiles
launched from ships at sea, will be able to blast into worth-
less chunks all the enemy's great power dams and plants
upon which he must depend for manufacturing his atomic
bombs. He will have no chance to put together another
bomb after the war has started. The bombs he has in his
stockpile on the day war breaks out are the only ones
with which he will be able to hurt us.

The idea of a stockpile of bombs adds to war a prin-
ciple of preparedness in depth, gives to the nations re-
maining at peace, but preparing for war, an accumulation
of strength. The longer the war is postponed the larger
will grow the stockpile of bombs on each side. This means
that the longer the war is forced to wait upon prepared-
ness, the more terrible it will be when it does come.

Suppose that in the nation or nations that are to become
our enemy the stockpiling of bombs grows ever larger,
until there are more than enough bombs, after allowing
for the large number that will be lost before reaching
targets, to destroy all of our large cities, large dams and
all other first priority targets. Having completed the de-
struction of these, the enemy then works down through
the middle-sized cities, large industrial plants, mammoth
bridges, long tunnels through the Rockies and the Cas-
cades and on to a long list of secondary targets, and still
has left a considerable stock of bombs. The question then
is, on a target how small would the enemy be willing to
spend an atomic bomb?

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 6 1

Obviously a pilot would never attempt to bomb a farm
house, no matter how plentiful his country's cache of
bombs. Hence the millions of people living in rural homes
will be in no more danger of being killed by atomic bombs
than they now are in danger of being hit by comets. But
a village of 1000 population — would the crew of an un-
opposed plane think of dropping an atomic bomb upon
a target that small? Government tests indicate that an
A-bomb dropped on an average village would destroy
50 percent of its population. Of the 500 killed in a village
of 1000, it can be estimated that 10 per cent would be
potential soldiers and 20 per cent workers or potential
workers in war industries. That, in cold-blooded language,
gives a total killed of 150 people whose lives were impor-
tant to the war effort. This small number certainly would
not be a rewarding target for an atomic bomb costing
millions of dollars and the labor of thousands of workers
and technicians.

Assuming that the enemy has an ample stockpile of
bombs left after the large targets have been destroyed,
would he drop a bomb on a city of only 15,000 popula-
tion if it has no large and important war plant? An atomic
bomb striking a city of 15,000 spread over an area of
average size and shape could, according to government
tests, be expected to destroy about 5000 people. Of this
number approximately 500 would be potential soldiers
and 1000 would be workers and potential workers in war
industries— a total of 1500 effectives. Again a question:
would 1500 be a rewarding number?

In the recent world war the estimated cost to our gov-

62 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

ernment for each enemy soldier killed was $100,000, and
there is no reason to believe that in the next war the aver-
age cost will be any less. If, in the savage kind of war for
which we must prepare, the dropping of a bomb on an
enemy city will cause the death of 500 potential com-
batants, this will be as great a destruction as fifty million
dollars and the lives of many of our soldiers could cause
on the battlefield. Furthermore, there would be the de-
struction of 1000 war industry workers, and a good many
thousand other civilians would be made homeless and put
to dire distress. From these gory, cold-blooded figures,
it is obvious that if we can manufacture atomic bombs in
stockpile quantity, and drop them upon targets in the
enemy country at an average cost of not more than 50
million dollars a bomb, we can afford, after higher priority
targets have been destroyed, to use one of these bombs on
a city in which a minimum of 5000 civilians would be
killed.

But in the work of bombing cities for the sole purpose
of destroying personnel, it probably would not be worth
while for either side to drop a bomb on a city unless that
bomb killed at least 5000 people, of whom 1500 were
potential combatants and war industry workers. If the war
had not been won by bombing out of existence all of the
major targets, certainly there could be no hope for its
being won by attacking cities of a size that would average
less than 5000 deaths. At that low figure a more feasible
course of action for either nation would be to save the
remainder of its stockpile of bombs to be used for the
destruction of mobile targets such as troopships at sea and

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 63

concentrations of men and materials on the battlefields, of
which there will be an unlimited and unpredictable num-
ber.

Generally speaking, then, a city whose population is less
than 15,000, and which has no important war establish-
ment near it, should stand in no danger of an atomic
attack, no matter how plentiful the bombs in the enemy's
stockpile may be, or how many good chances he may
have for dropping one of them upon the city. According
to the 1950 census, the number of people living in cities
of less than 15,000 population, together with the number
living in towns, villages and on farms, is approximately
one half of the nation's total population. With the excep-
tion of the few people who may be living in small cities
and towns having war industry plants or other establish-
ments that will make them rewarding targets for atomic
bombing regardless of population size, it can be said that
nearly half the nation's population will be in no danger
from atomic bombing, no matter what else may happen
to them during the war.

Obviously, then, in atomic defense approximately half
of our people are no problem whatever for the nation. Its
problem is the other half who are living in cities exceeding
15,000 population. The thesis here, to be supported with
figures in the next chapter, is that a city of more than
15,000 population can be rendered as safe from atomic
attack as a town or village. This can be done by expand-
ing its area, moving war industry factories to its perimeter,
and by spreading homes, offices and stores apart. An en-
emy would not attack a city properly dispersed in this

64 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

manner, because he would not be adequately rewarded for
his costly and irreplaceable atomic bomb.

So far, unfortunately, there has been no national accept-
ance of the fact that dispersion is the only certain defense
of the cities against the atomic bomb. On the contrary,
in the six years that have passed since two bombs wiped
out two crowded Japanese cities, and in spite of terrible
warnings of things to come, our cities have been allowed
to grow larger and more congested and our rural popula-
tion to shrink proportionately. Fate has been working
against us from both ends. Certainly one of the most dis-
couraging aspects of this national drift is the tendency
among many civic groups to see a virtue in the mushroom
growth of cities between the years 1940 and 1950 and in
the plans that are being laid for even more startling in-
creases by the year 1960. It is not a healthy sign that civic
spirit and pride continue to be built entirely around the
objective of making a city larger and larger, no matter
how badly congested, shabby, foul-smelling, wicked and
corrupt it may become in reaching its larger size. Rather
the objective should be to put into operation a Burnet
Plan for spreading the city out and to try to make it the
most beautiful, most decent and most cultured city in its
state.

The slowness in accepting dispersion as a defense against
atomic bombing for the big cities can probably be ex-
plained in good part by the fact that throughout many
centuries of experience in other methods of warfare, dis-
persion has never been accorded the military value it de-
serves. Indeed, on the battlefields of the past the principle

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 65

of dispersion has been repeatedly ignored, or rather there
seems never to have arisen a great commander in history
who gave serious thought to allowing dispersion a place
among the principles of war. This is a strange sin of
omission and hard to account for.

It is true that when the weapons of the battlefield were
the sword and lance, reasons were good for placing in-
fantry massed at close intervals and in great depth, in order
to build a phalanx of strength at a particular point to
break the opposing enemy line. But when gunpowder was
introduced into warfare, bringing the musket and cannon
into use and giving the soldier two weapons ideally em-
ployable against mass formations, it seems there should
have come forth a military commander with the vision to
see that dispersion and not mass was a defensive require-
ment on the new battlefield. This would limit the oppos-
ing infantrymen to aimed fire with their muskets at in-
dividuals, not at solid walls of men; and would allow the
opposing artillerymen no clusters of personnel at which to
sight their cannons. Such was not the case.

During the Civil War the armies of both the North and
South attacked in line, men shoulder to shoulder, charg-
ing the opposing lines and even the batteries of artillery
in these formations. The appalling loss of dead on the
battlefields at Antietam, Gettysburg and other major
battles of that war are tributes to the sublime courage of
the soldiers, both the Blue and the Gray, but no tribute
whatever to any commander, either North or South, who
might have spared his men from such bloody slaughter by
giving the infantry such dispersion laterally and in depth

66 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

that nothing but aimed fire could inflict any serious harm
upon it.

In our next major war, with Spain in 1898, there was
even greater need for dispersion than there had been
during the Civil War. In the time between the two
wars both the magazine rifle and smokeless powder had
come into standard use. Hence the infantry, more than
ever before, was a target that could suffer heavily from
fire aimed at it in the mass rather than at individuals. But
no change in tactics was made. The infantry fought the
Spanish-American War in close lines of skirmishers. A
yard was the proper interval between men in the line,
because this was the minimum distance at which men could
lie in the skirmish line and work the bolts of their rifles
without rubbing elbows with one another.

By the time the First World War arrived the machine
gun had been perfected, and it was ideally employable
against a concentrated line of infantry. But in spite of
this, no change had been made in our infantry tactics.
Infantry was still being trained to deploy and fight in line
of skirmishers with a yard interval between men. This
meager interval of a yard was still kept for the purpose
of giving the men a chance to work the bolts of their rifles,
and there was no idea of allowing them dispersion for the
sake of reducing casualties. If the men had been able to
work their pieces at intervals of less than a yard, very
likely the skirmish line would have been more crowded
than it was. As a matter of fact, soldiers in 1917 were
being trained to stand upon their feet in close order of
squads, shoulder touching shoulder, and fire in volleys.

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 67

The idea was that there would be times when they could
use this alternate method of firing to do their best
fighting.

In Europe, after World War I had been raging for more
than two years, and the flower of infantry had been
mowed down on both sides by machine guns, both the
Allies and the Germans began allowing greater interval
in the skirmish line, and the Americans in 1918 copied
the others. At the end of World War I our text books
were rewritten to allow our infantry a normal interval of
five yards in the skirmish line. But the skirmish line itself
was retained, as fixed and sacred a formation as it had
been in the days of pikes and harquebuses.

Soon after the First World War the attack plane made
rapid development, and was seen as an effective means
for delivering fire from machine guns upon skirmish lines
of infantry and troops on the march. Many enthusiasts
for the Air Corps went so far as to believe that the attack
plane would make the infantry an obsolete arm. Among
these was a member of the U.S. Congress who toured the
army posts, speaking to groups of officers on the military
powers of the attack plane and asking them to realign their
military thoughts to acknowledge its superior place. The
gentleman carried with him as his props some huge charts
demonstrating an attack made by planes at an Air Corps
field against assumed infantry in skirmish lines and in
columns of fours on the march, the soldiers in each case
having been represented by silhouette pasteboard targets
of life size. The attack planes had made runs over these
targets at low altitudes, spitting fire upon them from their

68 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

machine guns. Then the pasteboards were examined, and
each bullet hole counted as a fatal hit, and because practi-
cally all of the targets had been hit, some of them so many-
times that they must have looked like punch boards, the
only possible inference was that infantry was doomed
before the fire power of the improved attack plane. There
were many infantry officers who agreed with him.

It was the attack plane, therefore, rather than the ground
machine gun of World War I that at last forced the
infantry commanders to give up the ancient, sacred skir-
mish line, and to disperse the infantry in battle, both
laterally and in depth, so that a platoon of deployed in-
fantry no longer would offer itself as a target for any
kind of unaimed fire, whether from rifle, machine gun or
attack plane. It was dispersion that saved the infantry as a
branch, and it lived on to give such good accounts of
itself on a dozen fronts of World War II that at present
no one, not even the enthusiasts of the attack plane who
once were out to get its hide, has any desire to deny the
infantry its share of the credit and glory of winning the
war.

The examples above have all been taken from the in-
fantry, because the picture can be more clearly drawn for
this basic arm than for some of the other arms and serv-
ices. But the truth is that all components of the fighting
forces and all elements of command have suffered as much
as the infantry once did from over-concentration.

For example, there is Pearl Harbor. There was a time
many years ago, back in the days of sailing ships, when
the harbor was a place where ships of a fleet could rest

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 69

at anchor safe from the attack of another fleet. During the
Revolutionary War, time again a British fleet or a French
fleet ran into a harbor along the Atlantic shores to avoid
being forced to give battle to a fleet of superior size and
gun power. Once the superior fleet had driven the smaller
fleet into taking refuge in a harbor, it might stand outside
and bottle the latter up indefinitely, but it scarcely dared
to risk moving its wind-driven ships, one by one, through
the channel into the harbor against the waiting guns of the
ships inside. In those days it was a bold commander who
could talk of sailing his ships into a harbor to grapple with
an enemy fleet already at rest there.

When ships changed from sails to steam a fleet that was
already inside a harbor still held an advantage over another
fleet trying to enter, but not by so wide a margin as
during the days of sail. For instance, when the Battle of
Manila Bay was fought in 1898, Admiral Dewey boldly
ran his fleet inside the bay to give battle to the Spanish
fleet already in position there. When the admiral sighted
the Spanish fleet lying off Cavite with broadsides faced
for battle he stood down in column upon it. When he was
within 5000 yards he ported his helm and opened fire,
using his port batteries. Then he quickly turned about — a
maneuver within the bay that a fleet of sailing ships could
not easily have managed— and stood back, decreasing the
distance. All of the Spanish ships were badly hit, and the
victory over them was complete. The great lesson of
Manila Bay was that a harbor could no longer be counted
upon as a protection against another fleet.

But it was the development of the long-range bombing

70 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

plane that completely ruined a harbor as a place of refuge
for ships. During World War II, it was learned that the
boundless ocean, hundreds of miles from any shore, is the
safest place for ships of a fleet to be in time of war. At
Pearl Harbor our own navy had to learn this lesson the
hard way.

It is not an acceptable excuse to try to explain that the
disaster at Pearl Harbor could never have happened if
our nation had actually been at war. When it did happen
we were, to all intents and purposes, already at war with
Japan. For as much as two months before that disastrous
day at Pearl Harbor our fleet had been escorting transports
across the broad expanse of ocean lying between Hawaii
and the Philippines— a measure which only the imminence
of war could have brought into use. Furthermore, we
should have known even at that time that the war would
not start with a formal declaration. In 1904 Japan had
destroyed the Russian fleet as the first act, and the decla-
ration of war was a detail that had to wait until the fol-
lowing day. In the time between 1904 and 1941 Japan
certainly had shown no noticeable improvement in the
niceties of conduct among nations that could warrant the
belief that when she got ready to break with us she would
formally declare her intentions and allow rime for the
message to be ceremoniously delivered to us with white
gloves before any overt act took place. If our fleet com-
mander in Hawaiian waters had been keeping his many
ships reasonably well dispersed, instead of crowding all of
them inside the small basin of Pearl Harbor, there never
could have been the disaster of December 7, 1941, to be

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • Jl

written into the records as the greatest defeat the Ameri-
can navy ever suffered.

But greater than the sea disaster at Pearl Harbor was
the land disaster at Bataan and Corregidor, soon to follow,
and for the same reason— over-concentration. Bataan and
Corregidor have been so little understood because of the
four years of black-out that followed their surrender, that
some little space is here required to tell what part over-
concentration played in their doom.

Scarcely had we acquired possession of the Philippine
Islands at the close of the war with Spain before army
and navy officers acquainted with the Orient began to
assume that Japan would some day try to wrest the islands
from us. As early as 1913 there was an important threat.
The occasion of it was an act passed by the state legislature
of California which denied to Japanese and other Asiatics
the right to own land. Woodrow Wilson was President
and William Jennings Bryan his Secretary of State when
this happened. Bryan rushed out to California and tried to
persuade the legislature to withdraw the act. The Japanese
had raised a threat of war over the discrimination against
her people. In the Philippines there was more to the
Japanese threat than the American people at home ever
knew about. In the Islands at that time the mobile forces
under the American flag and pay consisted mainly of bat-
talions of Philippine Scouts. These were units of native
troops commanded by American officers holding com-
missions especially authorized for this service.

In the Philippines when the Japanese were making their
threat, at the isolated army garrisons the commanders of

• TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

the battalions of Philippine Scouts received orders from
the headquarters of the Philippine Department to be pre-
pared, in case war with the Japanese did come, to burn
all military impedimenta and move their troops onto Cor-
regidor Island in Manila Bay. The idea at Department
Headquarters was that on Corregidor the forces would
take refuge as in a castle until the United States navy could
defeat the smaller Japanese navy and convoy an army from
the Continental United States to the Islands. Certainly this
was a plan, if plan it deserved to be called, that easily and
quickly might have been put into operation.

Nevertheless, most of the American officers on duty
with Philippine Scout troops were opposed to it in prin-
ciple. These officers had spent many years with the native
Filipino troops, had commanded them in dozens of skir-
mishes and other more serious encounters, and knew that
when fighting with guerilla warfare tactics in his native
jungles there is no better fighting man anywhere in the
world than the Filipino soldier. These officers were con-
fident that they could move their Scouts into the hills at
any time, on a day's notice, and depending only upon wild
game and native foods for their subsistence, hold out for
months or even years against any invading Japanese force
trying to conquer them. On the other hand, if required
to move onto Corregidor the natural fighting ability of
their Filipino soldiers, so versed in jungle warfare, would
be lost. The worst side of this plan was that any troops
voluntarily beleaguered on that tiny island would be de-
pending entirely upon a quick defeat of the Japanese
navy by the American navy. In case anything happened

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 73

that would prevent our navy from accomplishing thk
mission, the stores of foodstuffs on Corregidor could not
last and the troops would be starved into submission. This
was what many Scout officers in the Philippines were
thinking and talking about as far back as 1913.

Then came 1921, the year in which the Washington
Disarmament Conference was held. After much opposi-
tion from Japan, the conference allowed the United States
a greater number of capital ships than Japan, in the ratio
of 5 to 3. This ratio was believed by military and naval
persons to be sufficiently favorable to assure the United
States an early victory over the Japanese navy, should
war come. A plan for the defense of the Philippines was
accordingly based on the conviction that the American
navy would not fail to defeat the Japanese navy, and
would be able to transport loads of American troops from
the United States and put them on the Islands. Under this
plan not many American troops would need to be kept
in the Philippines. Most of the troops stationed there could
belong to units of the Philippine Scouts, and all future
commissions to officers in command of these Scout troops
would be given to citizens of the Philippine Islands.

By this new plan, in case war broke out with Japan
and the Japanese invaded the Philippines, the troops al-
ready in the Philippines were to resist the Japanese armies
in the field as long as they possibly could, and then with-
draw onto Corregidor Island and into the tip of Bataan
Peninsula, which lies across a narrow passageway of water
from the island fortress and forms with it a single area
of defense. Here the outnumbered army would defend

74 ' TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

itself as from a stockade until our navy could defeat the
Japanese navy and convoy to the Islands an army of
reinforcements from the United States. In order to
strengthen the natural defense of the area and to protect
it from what might be a long siege, Malinta Tunnel was
constructed on Corregidor, and at the tip of Bataan Penin-
sula storage places for ammunition and other military
supplies were built.

But again there were many officers of long service in the
Philippines who were as opposed to this new plan as they
had been to a similar plan in 1913 and for the same reason;
namely, that the plan staked everything on the expecta-
tion that the larger U. S. navy would have no trouble
defeating the Japanese navy. These officers dared to be-
lieve that the Japanese navy, though smaller in size, might
not be so easily handled in its own part of the ocean as
was assumed by the planners. If this proved true, any
troops bottled up on Corregidor and Bataan soon would
find themselves in a sorry plight. Once they had volun-
tarily beleaguered themselves within this small area of
defense there would be no escaping from it. A better plan,
so thought these officers who had had much experience
with the native Filipino soldiers, would be to move their
troops into the hills, in case of a Japanese invasion that
could not be checked, and from the mountain fastnesses
and almost impenetrable forests fight the Japanese on terms
in which the Filipino soldier, man for man, would have a
decided advantage over the Japanese soldier.

However, there was another group of officers who had
little experience in the Philippines. These officers, who

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 75

had cooked up the scheme for the defense of the Corregi-
dor-Bataan area, and thought highly of their own cooking,
were not disposed to listen to what the old Philippine
Scout officers had to say on the subject. Instead, these staff
officers went ahead with the plan of making Corregidor
and the tip of Bataan a bastion of defense for use if re-
sistance in the field against the Japanese became impossible.
The plan completed, it was labelled the Orange Plan, and
maneuvers were built around it.

More rime passed, the Second World War came and the
line-up of nations was about as had been expected for
many years. The Japanese entry, as will always be remem-
bered, was on December 7, 1941, and it was a blow that
caught the U. S. Navy completely by surprise. For one
full day and part of another the United States was almost
too stunned by the incredibility of the act to believe it
could be true. But by the third or fourth day the nation
was ready to believe that the Japanese might try anything
as their next move. On the Pacific Coast both civilian and
military groups thought an invasion of California was to
follow. There were hysterical reports that told of a Japa-
nese invasion fleet moving first toward one port and then
another. Some days it was only a hundred miles off the
coast, and coming on at full steam. Without much doubt
the Japanese could have landed troops at any point along
California's coast during the month of December, 1941,
if a large invasion force for the purpose had been in their
plans. At least the Japanese might have seized the Hawaiian
Islands, because the attack upon Pearl Harbor must have
succeeded beyond their fondest hopes.

7 6 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

But the truth is that the Japanese had no intention of
trying for an invasion of either the United States or
Hawaii at that early stage of the war. They were still
adhering to a plan over which they had spent years of
work and study, one which called for the conquest of the
Philippines, and from there moving on to an invasion and
conquest of the whole of the South Pacific. The attack on
the American navy at Pearl Harbor was meant to cripple
it, so that it would be unable to operate against the Japa-
nese navy and convoys, and to prevent it from escorting
reinforcements from the United States to the Philippines.

The point here is that the Battle of Pearl Harbor was
not for the Japanese an independent engagement at all,
but was a maneuver in the Battle of the Philippines. Ac-
cordingly, soon after the American fleet was knocked out
at Pearl Harbor the Japanese started their army moving
forward by convoy from Formosa, landing it from trans-
ports along the beaches of Lingayen Gulf, north of Manila,
at the very strip of beachhead on which American military
experts had always said a Japanese army would some day
try to land. The combined American forces in the Philip-
pines and forces of the Philippine Government moved to
meet the Japanese invading forces, and met them in some
places on identical rice fields and areas of bamboo jungle
where our troops had in the past fought flag wars against
assumed Japanese forces moving inland from landings at
Lingayen Gulf. All was going strictly according to blue-
print on both sides, except that the Japanese by their sneak
attack on Pearl Harbor had knocked out our navy, which
by the Orange Plan was supposed to accomplish a quick

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • JJ

..

defeat of the Japanese navy and start convoying reinforce-
ments to our side from the United States.

With half our fleet of capital ships having been knocked
out in forty minutes at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy
was now in a position to prevent the United States from
sending any reinforcements to the Philippines for a year
or more. This fact alone should have prompted our officers
to take the Orange Plan from its file, tear it into a thousand
pieces and curse the day on which such an asinine plan
was ever devised— a plan which gambled our army on the
chance that our navy would quickly defeat the Japanese
navy. Yet while the Japanese were landing on the beaches
of Lingayen Gulf with tanks, artillery and troops by the
thousands and moving them quickly inland, the Orange
Plan was taken out of its file and put into force. The
American-Filipino troops on Luzon, fighting only with
rifles and pistols against tanks and armored cars, were
ordered into the Corregidor-Bataan stockade.

On the day the last weary unit of American-Filipino
forces stumbled into Bataan and the gates behind them
closed, there were inside the stockade rations to last at full
ration strength no longer than two months, with no pos-
sible way to obtain a pound more until our navy, then
crippled and lying in the mud at Pearl Harbor, could be
rebuilt, the Japanese navy defeated in a battle at sea, and
then troops and supplies convoyed to the Philippines.
That would be two years away at the very least.

The story of what happened to the Corregidor-Bataan
stockade is too recent to require a detailed account here.
Briefly told, however, in the few months left the Ameri-

78 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

can-Filipino forces on Bataan defended themselves with
sublime heroism against attack after attack by the Japa-
nese, stacked division behind division. But every day star-
vation, sickness and battle casualties wore the valiant de-
fenders down more and more. Came a day when only
surrender could save from death the last starved, sick and
wounded soldiers. From the tip of Bataan Peninsula where
these surrendered troops had made their hopeless last
stand, they were put through the long Death March of
awful fame, ending with imprisonment in camps at which
deaths from starvation and disease were to reach a total of
over five hundred a day.

On the day that Bataan fell the Japanese started moving
artillery forward to positions at the tip of Bataan Penin-
sula, from which shells could be lobbed across the narrow
strait onto Corregidor. Day after day tons of shells rained
upon that mound of rock. At last the situation grew as
hopeless there as it had been on Bataan, and it narrowed
to a choice between surrender and death by annihilation.

Meanwhile, in Mindanao and other islands of the South-
ern group there was a force of something like 15,000 that
had been spared the Corregidor-Bataan self -imprisonment.
This force was preparing to split up into organized de-
tachments of guerillas and carry on guerilla warfare from
the mountain jungles, the kind of warfare at which Fili-
pinos have no equals, and the kind which years before the
older heads in the Philippines had said should be the basis
of resistance against a Japanese invasion. But the army of
15,000 on Mindanao and its adjacent islands was not per-
mitted to turn to guerilla warfare. The Japanese refused

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 79

to allow the troops on Corregidor the rights of surrender
unless the Mindanao forces and all other forces remaining
loose in the Philippines were included with them. Hence
these other forces had to surrender, or else become the
cause of the massacre of their comrades being held as
hostages on Corregidor.

The grievous sum of all this was that in five months the
Japanese killed or captured practically all of the American-
Filipino forces, who at the start had numbered nearly
100,000. The only troops to escape were a few thousand
who, as members of small groups separated from the main
bodies, ignored the orders to surrender and took up
guerilla warfare on their own.

Some eight months after the surrender of the last of
the Philippine forces it happened that all but a few of the
senior American officers were moved from prison camps
in the Philippines to camps in Formosa. This island was
interestingly connected in recent history with that of the
Philippines, because it had come into possession of the
Japanese only shortly before the Philippines came into pos-
session of the United States.

In the mountains of Formosa live a fierce race of abo-
rigines with a language and physical features that identify
them as akin to the natives of Borneo and Mindanao.
Their number has been put at 100,000. Time and again
the Japanese, after taking Formosa from China, had tried
to drive these aborigines from their mountain fastnesses,
in order that the rich camphor forests of the mountains
might be harvested. But the resistance was too fierce.
Finally the Japanese were forced to surround the mountain

8o • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

area with a chain of forts, placed a few miles apart and
connected with one another by a heavily electrified fence.
Then, area by area, as a new patch of camphor trees was
tapped, the chain of forts and the electrified fence were
moved forward. But despite all the military expeditions
and the money spent in trying to bring the Formosans of
the mountains under their domination, the Japanese never
succeeded.

In the meantime, in 1904-1905, Japan had defeated the
armies of the Czars of Russia in one great battle after
another. Later she had annexed in succession Korea and
Manchuria and overrun the most populated parts of China
proper. Finally she drove down the Malay Peninsula and
captured 100,000 British, Australian and New Zealand
troops, and in the Philippine Islands in five months she
killed or took prisoner 100,000 American and Filipino
troops. But on Formosa 100,000 dispersed natives, armed
only with spears, for nearly half a century had resisted
Japanese conquest, although Japan had lost many soldiers
and spent plenty of money in an effort to conquer them.

What 100,000 Formosans of the mountains, armed only
with spears, had done for nearly fifty years, 100,000
Americans and Filipinos, armed with rifles and machine
guns, could surely have done for at least two years, if
they had been allowed to turn to guerilla warfare. This is
not mere supposition, for the few thousand soldiers of
the groups that ignored the surrender orders lived through
three years of guerilla warfare and came through it with
far fewer deaths, in proportion to numbers, and in better

THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION • 8 1

health than did the hundred thousand unfortunates who
surrendered.

Corregidor-Bataan is the greatest defeat ever suffered
by an American army, and the decision to concentrate
troops into these two small areas, with only two month's
supply of rations, and with the rescuing navy lying in the
mud at Pearl Harbor, will probably be written into history
as the greatest military mistake ever made anywhere, at
any time, during 3,000 years of recorded warfare. Hitler's
attack upon Stalingrad does not begin to compare with
Corregidor-Bataan in enormity as a mistake. At Stalin-
grad, up to almost the end, the German troops had a
chance of winning, and if they had, the war against Russia
might have been won. But the withdrawal of troops onto
Corregidor and to the tip of Bataan only put the troops
into a stockade, in which they were doomed to defeat
and surrender the day they entered it.

It is no valid argument, which apologists for the Bataan-
Corregidor debacle sometimes try to make, that the mis-
sion of the Filipino-American troops was accomplished
because their heroic resistance for five months delayed the
Japanese from moving forward and thus gave the Austra-
lians and Dutch of the East Indies time to brace themselves
for the invasion that was meant to follow the conquest of
the Philippines. If the enemy's movement toward either
Australia or the East Indies did depend upon the prior
subjugation of the land forces in the Philippines, it never
could have been started if the troops in the Philippines
had been permitted to turn to guerilla warfare. In guerilla

82 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

warfare these troops could no more have been conquered
than could the 100,000 Formosans of the mountains.

But just as only a few, so far, have seemed to realize
that the act of concentrating instead of dispersing our
forces in the Philippines was a colossal blunder which had
to be paid for by the life of every soldier who was there,
or by his suffering through four years of torture, starva-
tion and disease in grim Japanese prison camps, so today
only a few seem fully to realize that only dispersion can
save all the millions of people living in our overcrowded
cities from a mass slaughter that will exceed any horror
the world has ever known.

Before any adequate start can be made toward achiev-
ing atomic security for our nation the great body of our
people must become convinced that dispersion in itself
is a defense against the atomic bomb. Dispersion and still
more dispersion. And it is the only complete defense.

4

DISPERSION OF CITIES

r-i-i

J. HE CONTINUING growth of our cities under the pressure
of intense industrialization has inevitably produced con-
gestion and overcrowding. Factories and workers' homes
were built close to each other because most workers
walked from home to factory. And until recent years the
sites chosen were generally well within the central area
rather than on the outskirts of the city.

Today the automobile and the modern highway offer
the means not only to relieve this congestion but also to
promote the general welfare of the community. A factory
now can just as well be located twelve or fifteen miles
away from the central part of the city, and all of its
hundreds of employees can make the trip in their auto-
mobiles over a wide expressway with less roundabouts and
turns, less stops and starts at traffic lights and with less
wear and tear to themselves and their cars than they now
have in traveling three or four miles through crowded city
streets.

A big manufacturing establishment which is producing
arms or munitions or which can be converted to war

83

84 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

production, must be one of the first to be relocated under
any plan for dispersion. As long as it is allowed to remain
in the heart of the city, the city runs the risk of attack
no matter whether the city is large or small. But if such
a factory is moved to the perimeter of the expanded city
and its facilities are scattered among a good number of
widely-spaced small buildings, it will no longer be a
danger to itself or to the city. The employees can hold
their jobs by using their own cars or buses for the trip
to the new location. Therefore the moving of the en-
dangering factory away from the central part of the city
will not necessitate the sudden moving of the homes of
its workers.

If a city exceeds 15,000 population the removal of its
endangering factories and other heavy establishments to
its perimeter will not alone give it atomic security. Its
inhabitants must also be more widely spread. A careful
survey of the city's present density of population is the
proper first step in approaching this problem. A point that
must be kept in mind is that the atomic bomb, because
of its great cost, will never be dropped on a target chosen
by a pilot at random after his take-off, as might a TNT
bomb costing only a few thousand dollars. On the con-
trary, every bomb used by the enemy will be the subject
of a carefully planned operation, with a specific reward-
ing target for it located and a plane crew carefully briefed
long before the plane which is to deliver the bomb takes
off.

Effective atomic defense requires so thorough a dis-
persion of the population of a city that the number of

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 85

people a bomb can kill will not be great enough to make
the mission a rewarding one. If the density of a city is
low enough in all of its sections to make it impossible
to find a rewarding target anywhere, the entire city will
be safe from a bombing attack, no matter if the city has
a population of only 15,000 or as much as 500,000.

The last-mentioned point is so important that it deserves
a restatement. A city which sets out merely to reduce the
casualty probability from a single bomb instead of making
the whole city a place of such unrewarding density that
the enemy will never plan to attack it, will not, when at
the mercy of an enemy armed with an adequate stockpile
of bombs, be any safer than it was before. On a city that
has dispersed itself but is dispersed not quite enough, the
enemy will be forced to drop more bombs. But requiring
the enemy to spend more of his bombs to destroy the city
is not saving the city. For this reason, the city which
plans to disperse itself must plan on doing an adequate
job of it. If it does not, the city might just as well save
its money and effort and remain in its presently over-
crowded condition, and in this condition brace itself for
the destruction to which it is doomed.

Before any city can set up a trustworthy plan for
spreading its population until none of its sections can be
considered by the enemy as a rewarding target, that city
must have a reliable set of figures on population density
by which it can be guided. If there are no authoritative
figures, some people will suggest one percentage of maxi-
mum density for the objective, and some another, with
the probability that this critical matter will be settled by

86 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

the loudest voice or the foremost politician present, rather
than by careful and authoritative calculations.

In the previous chapter 5000 was given as the minimum
number of civilian deaths the enemy would have to in-
flict upon a city, where personnel alone is his target, to
justify the expenditure of an atomic bomb. It is earnestly
hoped that the reasons given justified the selection of this
particular figure as the critical one. The figure, however,
is offered only as a tentative one and should be revised
whenever new factors or information from official sources
require.

Only recently our government released information as
to the number of deaths which would probably be caused
by the explosion of a modern A-bomb, at various distances
from its center of explosion. Because of the solemn nature
of the subject there is every reason to believe that the
government took care to make these figures as accurate
as it is humanly possible to make them before turning
them over to the trusting public. According to these fig-
ures, within a radius of one-half mile of the center of
explosion of a modern A-bomb on a hypothetical, average
city, the deaths would number 90 per cent of the people
within the area; from one-half to one mile away, they
would be 50 per cent; from one to one and one-half miles
away, they would be 1 5 per cent; and from one and one-
half to two miles away, they would be only about 3 per
cent. Beyond two miles of the center of explosion practi-
cally no lives at all would be lost.

Computing with these figures for a hypothetical city
having a uniform density of 1000 inhabitants to the square

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 87

mile, it is found that the inner zone, whose radius is one-
half mile and whose area, consequently, is .785 square
mile, there would be 707 persons killed. In the next ring,
whose radius is one-half to one mile, and whose area,
consequently, is 2.36 square miles, the number killed
would be 1 1 80. For the third ring, whose radius is one
mile to one and one-half miles, and whose area, conse-
quently, is 3.93 square miles, the number killed would
be 589. For the fourth ring, whose radius is one and one-
half to two miles, and whose area, consequently, is 5.50
square miles, the number killed would be 165. Adding
the death probabilities for these four zones, 707 plus 1180
plus 589 plus 165, we have a total of 2641 persons who
would be killed from a single bomb dropped on a hypo-
thetical city with a uniform density of 1000 to the square
mile.

From the above figures, assuming the enemy's modern
bomb is of the same power as our own, it is obvious that
should the enemy require 5000 casualties as his minimum
reward, when his only purpose in bombing a particular
place is to kill all the people he can, any city with a popu-
lation density not exceeding 1000 to the square mile in
any uniform section of it at least the size of the pattern
of a single bomb blast (about 12.5 square miles), could
not be considered a rewarding target for this costly bomb.
Mathematically, before any such area could suffer 5000
casualties it would have to have a population density of
1893 to the square mile.

Assuming for a moment, then, that 5000 deaths is the
enemy's minimum figure for his atomic bomb, when his

88 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

target is solely the destruction of human lives, a city with
a population density less than 1893 to the square mile in
any section of it large enough to be selected for the definite
target could count itself safe from being attacked by
means of an atomic bomb, while a city with large areas of
greater density could not count itself safe. If the density
is below this figure, the enemy would never plan an attack
upon the city, knowing that in case he should, the bomb,
mathematically, could not be counted upon to yield the
5000 deaths he must claim as his minimum reward. But if
the city has a large section with a density above this figure,
he can give the city a beaded pin on his war map, marking
it for a planned attack when targets of higher priority
have been dealt with, or as a target of opportunity for a
plane driven away from its primary target. This, again,
it must be kept in mind, is taking cases of cities that have
no value for bombing other than the potential military
manpower and the potential war industry manpower they
represent.

Having arrived at this critical density figure in the
manner explained, it will be easy to revise it, if in light
of better information the rewarding death figure is found
to be greater or less than the 5000 figure suggested above.
If the cost to the enemy for producing atomic bombs,
even after all facilities are built and manufacturing effi-
ciency has reached its peak, is still so high that he cannot
afford to use a bomb of the presently presumed size solely
against personnel unless there is a promise of 10,000 deaths,
then the critical population density figure would be twice
that named above or 3786 inhabitants to the square mile.

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 89

On the other hand, if the cost of manufacturing and
delivering bombs upon targets is cut to a figure that will
justify the enemy using a bomb although the predicted
number of deaths from it is less than 5000, then the criti-
cal population density figure will be less than the 1893
figure given above.

The chances seem to favor the reduction of the cost
of manufacturing bombs rather than the increase, or
rather that more destructive power can be put into bombs
at less cost than at present. Our government has released
information to the eifect that a bomb having twice the
power of the present A-bomb could not do as much dam-
age to a city as would two bombs of the present size
dropped at some distance apart on the same city. Nor
would a hydrogen bomb having a thousand times the
power of a modern A-bomb have a thousand times the
destructive effect. In each case this would be true because
the more powerful bomb would waste an enormous
amount of its power near the center of explosion. This
being true, the converse of it must also be true, which is
that the greater danger does not lie in the ability to manu-
facture hydrogen bombs and A-bombs that are terribly
more powerful than the present model, but in overcom-
ing certain technical difficulties with what is known as
critical mass that will make it possible to manufacture
bombs smaller than the present bomb at a cost propor-
tionately less.

If that does become possible, and there is hardly a doubt
that it will, if indeed it is not already, then the critical
population density for a city could be less than the figure

9O • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

given above. Not by any great amount, however, because
the stockpile of bombs will be limited to the number of
bombs already manufactured when war starts, and when
the point is reached where a bomb cannot destroy more
than 5000 civilians the same bomb probably had better
be saved for use against a mobile target, such as a troop-
ship at sea or a division of soldiers on the battlefield. Never-
theless, in order to be working with a margin on the side
of safety rather than on the side of risk, it is here rec-
ommended and urged that a city setting out to accom-
plish atomic defense by means of dispersion should set
its maximum allowable density at 1000 inhabitants to the
square mile, with no section of the city allowed to exceed
this density.

One distressing fact is that there are not now many
cities in the United States of over 15,000 population with
a density average as low as i ooo to the square mile, at least
not in every area the size of a target for an atomic bomb.
Fifty years ago dozens of cities could claim this low den-
sity. What has happened during the past fifty years is that
our cities, with a mania for growth, have achieved enor-
mous size, which has been their wish, but they have done
far too little about increasing the extent of their bounda-
ries. Indeed, in most of our large cities people are now
living five times more closely crowded together than they
once were. But if this condition is a distressing fact, it is
still not hopeless. If we once had adequate dispersion
among most of our large cities, certainly with determina-
tion and the right kind of planning we can have it again.

Therefore, the very first step each city must take toward

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 91

accomplishing defense against atomic bombing will be to
take into its incorporated limits sufficient areas of sur-
rounding land to give its life and commerce a chance to
spread widely apart. After this adequate enlargement of
its area has been made and proper dispersion accomplished
the city must, of course, exercise a strict control over all
future building and developing, so that atomic defense
having once been achieved it can also be preserved. This
the city can do only through appropriate zoning laws and
a permanently established zoning and planning authority.

After the boundaries of a city have become greatly ex-
tended, an area of generous space, which will be referred
to hereafter as the FACTORY ZONE, must be zoned for the
location of factories, machine shops, packing plants, rail-
road terminals and yards, air fields and for all other heavy
establishments. Throughout the area the buildings and
facilities must not only be well dispersed but also dwelling
units of any kind must be excluded. If the city is a port,
its waterfront must be similarly zoned for the facilities
of waterborne commerce.

It is convenient to think and speak of the factory zone
as an area at the perimeter of the city, completely encir-
cling it. That, however, could only be possible with a city
that does not face upon a harbor or river, or does not
have the bank of a mountain at its rear. With the usual
city, consequently, the factory zone will be an area upon
one or more of its flanks. It is also convenient to think of
a city as having an area that approaches a square in shape.
Actually, though, the city to be expanded will probably
grow elongated in shape, because the terrain features that

92 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

determine the building sites for cities with large areas are
likely to be themselves elongated in shape. Furthermore,
an elongated shape has the virtue of increasing the atomic
defense of a city, while convenience of access will not
be lost by increased length, because the arterial streets and
expressways will afford excellent connections between all
the sections.

At the start of any city's program for dispersion only
those few establishments that are rewarding targets for
bombing must be moved to the factory zone. These in-
clude the large factories turning out war materials and
supplies, or those that can readily be converted to this
purpose, the railroad terminals and yards and some others.
All other establishments, such as bottling plants, dairy
product plants, flour mills, clothing factories, furniture
factories and many others can be allowed to remain where
they now are until rimes are more favorable for relocating
them in the factory zone. They are not the kind of estab-
lishment that will draw fire, and in their present locations
do not unduly contribute to population density. It must
be assumed, however, that as new buildings and facilities
for expansion are required, these plants will also be shifted
to the city's factory zone.

At the business core of the city the modern skyscraper,
which stacks humanity floor upon floor into the clouds,
increases enormously the square-mile density of the area
on which it stands. No more of these steel-skeletoned
towers should ever be built, and fortunate is the city which
now has few or none of them to worry about.

There are practical reasons why lawyers, doctors, den-

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 93

tists and other consultants still will choose to have their
offices located above the street floor, and clothing stores,
drug stores, jewelry stores and other retail establishments
must be located on the ground floor. These two general
requirements supplement each other to commend the two-
story building as standard architecture for the future
throughout all business sections of a city, as was true fifty
years ago. The construction of a building of more than
two floors should be permitted only on condition that
there be permanently maintained parking and other open
spaces to compensate for the undue height of the building.

After a city has succeeded through its zoning and plan-
ning authority, in moving to the factory zone all the heavy
establishments that might draw fire upon the city if
allowed to remain where they now are, and has begun
spreading its business sections apart by controlling the
height to which new buildings can rise and encouraging
a good number of shops and stores to move to drive-in
locations, the city will still have before it the problem of
dispersing houses in its residential sections.

Whatever else may be done about this problem, in
nearly every city there must be found a way to correct
an evil of the automobile age that has been causing houses
to become more and more crowded together. Before the
time of the automobile the street in front of a house cost
the owner of the house almost nothing for maintenance.
It was a street of dirt, and got a few squirtings of water
from a horse-drawn waterwagon during the dry months
of summer, as a pretense at laying the dust, but that is
about all the attention it ever did get or require. Because

94 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

there was almost no cost for street maintenance, the street
frontage of most of the homes in the city at that time
was ample. In fact, a city lot at that time normally was
large enough for a house, a lawn at the front of it, a garden
and orchard in the backyard and at the alley a barn for
a span of buggy horses and sheds for a milk cow and a
small flock of chickens. But strangely it is the automobile
that is now depriving home owners of houses built on
such ample grounds. The automobile requires a paved
street, the cost for which must be borne in whole or great
part by the property facing upon it, and the amount is so
great as to cause home frontages to shrink more and more
until now the usual lot has a width of only 50 feet, or even
less, allowing only enough room for the house and a nar-
row driveway alongside, through which the automobile
must get to and from the garage at the rear while rubbing
the paint off its fenders.

This crowded condition can be overcome in part by
doing away, as far as possible, with the idea that the resi-
dential sections of the city must be laid out with miles of
wide streets and wide cross-streets cutting the area up
into rectangular blocks. This was the custom when people
walked or rode in carriages to get from one part of the
city to another, but has been a very expensive custom
and one not at all required since the automobile became
the normal method of travel. One of the plans for dis-
persal provides for replacing the rectangular block and
substituting large areas to be laid out for new homes.
Through these residential areas would run six-lane arterial
streets. These arterial streets would be at considerable in-

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 95

tervals and in general would radiate from the business
core of the city to the factory zone or in the direction
of neighboring cities. No homes of any kind would be
allowed frontage on these wide arterial streets, but on
either side of them would run strips of good width zoned
for drive-in establishments.

At right angles to these arterial streets and at consider-
able distances apart would be dead-end streets leading
into park-like areas. Leading from a dead-end street would
be short lanes and loops which would all be fronted with
houses. But because these driveways would serve only the
homesites in the immediate area and not as thoroughfares,
a street with a two-lane paved surface and with wide un-
paved shoulders, like a county road, would be adequate
for the dead-end street. The lanes and loops leading from
the dead-end street would require only one lane of paved
surface. The owners living in these park-like areas cer-
tainly should not mind driving their cars two or three
hundred yards over one-lane and two-lane driveways
getting out into the arterial street, if they have before
them six lanes of paved surface over which they can
travel the remaining fifteen or twenty miles of their trip
with few stop lights and no speed zones less than forty
miles an hour. The driveways within the park area built
in this economical manner might well be fronted with lots
150 or 200 feet wide, yet costing the property owners
no more for street construction and maintenance than
they now are paying on their squeezed strips of 5o-foot
frontage in blocks fronted and sided with wide streets
used for all kinds of traffic.

96 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

At first thought it may seem that a residential area laid
out in the manner described above would be a labyrinth
of dead-end streets, lanes and loops, and no one not
already thoroughly familiar with the area could ever
locate a house anywhere within it. This would be the
case if the city persisted in using for the new area the
same bewildering system of designating streets and homes
now used in the area of rectangular blocks, which gives
a name to each street, no matter how short or unimpor-
tant it may be as a street. But if the city will designate a
series of dead-end streets by consecutive numbers with
reference to the arterial street, and designate also by con-
secutive numbers the lanes and loops branching from a
dead-end street, and finally the houses of a row by con-
secutive numbers with reference to the street, lane or
loop on which it is fronted, a total stranger to the city
would be able to locate a home anywhere in the city as
easily as one can locate an office anywhere in the heart
of Manhattan when one knows only the name of its
street and building entrance number and the number of
the room.

Still more dispersion among the houses in the park-like
areas would be accomplished by giving greater depth to
a lot than there is now, so that no lot would consist of
less than 2 acres. On these 2 acres of land besides the house
and customary lawn at the front there would be space
enough at the rear for a garage with graveled turn-round
in front of it, a garden and grove, and for just about any-
thing else the owner should care to build or plant.

The residential sections of a city which are chopped

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 97

up into conventional rectangular blocks with thorough-
fares crossing and crisscrossing them ruthlessly, could not,
of course, be changed at once into park-like areas. Never-
theless, much can be done in that direction, if some of the
streets are widened into arterial streets and the others
either closed or made dead-end streets. It is conceivable
that any city with areas of homes along worn-out streets,
and with not enough money in its treasury to reconstruct
these streets in full, can with a little intelligent planning
save at least a half of the presently estimated cost for
repairs by closing one end of certain streets, changing
some streets into one-lane passageways, and doing away
with others entirely, and after these changes have been
made leaving the area more beautiful and desirable than
it was before.

No doubt many will say right away that this idea of
giving 2 acres of ground to homes sounds well and good
for homes to be built in the future but does not explain
how houses already built, and admittedly standing crowded
too closely together for atomic defense, can be made to
thin out. They will admit it is all right for a city through
its zoning laws to require factories which would draw
fire to be displaced to the factory periphery at once, to
prohibit the construction of any more tall buildings, and
even to refuse a building permit for a new residence in
any part of the city unless it has around it a minimum of
2 acres of ground, but they still will declare that no city
government has a right to say to a man who has already
built or bought a house that he must tear it down or move
it to a less congested place. And they will be dead right.

98 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Between requiring a factory to displace and requiring a
home owner to displace there is a different principle in-
volved. Once a man has bought or built a home it be-
comes his castle, and his right to live in it should never
be taken away from him by compulsory surrender unless
the public interest clearly demands it, and then only
after adequate compensation has been made him. If this
principle of the inviolability of the home must be over-
ridden by dictatorially and arbitrarily telling the owners of
millions of homes that they must move, it will mean that
we shall destroy democracy in America by trying to
accomplish atomic security. In that case, to choose be-
tween the two forms of destruction, it would be just as
well to sit right and wait for the atomic bomb to come
and do its worst.

The problem, then, is how to thin out the homes al-
ready built, but without requiring a single home owner
against his will to move from a house he has already
bought or built. The problem is tough, as are all prob-
lems of atomic defense, but by no means is it insoluble.

If the city is a typical city of 100,000 or more popula-
tion, a survey of it will disclose that in the older residen-
tial areas there are not a few homes of permanent con-
struction that were built before the automobile had started
to shrink property frontage, and about these homes there
are many yards of good space. In this section also will be
found many old frame houses which, if they could speak
for themselves, would like to come down. A third type
of building found in considerable numbers in the same
area is a frame house of four or five rooms with rather

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 99

plain exteriors and not much of a credit to the section
of the city where it stands. This type of building has
sprung up within the past few years at the side of a per-
manent home on a small corner of ground which has either
been sold by the owner of the permanent home, or the
house has been built by him and rented out. In the new
additions to the city two types of houses stand out. One
is the large house of permanent construction, with ample
yard space surrounding it. The other is a frame house
of five or six rooms, very modern and very attractive,
but unfortunately standing on a lot with only 50 feet or
less of frontage, on a street crowded with houses of the
same type. Taken all together, the old and the new areas
and all the types of buildings covering them, the density
is too great for atomic security, and a thinning-out must
be accomplished.

However, when it comes to the work of dispersing
homes what must be taken into account is not how
crowded the houses may be that presently are standing
on a particular street or in a particular section, but how
many dwelling units there are on an area of 12.5 square
miles, the approximate area a single modern A-bomb can
cover with its destruction. If the city is typical, the num-
ber of houses of brick or stone, and consequently unmove-
able, and those built of wood that are too large to be
easily moved, are together so greatly outnumbered by the
readily moveable small houses and the buildings that
should be wrecked, that the removal of these would leave
the permanent homes and the large frame mansions and
most of the recently built smaller houses with an average

100 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

of not less than 2 acres to the dwelling unit, which here
is deemed the minimum average space homes must have
before a city can regard itself safe from an atomic attack.
If the city is not typical but rather has an unusual pro-
portion of fine homes, the chances are that these homes
already have about them spacious yards and consequently
not many moveable homes need be taken from the general
area to give the homes that are to remain the required
minimum average of 2 acres of space.

The dispersion of homes until the dwelling units in each
residential section have an average of not less than 2 acres
of yard space can be accomplished in each city by taking
over an area in which there are no buildings, or very
few. This we may call the RELOCATION AREA, in which
2 -acre lots would be sold to actual homeseekers, one lot
only to any one person, under a plan of government aid
to be presently explained. For the typical city the size of
this relocation area would be approximately three times
the total area of its present residential sections. It will be
convenient to speak of it here as one piece of land, and
for some of the cities it undoubtedly would be, but for
others it would consist of two or more separate tracts.

During the first two or three years of the operation of
relocation most of the houses on the relocation area would
be those which have been moved there from the other
areas, because building materials and labor are likely to
be too scarce during these early years to allow much new
construction. Furthermore, the moving of houses into the
area rather than the building of new ones would be en-
couraged in every way and may even be required in some

DISPERSION OF CITIES • IOI

of the cities, as only in this way could the thinning of
houses in the overcrowded old residential sections be ex-
pedited.

In some of the cities the moving could be done by the
city. In other cities it would be handled by private con-
tractors. But in either case the job would not be difficult.
With the use of modern house-moving equipment a frame
house of large size can be lifted from its foundation, put
on pneumatic tires, and pulled along a street about as fast
as the tractor hooked onto it can normally move. At Rib-
bing, Minnesota, where not so long ago an entire city had
to move to a new location to make way for a new open-
pit iron mine, there was a good demonstration of how
really easily and at what small cost frame houses can be
moved when there are enough to be moved at one time
to make a project out of the work.

A vacated lot might be readily sold to the owner of
any adjoining piece of property on which stands one of
the permanent houses or large frame houses that will
remain in the old area. If this cannot be done, it might
be bought by the city or by a real estate company, to
be held until it and neighboring vacated lots make up a
minimum of 2 acres, and then the whole would be offered
in one piece as a desirable homesite. However disposed
of, the amount received for it should, in the usual case,
be sufficient to reimburse the owner for the small sum
he would be required to pay for the subsidized lot on the
relocation area, and enough besides to pay for most, if
not all, of the costs for hauling the house to its new loca-
tion and constructing a new foundation for it. On top of

102 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

that, the house, when it has been set up on the attractive
and spacious lot in the relocation area, should be more
valuable than it was before.

It is true that many of the houses in the old area will
be tied by mortgages to the property on which they stand.
But because removal of homes to the relocation area will
be to the interests of the mortgage holders as well as the
homeowners, there seems no good reason to doubt that
transfer of the mortgage title from the old piece of prop-
erty to the new will be allowed in every case where trans-
fer is requested.

Those who are quick with figures may say that if an
area of 2 acres is allowed as the minimum area for a family
dwelling unit on the relocation area, and also as the mini-
mum average area to the family unit to which the old
residential sections must be thinned, and that if four people
to the family are approximately the national average for
the dwelling unit, approximately 1280 persons to the
square mile would be living in the residential areas after
the work of dispersion is accomplished. This would be
exceeding 1000 persons to the square mile, the number
which a city should set as its density objective, if the
areas were solid with residential lots. But deducting from
the average square mile of area in the residential sections
all the space that would be taken up in arterial streets,
drive-in establishments along the arterial streets, grounds
for schools, churches and parks, it is safe to say that in
any area of 12.5 square miles in which homes have no less
than 2 acres of ground, the population density would not
exceed an average of 1000 to the square mile.

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 103

The relocation area would be the principal means by
which the city would achieve low density of population,
but in addition to it the city should give thought to pro-
viding more space for parks, particularly the natural parks
which cost little for upkeep, to extending the grounds of
schools and hospitals, encouraging the congregations of
its several churches to surround their churches with
ground for the planting of groves and the building of
ample parking space, and to dozens of other projects
within the city which would mean less crushing and
crowding for all.

Also, once a city has become dispersion-minded there
should be a decided increase in the development of new
residential areas by private capital, in which the property,
as in the past, would be handled entirely by arrangements
between developers and buyers. This should be especially
true of the areas suitable for those who can afford to
pay for the construction of sumptuous homes. The only
important new control the city would exercise over such
residential areas would be to zone them for a minimum
yard area of 2 acres to the dwelling unit.

Some of the cities when they start expanding enor-
mously are going to run into problems peculiar to expan-
sion, such as spreading beyond a county line, overrruning
suburban cities, bumping into other large cities, and so on.
None of these problems, however, is unsolvable.

If a large city must overspread its present county in
order to expand adequately, the state should allow a con-
solidation of counties, so that the expanded city will not
be forced to become divided between two or more coun-

104 ' TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

ties. Or for a particular city faced with this problem the
situation might best be handled by taking the city out of
county government entirely and giving it the status of an
independent city, such as already has been done for Bal-
timore, St. Louis and for all the large cities in Virginia.
In case an expanding city spreads beyond a self-govern-
ing suburban city, the absorption of the small city into
the large one must be allowed; otherwise there would be
a complicated situation of one city lying completely in-
side another.

In a case where two or more important cities are occu-
pying the same industrial area and cannot expand their
boundaries adequately without bumping into one another,
it might be advantageous for the two or more cities to
consolidate into a single city. The arguments that have
been given here for the dispersion of cities in order to
achieve atomic defense do not intimate that the cities must
stop growing in size of population, but only that their
population densities must be decreased. In fact, it can be
expected that in some instances the consolidation of two
or more cities into one would help the cause of dispersion.

Houston, Texas, with its area of neighboring cities can
be taken as a good example. Houston, by taking into its
incorporated limits all of the other cities and towns on
its side of Galveston Bay, can have the longest waterfront
of any American city and unlimited space extending in-
land for factory zones and residential sections. Within
this magnificent area a determined new Houston— and to
those who know the city well, Houston is already the
very essence of determination — could grow into a city of

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 1 05

two million, three million, or even larger, and still not
have a population density in any sizeable area exceeding
1000 to the square mile. Consequently it would be in no
more danger from atomic bombing than a city of only
20,000. Corpus Christi is another port city with a bright
future, having large sections of vacant land and miles of
water frontage available for its area of expansion.

It was said above that almost all of our cities of over
15,000 population presently have areas that are too
crowded. But the buying of additional land and costs for
developing it are burdens which not many of these cities
could shoulder alone. Much financial assistance must be
given them from their state governments and from the
federal government.

The state will have the obligation, as it now has, of
aiding the cities in the construction of their many arterial
streets that are to serve also as inter-city highways. The
construction of these arterial streets will be a major item
of cost confronting the cities concerned with expansion,
and if the state government finds that it can bear the larger
share of the cost, at the expense, perhaps, of other high-
way construction in the state for the time being, it will
have made an important contribution toward helping its
cities achieve atomic defense.

Among many other obligations the federal government
owes the cities in helping them with atomic defense, is
to be generous in the granting of loans through the Re-
construction Finance Corporation to the war industry
plants and other establishments which may be required
to relocate at once in the perimeters of the cities, and

IO6 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

firm in its refusal of loans at this time to other companies
seeking funds for plant expansion which violate the prin-
ciple of decentralization of war industries and facilities.
But in direct financial assistance to the cities in accom-
plishing dispersion of their residential sections and en-
dangering factories the federal government owes the great-
est obligation of all. Unless the federal government lends
generous assistance with this work, not many of the cities
will be able to achieve the atomic security they seek.

This is assistance that the cities concerned have a right
to ask for from the federal government without feeling
that they are begging for it or asking favors. The citizens
of these cities have a good part of their incomes taken
from them by the federal government in the form of in-
come taxes, excise taxes, internal revenue taxes, and other
federal taxes until, as all know, there is little left which
could stand further taxation, certainly not enough left
for the cities to assume that they could raise by means
of increased local taxes the money with which to pay in
full for all the works that will be required to achieve
atomic security. Really, about the only way a city could
attempt to raise the required amount itself would be
through the sale of some more municipal bonds. But who
would want to buy for this or any other purpose a bond
offered by a city that is now faced with atomic destruc-
tion? On the market the bond could not be considered
a sound investment until after the city has its atomic
defense in order.

As the federal government does take away from the
citizens in the form of various taxes such a large part of

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 107

their incomes, it cannot in good conscience say to the
cities that are now faced with atomic destruction that it
needs all the money collected in taxes to help the Atlantic
Pact nations build up their armed forces and keep them
supplied with Marshall Plan aid, and pay the enormous
bill for expanding our own armed forces, in addition to
paying the normal expenses of government. The govern-
ment cannot say that because of these obligations it has
not a cent left to spare to the cities for their atomic de-
fense programs — that they will just have to get along for
themselves the best way they can. Of course our federal
government has no reputation for pushing the cities off
with a hard-luck story of its own in any such manner.

On the contrary, as the record stands at the moment
of this writing Congress has already appropriated 3.1 bil-
lion dollars for the building of air raid shelters in the
cities. This is a lot of money, even for the United States,
which has ceased to be staggered by big fiscal figures,
and if graft and misuse can be kept away from the spend-
ing of it, it could pay for the digging of enough holes
in the ground to give one to every man, woman and
child to tumble into, like a prairie dog, whenever an air
raid siren starts sounding. Unfortunately, however, air
raid shelters are no defense against the atomic bomb. The
people who must crawl into the ground to keep from being
killed by an atomic bomb are not going to be much better
off than they were before if they come up out of their
holes after the explosion to find everywhere about them
a city crackling with flames and smothered with smoke
and the whole area sown with deadly radioactivity. Nor

108 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

will it be of much comfort to them to know that in their
city there are corps of volunteer fire fighters and stretcher
bearers, when the number of seriously injured among the
volunteers themselves will be exceedingly great. What the
people of a city will want is atomic defense, not merely
atomic rescue, and this they can have only by spreading
their city out until it is no longer a rewarding target for
the enemy's atomic bomb.

When the construction of air raid shelters and the or-
ganization of brigades of fire fighters and stretcher bearers
are recognized as measures that are falsely leading the
people in the cities into believing that security against
atomic destruction is being provided for them, the citizens
of all cities of population exceeding 15,000 will have the
right to demand that the federal government aid them in
obtaining real atomic defense for their cities. This the
federal government can do by appropriating funds suffi-
cient to cover the cost of the additional land the cities
must acquire for their relocation areas and by helping in
considerable measure to build the water and sewage sys-
tems and construct the streets in these new additions.

An estimate, with many factors involved, puts at ap-
proximately 8 million the total number of houses in the
cities exceeding 15,000 population that must be moved to
the relocation areas. This will require 20 million acres of
land for the relocation areas, allowing 2 acres as the mini-
mum ground space for each dwelling unit, and allowing
space for the arterial streets, drive-in borders along the
arterial streets, space for schools, and other non-residen-
tial spaces within the relocation areas. Because the boun-

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 109

daries of the cities must be extended at considerable dis-
tance beyond present boundaries into what now are farm
lands or waste lands, the average cost for the relocation
areas should not exceed $250 an acre. This figure will at
least serve for the purpose of estimating an appropriation.
20 million acres at $250 an acre gives 5 billion dollars as
the amount of money Congress should appropriate for
purchasing relocation areas. In addition to this amount
10 billion dollars should be appropriated for buying land
for factory zones and putting in the water and sewage
systems and building the streets in both new areas. A total
of 15 billion, divided over two fiscal years, is here esti-
mated as sufficient federal aid toward accomplishing atomic
defense for all the cities in the United States exceeding
15,000 population, with the exception of New York City,
Boston and the crowded neighboring cities, the cities of
three counties in Connecticut, of five counties in North-
ern New Jersey, all of the cities of the state of Rhode
Island, and Washington D. C. These cities are special
cases, and will be given further comment.

The 1 5 billion dollars are estimated sufficient assistance
to come from the federal government provided, of course,
the sum is properly handled. What is meant by proper
handling is that the federal government, through a com-
mission especially created for the purpose, would keep the
expenditure under supervision and control. This commis-
sion would turn over to a city entitled to receive the aid
a portion of its pro rata share from time to time, as re-
quired, but no part of it until such city has submitted
to the federal agency a satisfactory plan providing for the

110 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

acquisition of a relocation area of size estimated to reduce
the density average of homes in its present residential
sections to not less than 2 acres to the family dwelling
unit, prohibiting the building in the future of a new house
anywhere within the city that will not have 2 acres of
land on which to stand and providing for the purchase
of sufficient land to give the city an adequate factory zone
with a wide belt of land to be left vacant between this
zone and the rest of the city.

The cities exceeding 15,000 population vary so widely
among themselves in the sizes of their areas, the value of
adjoining property, and in regard to so many other fac-
tors that the only practicable way in which to divide
the 15 billion among them would be in proportion to
their respective populations, as shown in the 1950 official
census. To give a few examples of the pro rata shares: a
city of 15,000 would receive approximately 3.3 million
dollars; one of 100,000, about 22 million; and one of
500,000, approximately 110 million. (In the Appendix is
a complete list of cities of more than 15,000 population,
and their pro rata shares.)

The sum for any city, though large, would not for the
average city be enough to buy the required amount of
land for the relocation area and the factory zone, and to
pay for developing these new areas with water and sewage
systems and paved streets. But it must be remembered
that lots in the relocation area, though subsidized, would
be sold to bona fide homeowners for enough at least to
cover the cost of the land (about $500 for the 2 acres), and
that factory sites in the factory zone, lots for drive-in

DISPERSION OF CITIES • III

business locations along the strips bordering the arterial
streets, and grounds for churches and other semi-public
institutions would be sold at fair market values. The total
amount received from all these sales of property, com-
bined with the amount received from the federal govern-
ment, plus the aid the city would receive from the state
for the construction of arterial streets, should, for the
average city, be enough to bring about proper dispersal
of homes without requiring any sacrifice from the owners
of houses moved from the old sections to the relocation
area, and without putting the city into debt for a new
bond issue. It is true that some of the cities would not be
able to buy acreage for their relocation areas at an average
price as low as $250 an acre, because of high land values in
their regions, but for these places it would also be true
that the land to be sold for drive-in locations along the
arterial strips and factory sites in the factory zone can be
priced correspondingly higher, so that the one condition
should balance the other.

In fact, a city that buys its land carefully, takes measures
to prevent jumps in land prices, makes good sales of the
drive-in locations and factory sites, and is generously
aided by its state on the cost of construction of arterial
streets, should be able to put aside enough money to com-
plete the construction of the two-lane and one-lane streets
in the relocation area and take care of transporting the
moveable houses that are to go from the old sections to
the new. Naturally, a project of this kind would be a
challenge for each city to give every effort toward thrift-
ily spending its share of federal appropriations for atomic

112 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

defense. But if a city does not undertake the project with
such determination, and will allow speculators in property
and others to horn in on the work with the idea of lining
their own pockets, then, of course, the amount of money
received from the federal government would not be suffi-
cient by half to attain atomic defense for the city.

After a city has qualified itself to start receiving por-
tions of its pro rata share of the federal appropriations
to buy and develop its relocation area and factory zone,
how and at what price the city should sell residential lots
on the relocation area to actual homeseekers, the prices it
would ask for drive-in locations along the arterial streets
and for factory sites in the factory zone, the amount of
assistance it would lend to the work of moving the move-
able homes, the manner of its disposing of the vacated
pieces of property in the old section— all are details to be
left to the decisions of the city concerned. The federal
government will have fulfilled its obligation to the cities
when it appropriates the necessary 15 billion dollars and
creates a commission through which it can be assured that
every city to receive a share of the fund will produce
and follow a plan of dispersion that will reduce its resi-
dential density to a minimum of 2 acres to the dwelling
unit, and will without delay cause all of its endangering
establishments to be displaced to its factory zone.

The subsidized relocation area and factory zone by
which a city will obtain its atomic defense will not put
the city into the real estate business permanently, nor
is any experiment in socialism going to be tried out. In
some regions of the early West it was not unusual for a

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 113

city to own the entire townsite at the start, and to sell
residential and business lots to whomever it could. The
minute a lot was sold it became private property, and
when the last lot had been disposed of the city was out
of the real estate business for good and all. It would be
the same with the relocation area and the factory zone.
After all the lots and sites are sold the city's control over
the population density in all of its areas would be exercised
solely through appropriate zoning laws and its perma-
nently constituted zoning and planning authority.

Appropriations of 15 billion dollars from the federal
treasury, spread over two years, to be spent upon reloca-
tion areas and factory zones for the large and middle-sized
cities should not only give them atomic defense, but also
do other things for them of great and enduring good. Be-
cause many old houses will be wrecked and others moved
to the relocation areas and set upon new foundations, the
cities will be doing the best jobs of slum clearance they
have ever done. Furthermore, the expanded cities will have
a better chance to combat crime and corruption by de-
stroying the roots of their evil.

Many years ago Viscount James Bryce in his The Amer-
ican Commonwealth told us that our large cities were
our one conspicuous failure in democracy. His observa-
tion was not unfair. In the large cities have flourished
gangsterism, rackets, graft and many other evils from
which other parts of the country, by and large, have been
free. But the viscount with further inquiry might have
observed that in our large cities a strictly residential sec-
tion, a manufacturing zone or a strictly business part is

114 ' TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

seldom disgraced with crime and vice. Most of the crime
and vice in our large cities is in the squeezed areas where
residential sections and business sections overlap. Here is
found a distressing scene of small shops and stores with
families living on the upper floors, rows of tenant houses
crowded wall to wall, filthy streets, garbage and ash cans
at the curb, washing hanging from windows, old people
sitting on doorsteps during the summer evenings trying
to get a breath of fresh air and children playing in the
street. In these drab, cheerless, polluted quarters humanity
does not have a proper chance. By spreading a city out,
and segregating stores and offices, manufacturing plants
and dwellings into their proper zones, it will be made
possible for the lives of all in a big city to be more whole-
somely lived.

It has been admitted that atomic defense through dis-
persion cannot be gained in New York City, Boston and
its cartwheel of neighboring cities, the city of Washing-
ton, three counties in Connecticut, five counties in New
Jersey, and the entire state of Rhode Island. New York
City does not have room in which to expand adequately
as a single municipality because it is squeezed between the
state of Connecticut on the one hand and New Jersey
on the other. Its population of nearly eight millions is
sardined into an area no larger than the area of New
Orleans, whose population is only about one-fourteenth as
large. Lacking the space to spread laterally, the city has
taken to the clouds with its skyscrapers.

Boston cannot expand because it is fenced about with

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 115

large cities as badly in need of room for expansion as her-
self. Before the metropolitan area of Providence could be
properly spread out it would require at least a third of the
area of Rhode Island. Connecticut has three-fourths of its
population crowded inside three counties. New Jersey
has two-thirds of its population inside a pocket that is
within commuting distance of New York City. Washing-
ton is a special problem, which will be discussed at length
later.

A Chinese proverb says that one picture is worth a
thousand words. On a map of the United States, starting
at Boston, draw a line to Providence, from Providence to
Hartford, Hartford to New York City, New York City
to Newark, and using this slightly zig-zagged line as an
axis, draw an oval about it. Let this egg-shaped oval be
called the Area of Utter Destruction.

This Area of Utter Destruction, which is no larger in
land area than some of the counties in the West, has
crowded within it over 1 5 million inhabitants — more than
a tenth of the whole population of the United States. The
enemy could let fall an atomic bomb almost anywhere
within this teeming area and have a rewarding target, and
by covering all of its densest parts with saturation bomb-
ing could kill at least 10 million.

If ten years instead of four were the estimated time the
cities have left to achieve atomic defense through disper-
sion, there would be presented lengthy arguments why
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York,
and New Jersey should make common cause of their vul-

Il6 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

nerability to atomic destruction and unite into one large
state. This new state would have an area of about 72,000
square miles. It still would be only sixteenth in size among
the other states, but second to none in agricultural and
manufacturing wealth, historical spots and variety of recre-
ational places. But the real point is that within this one
area, with many miles of present state boundaries elimi-
nated, all of the large cities, uniting with neighboring
cities, would have a chance to spread until safe from
atomic destruction.

Because it is unlikely that the five states of the Area of
Utter Destruction can be induced, in the short time avail-
able, to unite into a single state, it appears that the only
other way in which its 15 million people can be saved
from terrible disaster will be by the relocation of most
of its factories in other regions. What is to stop these
factories from moving? Surely the time has come in this
stark crisis of the nation when civic organizations could
not hold it a sin for a factory management to consider
moving to a safe location. On the contrary, if a city is so
situated that it cannot expand its area so as to give its
factories a safe zone at its perimeter, the leaders of its
civic organizations should be among the first to let the
factories know the truth, and wish them good luck in
other places. When the endangering factories have been
moved elsewhere and the city has shrunk in size of popu-
lation to possibly a fourth or fifth of its former size, it
may be that it will have a chance to escape from an atomic
bombing attack. If a city of, say, 250,000 does not have

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 117

open land surrounding it over which to expand itself,
better for it and for the country that it dwindle to 50,000
and live than to hold onto its crowded factories and
swarming humanity and be blasted from the face of the
earth. And if each stockholder in a factory, knowing that
the factory is doomed to destruction if allowed to remain
where it now is, insists upon its relocation, he will be
acting to save the lives of employees and their families,
his duty to God to do if he can, and he also will be
acting to save his investments, which he certainly has a
right to do. Moreover, he will be helping to save America.

The factories moved from the Area of Utter Destruc-
tion will be followed by millions of employees, and a
proportionate number of merchants, professional men and
many others must of necessity follow the groups of in-
dustrial workers. For the factory workers, however, the
migration to other regions is not going to be an unusual
experience. During the past ten years there has been an
average of just about one move for every industrial worker
in the land. Indeed, the migratory character of our people,
especially our factory employees, during the past decade
has been one of the most astonishing economic facts of
the times.

The atomic bomb, or rather atomic energy, is going
to make the greatest changes in the human race in all the
thousands of years since the discovery of fire. It is char-
acteristic of any great change that it makes opportunities
for some and takes them away from others. The cities of
the Boston-Providence-Hartford-New York City-Newark

Il8 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

oval that cannot expand because of the peculiar way the
five states are wedged together, like a jam of logs, and
the cities elsewhere that could expand properly if they
made a determined effort, but will not, are cities which
should have opportunities taken away from them. All of
these cities can expect to start losing factories by the
dozens and population in droves.

A factory seeking another location must be assured, of
course, that in the new location it will be safe from bomb-
ing attacks. Any other city bidding for this factory, but
having not yet put its own self in order for atomic defense
has nothing to offer it. But any city which will extend
its boundaries to give itself a factory zone at its perimeter,
with a wide belt between that zone and other parts of the
city to be left free of buildings, and which will disperse
its residences to a minimum of 2 acres to the dwelling
unit, and by exercising its zoning laws through a perma-
nently constituted zoning and planning authority is de-
termined that it will never allow the population density
in any section of its area to exceed 1000 to the square
mile, has security from atomic bombing to offer the fac-
tory and to all employees and families that will follow
it to its new location. Such a city, if it is ahead of most
rivals in a race to be among the first cities to achieve
civilian atomic defense, can expect to gain many new fac-
tories and industries.

In fact, no matter what factors in the past were favor-
able for the growth of cities, all now stand revalued and
shrunken in importance before the terrible power and
danger of the atomic bomb. For the years 1952, 1953,

DISPERSION OF CITIES • 119

1954 and 1955, therefore, it will matter but little how
much climate, history and bustle a city boasts about. The
one factor, surpassing in importance all other factors
taken together, will be the assurance, promised in good
faith, that it will not be a rewarding target for an atomic
bombing attack.

5

THE WHEAT LANDS
OF THE WEST

O

!NE of the very few things of which we can be com-
pletely sure about a total war, before it comes, is that no
belligerent will fail to use any effective special weapon
that has already been developed, if, presumably, more
harm can be inflicted upon the enemy than is likely to
be suffered in retaliation from the same weapon. Among
weapons of this category is one about which, so far, not
a great deal has been said. None of the special weapons,
however, with the single exception of the atomic bomb,
is more ominous for the future of the United States in
wartime than the incendiary parchment. Though not an
atomic weapon itself, the incendiary parchment can be
carried by the bale loads to any region in the United States
by any type of long-ranging plane that the atomic bomb
has caused to be developed, and terrible damage can thus
be inflicted.

The incendiary parchment is a product of British in-
genuity of World War II, and details of its manufacture
and prospective uses long since have been made public.
It is a composition of phosphorus impregnated in a leaf

1 20

THE WHEAT LANDS OF THE WEST • 121

of combustible fiber about the size of a cigarette paper.
So small is it, in fact, that thousands of sheets can be
borne aloft in a single plane load. Dropped from high in
the sky at night, when the air is cool and moist, the parch-
ment floats gently to the ground, and there it will lie as
inert as any other piece of paper so long as air and ground
remain normally moist. But on a day when the sun comes
out bright and hot the parchment, characteristic of a
phosphorus substance, will ignite spontaneously. When
this happens a flame shoots upward to the height of a foot,
setting fire to dry grass or any other combustible matter
near it.

Though tests with the incendiary parchment of World
War II proved that it could be depended upon to withhold
its spurt of flame until the spot where it landed grew dry
and hot enough to allow the quick spreading of a fire, it
was a weapon that could not be used effectively for the
destruction of the ripening grain in Germany. This was
because in Germany, as in other European countries, the
reaping or binding method is used in the harvest. By this
method the grain is reaped and bound while the stalk is
still streaked with greenness. It is then piled in shocks
in the field, where, during a lapse of three or four weeks,
it goes through what is known as a "sweating" period,
during which the processes of ripening and curing are
completed. It is then ready for the threshing machine.
Because in harvesting the grain is cut before its stalks
become thoroughly ripe, there is little chance that a fire
would spread through the field.

In the East, the South and parts of the middle section

122 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

of our own country, where summer moisture is not want-
ing, the binding machine is also used, and the grain is
cut before its stalks are thoroughly ripe. In these regions,
consequently, an incendiary parchment dropped into the
midst of a field of wheat at the time of the ripening prob-
ably would not cause a fire to take hold. But in most of
the wheat growing regions to the west of the Mississippi,
where most of America's wheat is produced, it would be
a different story. In these regions of semi-arid climate the
grain is left standing in the field until ripe almost to the
point of shedding its kernels. It may then be cut with a
machine that reaps and winnows it, to be picked up from
the ground, after only two or three days of drying in the
baking sun, by another machine that both gathers and
threshes it in one operation. In some of these regions, so
arid indeed is the climate that no drying whatever after
reaping is necessary, in which case the wheat may be cut
with a header and taken directly from the spout of the
header to the threshing machine. With still less trouble,
it may be handled by a combine harvester, a machine that
was developed especially for the grain fields of the semi-
arid West, which circles a field of ripe grain, reaping and
threshing the grain and spilling it into gunny sacks or grain
wagons in one continuous operation.

Whether with winnowing, cutting with header and
hauling directly to the thresher, or handling with com-
bine harvester — any one of these three rapid methods for
getting the grain into sack or bin is much more economi-
cal than the method which requires binding and stacking
into shocks, because several steps of labor are saved and,

THE WHEAT LANDS OF THE WEST • 123

moreover, the cost of binding twine is saved. But the point
is that these rapid and economical methods of harvesting
wheat can be used only in those certain suitable regions,
such as the semi-arid parts of the West, where the grain
does not require a period of standing in the shock to com-
plete the processes of ripening before it is ready to be
threshed.

In a Western wheat region when a field reaches golden
ripeness and is awaiting the machine for the harvesting,
it is defenseless against an accidental fire. For instance, a
lighted cigarette may be dropped from a passing automo-
bile along the highway bordering the field. Among the
parched grass where the cigarette happens to fall it is
fanned into a flame. Once started, the flame spreads
quickly across the shoulder of the highway, leaps into a
field of wheat, and with roar and crackle, as uncontrollable
as fire on the loose through prairie grass, it races across
the field. In minutes all that is left of the golden field
is a smoking ruin of black ashes. During a summer season
in the West hundreds of fields of ripe wheat are destroyed
in this sudden manner.

This accidental loss is only a very small sample of what
could happen in time of war to the wheat regions of the
West when the far-ranging planes of the enemy start
coming over at night and turning loose over them millions
of incendiary parchments. The next day after such a con-
certed raid, about the time the sun starts getting in its
best licks and the wheat is as dry as tinder, here, there
and everywhere the parchments would spring into life
from spontaneous combustion. In a single day from a single

124 * TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

raid of planes all of the ripened fields in an area the
width of several counties could be completely consumed
by fire.

A suggestion for a solution, naturally, is that the binder
machine should be brought into service to replace the pres-
ent methods of harvesting the fields of wheat in the West-
ern regions. The machine would reap and bind the grain
before the stalks are thoroughly ripe, and allow the proc-
esses of curing to be completed in the shock, as is the
practice in most wheat areas elsewhere. This method,
however, would increase the cost of growing wheat con-
siderably. In the dry lands of the West the bushel yield
per acre for wheat normally is so light that it is only by
harvesting the grain by an extremely economical method
that wheat can be profitably raised. But even if cost of
harvesting were not a deciding factor, such is the dryness
of climate throughout most of the wheat areas of the
West that the blades on the wheat stalks wither and parch
in the sun before the kernels are filled. In these regions,
consequently, the ripening wheat very probably could be
destroyed by an incendiary raid even before the field was
ready for the binder.

The introduction of "strip farming" into these dryland
areas appears to be the only practicable means of saving
them from destruction by an incendiary raid. Strip farm-
ing has already been experimented with and recommended
for these dryland areas, not as protection against fires, but
as a proved measure for erosion control. In these areas,
unlike fields in the East, the soil is not sufficiently fertile
to support a yearly crop. The normal practice is to put a

THE WHEAT LANDS OF THE WEST • 125

field to a crop of wheat one year, and the following year
only to plow the ground and let it lie fallow for a season.
"Summerf allowing" is the local term. Nitrogen from the
air restores nourishment to the soil during the idle season.
In the autumn of that year the field is seeded to a variety
of winter wheat. When the fall rains come the grain
sprouts, the roots are formed and go deep into the ground.
Then comes frost, and the grass blades are bitten to the
surface, and the field lies cold and barren, to all appear-
ances completely without life, through the long winter
night. But when the warm days of spring come, life in
the wheat plant is revived, and soon the field is covered
with a solid green carpet of wheat grass.

Typical of some of the wheat-growing areas of the
West is the checkerboard pattern of the landscapes during
the vegetation season— great rectangles of wheat, green
or golden yellow according to the season, and an equal
number of dark rectangles, which are the plowed summer-
fallow fields. As can be seen, a field which produces by
this off-and-on method yields a crop of wheat only every
second year.

When the infrequent rains which visit these parts do
come it is characteristic of the country that, more often
than not, they come in bucketfuls. In the fields that are
lying fallow the water pouring from the skies sluices in
muddy streams across the soft, plowed earth, carrying
away from the high grounds and depositing in the valleys
below the rich topsoil that a hundred years of mold and
decay, trace by trace, had been putting there. It was in
search of a way to stop this impoverishing loss of the top-

126 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

soil that the strip method of farming was developed by
agronomists.

By this method, instead of planting an entire field to
wheat and allowing an entire adjoining field to lie fallow,
a contour of wheat several yards in width is planted, an
adjoining strip of equal width is passed over, to be plowed
and left to lie fallow, and then another strip is seeded,
and so on, until the field is covered with alternating con-
tours of sown ground and fallow ground. After this has
been done, a stream of rainwater breaking across a plowed
strip has its muddy flow slowed by the first vegetated
strip it must cross. The slackened water is given time to
soak into the ground, depositing its load of topsoil among
the grass roots instead of carrying it off into the valley
to become forever lost. The next year the same process
is followed, except that the strip that was in wheat the
previous year becomes the summerfallow strip, and the
strip that was idle becomes the crop strip.

An improvement on the foregoing method which has
been experimented upon with success in some regions is
the planting of an animal legume, such as soybean or field
pea, on the strip that otherwise would be lying fallow.
It is the special ability of the legume, almost alone among
the numerous species of plants, to take nitrogen from the
air and put it into the soil for the use of subsequent crops.
By using this plant for this purpose nourishment can be
restored to the soil as well as it can through allowing a
field to lie fallow for a year, or even better. In addition
to this, the legume is a profitable crop, having a high feed
value for livestock.

THE WHEAT LANDS OF THE WEST • 127

Though strip farming was developed as a method for
erosion control, the same method could now serve effec-
tively to protect a field of wheat from an incendiary raid.
A fire getting started in any contour of the ripened grain
could burn its way only to the edge of the strip. There
the plowed ground or the green crop of legume would be
a barrier to its spreading beyond the one strip where it
got started. The area that a single incendiary parchment
might destroy could be further decreased by plowing fur-
rows at right angles across the wheat strips or by cutting
lanes of hay across them before the stalks have turned ripe.

In the long time since strip farming was first tried out
on a number of farms and its value in erosion control
demonstrated, there has been no general adoption of the
method by the farmers whom it could benefit most. It
appears that this is true only because farmers are no
prompter than others in responding to new ideas. There
is little hope, therefore, that the wheat growers of the
semi-arid West will voluntarily put strip farming into
practice in time to protect their fields of grain from the
incendiary parchment. Indeed, when in the big cities new
skyscrapers, new industrial plants, tall apartment houses
and other immense structures continue to rise, despite the
fact that almost daily some responsible person is telling
these cities that they will be targets for the atomic bomb,
it is too much to expect that farmers, whose lives will be
the safest of all when the next war comes, will be fright-
ened into taking action entirely of their own accord against
the threat of the incendiary parchment.

The fact must be faced, therefore, that if strip farming

128 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

is put into practice for the purpose of saving the nation's
supply of bread when the next world war comes, the
federal government will have to step in and require that it
be done as a measure of national defense. This the federal
government has the power to do not by resorting to police
action, but by the simple process of allowing price support
on wheat in the semi-arid regions only on crops grown on
farms where strip farming is used.

Without going into the plans for price support on crops
that have been used already, and the various other plans
that have been proposed, and without taking sides in the
present arguments among farmers and others over the
merits of any certain plan, it can be said that price support
on crops is defensible in principle. Furthermore, it can be
said that there will be price support on crops in one form
or another during the present year, next year and for as
many years in the future as anyone can foresee at this time.

But if price support on crops is allowed as a sound prin-
ciple, another principle that must not be forgotten is that
a rule is a poor one if it will not work both ways. If the
federal government by price support on crops must insure
a farmer against ruinous losses due to falling markets, in
return it would seem that the government has the moral
right to require the fulfillment of any reasonable require-
ment connected with crops that will be in the interest of
the farmer's own welfare as well as in the interest of
national defense. Applied to the subject at hand, this would
mean that in any wheat region where strip farming is
decreed by a proper executive order, any farmer failing to
put it into practice would be denied price support.

6

THE FORESTS OF
THE WEST

W.

HEN the war planes come over the ocean and loos-
ened bales of incendiary parchments flutter down from
the skies like millions of election handbills caught in a
whirlwind, more difficult than the problem of the wheat
fields of the West will be the problem of keeping whole
areas of the national forests from going up in smoke and
flames. Again, as in the case of the wheat fields, it is the
forests in the West that must suffer the greatest harm.
In the East the forests are a mixture of conifers and broad-
leaf trees. The latter are not so easily attacked by fire
as are the resinous conifers, and in course of time have
grown natural firebreaks through the forests. In the deep
South the forests are mainly turpentine-producing long-
leaf pines, easily attacked by fire wherever fire has a good
chance for spreading from one tree to another. But in the
South grows a fire-tolerant grass interspersed among the
forest trees and giving protection to them. In the West
there is little of either broadleaf grove or fire-tolerant
grasses to give protection to the resinous pine and fir
abounding there.

129

130 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Moreover, the forests of the West are more at the mercy
of a dry summer climate than are the forests of the East
and South. In the West it is usual for precipitation to fall
during the autumn, winter and spring, and almost none at
all during the months of summer, when it might do the
most good. An example is the Pacific Slope in Oregon and
Washington. This region is popularly supposed to have a
wet climate. Actually the annual rainfall is around 40
inches, which is about the same as for upstate New York.
But the difference between the two regions is that, whereas
in upstate New York normally six inches of rain fall
during July and August, in the Northwest barely more
than an inch falls during these two hottest summer months.

Along the coasts of Oregon and Washington, during
the long summer drought the forest becomes so dry that
no more than an accidental spark is needed to set whole
areas roaring in flames. In this region the camp fire that
has not been thoroughly extinguished when abandoned,
the uncrushed cigarette butt and the unbroken match stem
are blamed for most of the fires. But they are not the
only causes. It has been estimated, for instance, that light-
ning striking trees and setting them on fire is responsible
for at least ten per cent of the fires in the region. What-
ever the sources, the danger is so great that hundreds of
foresters keeping watch over the vast areas from high
towers and from airplanes, are not able to prevent an
appalling annual loss of good timber.

If no measures beyond those presently employed are
taken for the protection of these forest areas, one shudders
to think about what will happen when enemy planes un-

THE FORESTS OF THE WEST • 131

loose tons of incendiary parchments over them. No matter
how damp the forest may be when the parchments are
dropped, they will lie in wait for weeks if necessary, until
the area is thirsting with drought. Then they will spring
into life. Soon the whole forest area will be one vast fur-
nace of flames and the sky for miles around will be filled
with clouds of dense smoke, blotting out the sun.

Yet there once was a natural means for protecting these
magnificent groves of the West from fire. When the white
man first visited them a century and a half ago, then, as
now, there certainly was the possibility that a forest fire
could be started when a bolt of lightning sank its fangs
into the pitchy top of some dying monarch of the forest.

At that time, the Indian was the only inhabitant of
these forests. By all accounts he was a man of enviable
physical prowess. He could travel tirelessly through the
forests from daybreak to nightfall, bow and arrow in hand,
on the trail of a buck. He could swim like an otter, throw
from a high precipice a gig into a salmon resting at the
bottom of a pool of water far below, shoot an arrow
straight to the mark, and guide a canoe through the rapids
as if it were a bridled horse. He was a wrestler, too, and
they say he would not hesitate to bet his best horse to a
white man that he could throw him at Indian style of
wrestling. But with all of this energy bursting out the
seams of his buckskin breeches the Indian of the forest
never spent any of it stomping out a forest fire. That for
him would have been work, something in his nature to be
despised as much as hunting, fishing and wrestling were
loved. It is safe to say that the idea of fighting a forest

132 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

fire never once entered the mind of the Indian. On the
contrary, he sometimes sent his squaw to apply a fire brand
to the forest to burn off an area where young grass would
later sprout and give grazing land to the cayuses belonging
to the tribe.

If it can be explained why these great forests of the
West, which presently require constant watch through-
out the summer months by an army of foresters with fire-
fighting equipment, could not be destroyed by fire back
in the days of the Indians who never got up off their
haunches to put out a forest fire, we might find a way
to protect these same forests, not only from the danger
of an incendiary raid, but also from the destructive fires
that visit them during ordinary seasons.

The strange fact is that all of the forest areas of the West
in what are now Washington, Oregon, Idaho, northern
California, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, once
required no watch or forest fire equipment to keep them
from burning down because all of the streams and tributary
streams were cross-dammed and flooded into ponds and
swamps right up to the tops of the mountains. Between
every two small ridges the cross-dammed streams consti-
tuted an effective fire break. Moreover, the water spread-
ing into wide ponds and swamps kept the adjoining fringe
of forest damp with dew. The creature responsible for
this cross-damming was the ingenious and industrious little
beaver, once the inhabitant of every forest stream of the
West.

It was the misfortune of the beaver, and the misfortune
of the forests of the West that his pelt was so highly prized.

THE FORESTS OF THE WEST • 133

Many years before the Louisiana Purchase gave the United
States a window on the Pacific the French coureurs de
bois had pursued the beaver westward across America. It
was they who left French names upon so many lakes,
streams and mountains of the Northwest— Coeur d'Alene,
Pend Oreille, Touchet, Maries, Culdesac, to name only a
few. After the French rights to the Northwest had passed
by purchase to the United States, John Jacob Astor's
American Fur Company, the Northwest Fur Company,
the Missouri Fur Company and other American and British
fur companies crowded into the Northwest; and princi-
pally it was the pelt of the beaver that built the fortunes
of these companies. Many years before the excitement
about gold took hold of the West, the fur trappers had
had their day there, following the mountain steams to their
sources with their chains of traps. Every forest stream
down to the smallest was exploited for its peltry. Before
such rapacity the little beaver had no chance. Within a
generation and a half after the Louisiana Purchase opened
the Northwest to a trade war between the many rival fur
companies, both American and British, the beaver was all
but extinct.

In recent years much has been done toward restoring
colonies of beavers to the mountain streams of the national
forests of the West. Wherever replaced and given proper
protection the little animal has steadily multiplied. It is
again cross-damming the streams with its clever dam of
felled trees, sticks and mud, causing the water to spread
into ponds and swamps. One has only to stand upon a
mountain in western Colorado and look down into a valley

134 * TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

and see its floor completely flooded with water, and a
network of dams intersecting the valley (which a stranger
could easily mistake for the works of man, such as a series
of rice paddies), to catch a vision of what the forest areas
of the West must have looked like before the fur com-
panies all but extinguished the beaver. Every valley that
is dammed and flooded in this manner forms an effective
firebreak between one forestclad ridge and another. Also,
the water spreading over wide areas keeps the marginal
soil subirrigated, the evaporation of water from which, as
well as from the wide pond surfaces, keeps the forest
throughout the entire valley damp with dew.

A program for re-stocking the national forests with
beaver must be stepped up, to the end that all of their
streams, down to the tiniest, once more will be cross-
dammed throughout their lengths and the water flooded
over wide areas. There is every reason to believe that when
this has been accomplished fire will have no better chance
of destroying the forest than it had back in the days of
the Indians. At the same time, the beaver, by the thousands
of dams it builds, is bound to contribute greatly to flood
control and to the underground supply of water for pipe
irrigation, of which more will be said.

But the time before probable attack is too short to get
enough colonies of beavers transplanted and multiplied in
numbers great enough to build the tens of thousands of
dams the forests will require to make them fire resistant.
The work of transplanting the beaver must be continued,
but at best it will have to be regarded as a long-range
program.

THE FORESTS OF THE WEST • 135

What must be done against precious time, therefore, is
to give the Forestry Service additional funds to complete
building fire lines along the divides and principal lateral
ridges of the forest clad mountains, and funds for equip-
ment and labor with which to drag heavy logs from the
slopes and lay across the streams. The fire line will assist
in preventing a fire from spreading from one valley across
a ridge into another valley. The log dam, by causing the
water to spread, will serve to stop a fire from crossing
from one side of a valley to the other side of the same
valley, and it also will serve to keep the forest damp with
dew. In short, the fire line and the log dam together can
temporarily provide the protection from forest fires that
the beaver dam alone can later make permanent.

There is another means of protecting the forest areas
of the West from fires which no doubt will soon be more
extensively used. It is rain making by the process of seed-
ing the clouds from a plane with silver iodide crystals,
causing them to give up their moisture. But of course there
can come from the skies no more moisture than the sun
in its labors can suck up from the oceans and moist soil,
to be carried onward by clouds on the wind. If rain is
caused to fall over one area by this artificial means ob-
viously its fall is at the expense of normal rainfall in other
areas.

If artificial precipitation does become dependable as a
fire preventive during ordinary seasons, it could, of course,
be used to protect the forests from incendiary parchments
dropped by the enemy. But here, unfortunately, is a prom-
ised cure that could provoke a danger far greater than the

136 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

disease. If our government can give thought to milking
the clouds to produce a rain that will prevent the enemy's
incendiary raids from destroying our forests, so also could
the enemy produce drought in certain of our regions by
causing their normal rainfall to fall elsewhere. In fact, no
scheme of the enemy for hurting us badly could be more
easily carried out than for him to send his planes into the
areas of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and the Gulf of
Mexico, seeding the clouds with a rain making chemical,
causing them by this means to give up their moisture
before they have been swept by the winds across the con-
tinent. This could turn areas along the Atlantic seaboard,
the Gulf states, and the Pacific Coast into Saharas.

Fortunately, however, every chemical has its re-agent.
Any threat of the enemy to turn our continent into a
desert can be met by our government, if it is prepared,
by keeping the skies over the oceans in wartime dusted
with a chemical that will neutralize whatever chemical
the enemy might spread.

It is true that the idea of beaver dams and impounding
of water on the farms will be opposed by those who have
been draining swamps for the purpose of mosquito control
in areas where malaria is prevalent. The work of these
people cannot be too highly commended, because of all
diseases malaria is the worst. It shortens the life, kills and
destroys the mental faculties of more millions of people
than any other disease. In all the world there is no flour-
ishing civilization in an area infested with malaria. But the
drainage of swamps is not the proper method for obtain-
ing mosquito control.

THE FORESTS OF THE WEST • 137

As the mosquito is an insect, entomologists should use
other insects to destroy it. The proof that this is possible
is the fact that there are areas where there are no mos-
quitoes of any genus, though there are ponds and pools
of stagnant water and all the other usual conditions ideal
for breeding. One region is in the Blue Mountains of east-
ern Washington. It may be that in those areas it is the
water strider that destroys the larvae of mosquito. Or it
may be an omnivorous water bug that feeds habitually
on algae and incidentally on any larvae that come its way.
Whatever the cause that keeps certain areas free of mos-
quitoes, it should be found and introduced into the mos-
quito-infested areas. Surely the entomologist who is the
first to do this will have done a greater service to humanity
than any other man of his generation.

7

WHEN THE BIG DAMS
GO OUT

A

PROBLEM more difficult than either wheat field or for-
est region of the West is the problem of keeping the nation
from becoming crippled, almost beyond its power to re-
cover, when the colossal river dams now built are tumbled
into the gorges in great chunks of ruin. All of these big
dams are vulnerable. What New York, Chicago, Phila-
delphia and some forty other names are to the big cities,
so Grand Coulee, Hoover, Shasta and some forty other
names are to the big dams. The immense sizes of these dams
and their economic importance to the nation single them
out as targets against which the enemy can afford to send
bomb after bomb until all are destroyed.

Obviously, dispersion will not protect a dam already
built. Once the concrete for a dam has been poured, the
dam cannot be reduced in size. But the large dams, or
more properly speaking the electrical power they are pro-
ducing, can be replaced from hundreds of smaller dams,
none of which must be built so large that it can be singled
out as a rewarding target for an atomic bomb.

If a city whose population does not exceed 15,000 will

138

WHEN THE BIG DAMS GO OUT • 139

not be a target for atomic bombing, certainly a hydro-
electric plant serving the same city with power and light
will also be safe, because the loss of the plant could distress
and cripple only the industrial output of the people it
serves, but not destroy them. Neither does it seem that a
hydroelectric plant to serve several communities totaling
25,000 or 50,000 population, but no important war indus-
try plant, could possibly be a profitable target for atomic
bombing. But a hydroelectric plant with a capacity to
serve as many as 100,000 people, or an important war
industry plant, almost certainly will be marked by the
enemy for destruction by an atomic bomb when oppor-
tunity and priority permit.

When hydroelectric power is the sole purpose for
damming a river there seems no good reason why it would
not be better to build several dams in series along the same
river rather than put all the investment and risk into a
single large dam. If in a distance of 100 miles a river drops
200 feet, a dam 200 feet high built at its lower end will,
of course, form a lake the full 100 miles long, and will
harness every ounce of potential horsepower of the river
for this distance. But five dams built in series on the same
river, each with a spillway of 40 feet, and spaced so that
the foot of any one dam, except the lowest one, is at the
water's edge of the lake formed by the dam next below,
will capture all of the potential horsepower of the river
as effectively as can a single dam with a spillway of 200
feet. It is also true that less concrete and structural steel
are required to build five dams in series, each 40 feet high,
than to build one large dam 200 feet high on the same

I4O • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

river. That is because the higher a dam grows the greater
becomes its length, measured at the top, and the wider
becomes its base.

What is true about the size of a hydroelectric plant is
also true about a steam plant. If a hydroelectric plant serv-
ing 100,000 people becomes a profitable target for atomic
bombing, so also will a steam plant of that capacity. And
just as the defense of the hydroelectric plant is to divide
its capacity among several smaller plants, so the defense
of the large steam plant is to replace it with several scat-
tered plants.

Failure to protect both the hydroelectric and steam
plants will mean a major disaster for the nation. No matter
how widely manufacturing plants are dispersed to make
them safe from atomic bombing, they will, nevertheless,
be standing as idle as wrecked buildings if electric current
cannot be kept flowing to them.

This danger can be averted if all the facilities for gen-
erating electrical power in each of the large geographical
regions are consolidated under a single utility authority
which will erect a number of dams in series and steam
plants properly dispersed. None of these would be a large
enough target for atomic bombing, but the total of their
mutually supporting capacities would produce in time of
war, as a minimum of performance, enough electric cur-
rent to keep in operation all of the important war industry
plants and also supply electricity for other highly critical
purposes.

These regional utility authorities may be either wholly
government owned, or wholly privately owned, or part

WHEN THE BIG DAMS GO OUT • 141

one and part the other. If the public is fearful that private
ownership may lead to power monopolies, Congress may
require an organization similar to that of large corpora-
tions such as the American Telephone and Telegraph
Company, the stock of which is owned by so many
thousands of shareholders that the ownership amounts to
public ownership. Right now, however, the question of
ownership is not the important thing. The important thing
is to get these regional authorities organized as quickly
as they can be, and get started with the work of con-
structing the dispersed hydroelectric and steam plants.

Whatever the type of ownership, each of these large
regional utility authorities, extending as it will over more
than one state, must, of course, be under the control of
the federal government. The building of a large number
of scattered plants and the necessary high-tension lines to
make them mutually self supporting within each geo-
graphical region, will be primarily for the purpose of
national defense. Hence, no matter how owned, the cost
of construction must be borne by the federal government.

The building of dams in series and the decentralization
of steam plants can prevent the loss of critical amounts
of the nation's supply of electricity when war comes. The
generation of hydroelectric power, however, is not the sole
function of the larger dams. Other functions include flood
control, navigation, river regulation and water supply. In
fact, a few of the large dams do not produce any electric
power.

A dam 200 feet high will create a lake impounding far
more billions of gallons of water than can five dams, each

142 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

40 feet high, built in series on the same river, and will
provide flood control and generate as much power. If the
purpose of the dam is to supply irrigation water, a dam
200 feet high may be required to lift the water to this
height before it will flow by gravity onto the land to be
watered. A hundred dams in series, if each is less than
200 feet in height, could not perform this function of the
one large dam.

The auxiliary value of any dam as a means for flood
control is now being sharply questioned. If the lake which
the dam creates behind it is already full of water when
the flood season starts (which is the usual case), the in-
creased flow of water simply spills over the dam and goes
surging on its way. Except for the water which sinks into
the ground beneath the lake, not a gallon is held back by
the dam. In order that a dam may serve effectively for
flood control and also generate hydroelectric power, it
must have a superstructure above the water level which
provides power. There must be gates in this superstructure
which can be closed to give the lake formed by
the dam a greater depth for water storage whenever a
flood season is on. Not many dams have been so con-
structed.

Power dams built anywhere in the Mississippi Basin
are not trustworthy means of flood control. The Missis-
sippi Basin is the nation's greatest flood problem, receiving
as it does water from thirty-one states. Yearly the Upper
Mississippi and the Ohio become swollen in flood. When
the flood stages of the two rivers happen to come at the
same time, a disastrous flood is inevitable. Above the point

WHEN THE BIG DAMS GO OUT • 143

at which the Ohio joins the Mississippi the water of both
streams is rolled back for miles until it forms what in
effect are two enormous lakes, overflowing the natural
banks of the rivers, and causing great loss of lives and
damage to property every few years.

From a point a short distance below where the Missis-
sippi is joined by the Ohio the greater river starts mean-
dering. It becomes not merely serpentine in shape but in
places loops back upon itself to pass only a few yards from
a landmark it passed hours before, flowing in the opposite
direction. Because of this turning and doubling back of
the river below the point where it seems uncertain about
which way it wants to flow, its course to the sea covers
some 2000 miles instead of a straight course of only 600
miles. These 2000 miles of crazy winding and turning
form in effect an enormous dam, blocking the water for
miles above it.

As the rate of water flow in a river depends mainly
upon the amount of fall, if the channel of the Lower
Mississippi were straightened and shortened to less than
half of its present meandering length by cutting wide
canals through the narrow necks of land separating one
great loop from another, the rate of flow would be so
greatly increased that no enormous lake of water could
be formed above the point where the river now is ob-
structed. Fortunately, the government has at last started
upon a project for such canalization of sections of the
lower reaches of the river. When this work is completed
the increased rapidity of flow will give the water a chance
to escape to the sea during seasons of flood instead of

144 * TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

spreading over farms and villages. This canalization of the
great river will do more for flood control than has the
building of dozens of dams across the tributary streams.
Furthermore, dams built to control floods can be de-
stroyed by atomic bombing, but a canalized river channel
is one of the very few works an atom bomb can not
destroy.

Flood control for the great river could be furthered
if the government will link the impoundage of water on
thousands of farms in its basin with price support for
crops. So, too, could control be helped by the construction
by man of thousands of log dams in the forests, to be
replaced later with the dams built by the beavers. One
of the virtues of a pond, whether artificial or natural, is
that it causes water to sink into the ground, to seek its
way to the ocean through underground channels.

Another means of flood prevention is the growing of
grass on the watersheds, which, many leading agricul-
turists and conservationists insist, is the best means of all
because the grass stops the water where it falls from the
sky. And strip farming, which will save the semi-arid
wheat fields of the West from incendiary peril, will also
contribute greatly toward flood control.

Even if the big dams were the most effective means
for flood control, dependence upon them must now be
abandoned. If this is not done, and the work of con-
structing more big dams is continued, the cities and farms
along a river are going to suffer their most disastrous flood
of all time when the dams are destroyed by bombing.

WHEN THE BIG DAMS GO OUT • 145

It is in the West that the greatest damage and suffering
will be caused by destruction of the great dams, because
in that region most of the big dams which generate
hydroelectic power also supply water for irrigation. The
pipe or sprinkler system of irrigation which is rapidly
coming into use in many places will be much less vul-
nerable to bombing attack than the old ditch system.

The usual method for reclaiming the arid lands of the
West has been the ditch system of irrigation, first exten-
sively used by the Mormons. By this method water is
carried from a dammed river or creek through a system
of canals to the dry land. At the field the water is flooded
over the surface or, more often, carried across the field
through hundreds of small corrugation furrows spaced
about 30 inches apart. The land irrigated by this method
must be land that is level to start with, or which can be
leveled by scraping down bumps and filling small depres-
sions. Also, the land must be free from large stones. Be-
cause the ditch system is limited by any ruggedness of the
ground, a familiar view of an irrigated region is that of a
broad valley or plateau of choice land, flat as a hand,
glistening in the sun with irrigation ditches, and fruitful
with crops and orchards, which is surrounded by brown,
parched hills, still as much desert as they ever were, be-
cause their ruggedness prevents their being watered by
the ditch system of irrigation.

But no matter how rugged a hill may be, if water can
be brought to its top, it can be irrigated by the pipe sys-
tem of irrigation that has only recently come into use. By

146 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

this system the water is carried from a stream or piped
from a well or other source to the field through a system
of pipes and sprinkled over the ground as water is sprinkled
over a lawn. By one method, the irrigation pipes are laid
under the ground, and when the water is turned on it is
sprayed from the pipes through dozens of taps equipped
with nozzles. It is by this system that many of the golf
courses throughout the country are watered. By a more
recent system, however, and one far less expensive to
install, only a few taps are required for a field. From one
of these taps the water is carried by a hose which is
connected at its lower end to a moveable sprinkling pipe,
a hundred yards or longer in length, mounted on wheels.
This odd-shaped, elongated sprinkler is a single piece of
equipment, and because it can be moved to any part of a
field it can water a larger area than dozens of underground
pipes and nozzles, and at much less cost.

Pipe irrigation as compared to ditch irrigation has many
important advantages. One of these is that it can be used
on rugged land as well as on level. Another is that the
amount of water is only about a third of that required
for the ditch system. Another is that sprinkled water
soaks into the soil like a gently falling rain, and conse-
quently does not leach the soil of its minerals and nourish-
ment as does water flowing through the corrugation
ditches. Indeed, the only important disadvantage of the
pipe system as compared with the ditch system is the
initial cost of installing the pipes. But this is a cost which
has already been so greatly reduced by the use of the
moveable sprinkler that today in many regions a system

WHEN THE BIG DAMS GO OUT • 147

of pipe irrigation is only slightly, if any, more expensive
to install than a ditch system.

At first it might seem that any considerable expansion
of the pipe system of irrigation would put a heavy strain
upon the supply of iron ore, of which presently so much
is required in the expanded national defense. But it has
already been discovered that hematite, a low grade of iron
ore, can be used for the manufacture of the large arterial
pipes. Hematite is found in abundance in many regions
of the United States, and recent discoveries of methods
for processing it at a low cost probably will make it avail-
able for all the large pipes that would be required for
putting the millions of acres of rugged and arid lands of
the West under pipe irrigation.

When pipe irrigation comes into general use it can
reclaim much larger areas of land than is now under
ditch irrigation in the West. The water will be lifted
from rivers, creeks and drilled wells, and can be pumped
from low ground to a higher level without building costly
dams. Even in many areas where the ditch system already
is in use the pipe system is bound to replace it, because
the pipe system requires far less water and it also has the
merit of not washing nourishment from the soil.

The greatest use of the pipe system on a large scale
will be in areas where the ditch system has not been
useable because of the generally rugged character of the
terrain. Throughout most of New Mexico, Arizona, West
Texas and large areas in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho,
Nevada and California, and sections in other states, the
land, except in the valleys, is too rugged for ditch irriga-

148 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

tion and too arid in its natural state for any use except
light grazing. But under these magnificent hills, which
are bronzed and parched during the summer, or purple
with the desert-loving sage bush, flow underground
streams from the distant snow-capped mountains, await-
ing only to be lifted to the surface and spread over the
face of the earth with sprinklers.

When there has been more cross-damming in the moun-
tains, which there will be when the streams have been
re-stocked with beaver, and when there has been more
impounding of water on the farms, more growing of
grasses on the watersheds and more farming by the strip
method, the underground supply of irrigation water will
become more plentiful. Much of the same water that is
now flowing down the Mississippi, the Rio Grande, the
Colorado and the Columbia in seasonal floods can, by the
various means for causing water to sink into the ground,
be sent off to the oceans through underground courses,
to be tapped on its way by wells, lifted to the surface with
pumps and spread over the rugged hills by means of move-
able pipe sprinklers. When that day comes there will be
areas of the West where the hills can be kept as alive and
beautiful with grass throughout the months of summer
as they now are during the weeks of early spring — and
perhaps in nature there is no sight more beautiful.

Although the sprinkler system of irrigation can bring
water to millions of acres of arid land of the West that
the ditch system is not capable of reclaiming, the rugged
and stony nature of most of the land will allow the grow-
ing only of grasses, not the raising of cultivated crops.

WHEN THE BIG DAMS GO OUT • 149

This is something not in the least to be regretted. On the
contrary, the fact that only grasses can be grown on the
newly-watered land should be regarded as a godsend,
because the growing of an abundance of grass will mean
the production of more beef, and it is more of this class
of food which our nation at present is most in need.

It is a fact that has been observed by many prominent
agricultural specialists that the beef production in our
nation was in a far better balance a couple of generations
ago than it has been since. At that earlier time in the West
there was an abundance of open grazing land. Cattle could
be raised cheaply on the native grasses. When they had
grown to mature age the cattle were bought on the hoof
and shipped eastward in carload lots to the feeding pens,
to be fattened for a few weeks on the corn of Nebraska,
Iowa and Illinois, and then slaughtered. The cattle growers
of the West, although receiving in places no more than
two cents a pound for their steers on the hoof, were
relatively better off than the cattle growers today. Indeed,
in those days some of the herds roaming the unclaimed
lands of the West made fortunes for their owners, not
because of good hoof prices but because about the only
expenses in the business of raising cattle were the wages
of the cowboys and the cost of their chuckwagon chow.
As an example, there was the fabulous 101 Ranch in
Oklahoma which shipped to the market each year thou-
sands of head of cattle from grazing lands rented from
the Osage Indians at only a few cents an acre. The farmers
of the corn states, whose corn went to fatten the range-
grown cattle at the fattening pens had a good market for

• TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

their corn. Although its bushel price was, of course, much
less than the present market price, relative to other prices
of the period it was good. But the best result was that
beef at that time was no more expensive than other food.
Those were the days that many can remember fondly
when a juicy beefsteak ordered at an ordinary restaurant
overlapped the platter, and cost a quarter, including side
dishes and coffee. In those days, which now may appro-
priately be called the Beefsteak Age, a housewife who paid
more than 25 cents for enough beef for a meal for her
family was being just a little extravagant. The beef of
that period was not merely cheap because all food prices
were then much less than they now are, but also because
the cost of raising beef on the grass ranges of the West
was scarcely more than earlier it had cost the tribes of
Indians in the same regions to hustle their meat from the
herds of wild buffalo.

But about 1900 the balance between grasslands and cul-
tivated lands began to change, with more and more of the
grasslands being turned over to cultivation. The process
was hastened greatly during the period of the First World
War, when the price of wheat was bolstered by the
government to encourage greater production. Thousands
of ranches in the West were induced by the exorbitant
bushel price to plow up their grasslands and sow to wheat.
All went well while the war lasted, and for a few seasons
afterwards. Then the bottom dropped out of the wheat
market. In the meantime the grasslands had been stripped
of the sod that had required centuries to grow. It could
not be restored. Seasons of drought then came. The soil

WHEN THE BIG DAMS GO OUT • 151

was blown into the skies. The Dust Bowl was created.
Thousands of ranchers who once had been prosperous
were ruined.

But the greatest harm of all was the upset of balances
between the meat-growing lands and the cereal-growing
lands. The grass-grown livestock census went down. With
less grass-grown livestock being produced, the require-
ments for feeding grain were less, and its price dropped.
By those who at the time were trying to wrestle with it,
the problem was called overproduction, and the solution
was thought to be planting less, plowing up every other
row, and taking other pages from the philosophy of
scarcity.

In proportion to the increase in the nation's population
during the past fifty years there has been a third decrease
in its cattle, but it has been due not so much to the decrease
in supply and the increase in consumers as to the upset
of balances between grasslands and cultivated lands that
during the same period the prices of beef on the hoof have
increased more than a thousand percent. Most of the beef
cattle do not now come from the once limitless grasslands
of the West, but are raised on farms, where the cost of
raising is high and compels selling off the animals while
still weanlings and yearlings. On the farm a calf from a
day old is sucking milk that is worth a good price, and the
little critter must be allowed several quarts a day to keep
it from bawling. When old enough to be weaned from
milk it turns around and starts eating its head off from the
corn crib and the hay mow. By the time it is ready to be
sold for slaughter, if the price received is not enough to

152 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

make up for all the gallons of milk it guzzled as a youngster
and all the corn and fodder it later ate, the farmer has
lost money raising it.

It has been computed that in the raising of a vegetable
food, as for instance lettuce, a single county could grow
enough for every table in the United States. A single
county in Maine actually does grow a good part of all the
potatoes eaten in the East. But the production of beef is
a different problem. Beef is a highly concentrated food. To
raise a single steer to maturity requires the foliage growth
from several acres. If there is not an abundance of grass-
lands and beef must do its growing on cultivated crops,
the cost of raising it cannot be other than high. That is
the difficulty at the present time. Farms are for the grow-
ing of cultivated crops, for dairying, for raising hogs, for
producing poultry and eggs, but for the growing of beef
—no.

The way back to an abundance of beef is for our gov-
ernment to do its part toward reversing the processes that
have been causing beef to rise to skyrocket prices, yet
without bringing better profits than formerly to the cattle
growers. This the government can do by increasing the
productivity of the grasslands of the West by means of
pipe irrigation. Those rugged, stony hills that presently
are too arid to produce anything more than scant vege-
tation can, by means of pipe irrigation, be converted into
millions of acres of the sweetest, most nutritious grasses
that have been grown anywhere.

Let only these areas be apportioned among 3io-acre
perpetual homestead ranches (to be discussed at length in

WHEN THE BIG DAMS GO OUT • 153

a later chapter), and from government loans let there be
financed the water companies that can bring piped water
to these lands, and once more there will be millions of
head of grass-grown, mature beef cattle moving yearly to
the fattening pens, to be fed for a few weeks on corn, to
give tenderness and flavor to the flesh, and then slaugh-
tered. The farmers of the corn states will receive good
prices for their corn. Yet because the steers will have spent
all but a few weeks of their lives on the grassland areas,
carcass beef can be sold cheap, with profits to all con-
cerned in its production. Once more housewives will be
able to buy steaks and roasts at such reasonable prices at
the meat counters that they can, if they wish, give their
families beef in some form every day of the week.

A national project for creating tens of thousands of
perpetual ranch homesteads from the arid lands of the
West, watered by pipe irrigation, green with grass, in-
creasing by millions the beef cattle census of the United
States, and giving homes and colorful ranch life to tens
of thousands of families, will offset by a good margin the
food that will be lost when the big dams now furnishing
water for ditch irrigation are destroyed by atomic bomb-
ing. But, obviously, these new projects for pipe irrigation
will be doing nothing to furnish water to the farms now
irrigated by canals which take their water from the big
dams that are doomed to destruction.

However, because a forage crop, such as alfalfa, is the
ideal crop for pipe irrigation, and the water needed is only
about a third that needed for ditch irrigation, on many of
the farms now watered from canals there can be a hope

154 * TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

that eventually pipe irrigation will take over. In fact, had
the iron tube arterial pipe, the improved pumping ma-
chinery, the moveable sprinkler and other accessories of
the pipe system been available years ago, many of the areas
reclaimed with canals could have been reclaimed at less
cost with pipe irrigation.

In some places there is normally enough water from the
skies to produce fair foliage and only a few additional
inches of water from the sprinkler should be required to
grow grass in abundance, but in other places the rainfall
is so light that twelve or more inches of irrigation water
would be required. In some regions creeks and rivers are
close by, from which irrigation water may be pumped and
piped at little cost, and in other regions that is not so. In
some regions good flows of well water may be obtained
by drilling to a depth of a hundred or two hundred feet,
and in other places wells sunk to a thousand feet cannot
reach good veins of water. The whole subject, in short,
is complicated by so many factors that no general state-
ment can be made beyond saying that many of the farms
presently watered by ditch irrigation can be saved by
changing to pipe irrigation before the big dams doomed to
be knocked into pieces from atomic bombing go out, and
there are many others that are not so fortunately situated.

8

STOCKPILES OF MINERALS

1 HE nation's deposits of metallic ores are not, of course,
consumable by fire, as is a field of ripe wheat or a forest
of resinous pine that has not had a drop of rain in many
weeks, nor are they destructible by demolitions, as is a
dam of concrete. Nevertheless, the heavy machinery re-
quired to scoop out the ore at the mine pits and load it
aboard trains and the large smelters that reduce the ores
would be rewarding targets for bombing. Besides, the ore
mines are in danger of being neutralized from radioactivity
contamination.

Most vulnerable of our domestically produced ores is
iron, the one unhappily upon which war preparedness
must chiefly depend for its weapons and implements. An
estimated sixty per cent of this iron ore comes from a
single mound that nature in one of her most freakish
moods built millenniums ago at the center of an encircling
chain of lakes. The mound is in northern Minnesota, barely
inside the border of the United States, and is known as
the Mesabi Range. Scooped from the open pits by her-
culean shovels, the ore is given a short haul by gondola
cars to Duluth and there dumped into long, lean ore boats,

'55

156 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

which cross the length of Lake Superior, squeeze through
the locks of Sault Ste. Marie, and once in treadable water
again point for the ports that serve the furnaces of De-
trait, Gary, Pittsburgh, and other steel manufacturing
cities. Such is the enormous output of ore from this one
unique mine loaded out at Duluth that it gives that city,
which stands two thousand miles by lake and river from
the ocean, the strange distinction of being in point of ton-
nage shipped the second port in America, next only after
the port of New York.

Raids upon the open pits of the Mesabi Range for the
purpose of destroying the ore lifting machinery and sow-
ing the area with deadly radioactivity, almost certainly
could not be denied a determined enemy. A mission easier
still for him would be the destruction of the locks of Sault
Ste. Marie, the only outlet for the ore boats from Lake
Superior.

The Mesabi Range is the greatest of the ore deposits,
but by no means the only vulnerable one. The Copper
Bowl in Arizona, the open pit copper mine at Bingham,
Utah, the copper mines near Butte, Montana, and many
other highly centralized ore investments could be blasted
with atomic bombing, paralyzed and put out of commis-
sion for the duration of the war.

Because of the danger which threatens our domestically
produced metals, a program is required for the mining and
placing in dispersed stockpile storage, as dressed ore, pig,
and metal rolled into sheets and various other stock prod-
ucts, the quantity of each metal that is likely to be re-
quired during a war of long duration. The prices of these

STOCKPILES OF MINERALS • 157

metals, though high now, are cheaper than they will be
if we wait until war is upon us before starting to dig their
ores from the ground. Moreover, the man power to mine
and smelt, or even to mine and stockpile as ores, we are
more able to furnish now than we shall be after 1 5 million
able-bodied men have been taken from civilian life and
put into the armed forces. But the primary argument is
that only by getting our metals out of their highly vul-
nerable mines and getting them scattered into stockpiles
can we be sure that the enemy's bombing attacks will not
completely deprive us of them.

Stockpiling has given to war a dimension in depth,
making it possible for a nation to achieve war effective-
ness far beyond its yearly potential yield of resources.
The subject is important in the extreme.

After many years of persuasion from a small group of
men who have long been greatly interested in the subject,
and after some very bitter experiences during the recent
war, our government has at last become convinced of the
necessity of stockpiling various strategic minerals. A stra-
tegic mineral has been defined as one for which depend-
ence must be placed in whole or great part upon foreign
sources. Among these metals are tin, nickel, manganese,
mercury, tungsten, chronium, antimony, platinum, and
some others. But the present program for stockpiling stra-
tegic minerals, large though it is, still is not sufficient to
save our nation from becoming seriously crippled in time
of war in case the countries from which these strategic
imports are received should soon be knocked out of the
war effort, as many of them probably will be.

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

As many of the nations of the world which now are
counted among our friends expect that we will furnish
them with war equipment and financial assistance, even in
greater measure than at present, in addition to our stand-
ing ready to mobilize, train, equip and send overseas an
expeditionary force of five million soldiers, it does not
seem unreasonable that we should get from these nations,
in return for the money we loan them and the military
equipment we will turn over to them, all of the strategic
minerals they can spare, the value of each shipment to be
credited against the loans of money and the equipment
we furnish such country. Not only should we obtain in
this way shipments of strategic minerals from the coun-
tries we are aiming to support, but also we should receive
from them all of the iron, copper, zinc and lead that can
be spared, in order to increase our own stockpiles of these
metals. Whatever metals are turned over to us, whether
they are among the strategic items or not, certainly will
later have a better chance for becoming converted into
ammunition, guns, tanks and planes, which we will share
with our allies, than they will if left as ores in the mines
of the countries that are in danger of being overrun by
the enemy. All of the metals received in this manner from
overseas would not be causing our country to compete on
the metal markets with the countries from which they
come, because they would be stockpiled by us, to be held
strictly in war reserve storage.

But should there be reluctance in these countries to give
up to us quantities of their minerals in this way, preferring
to have our money and our machinery as outright gifts,

STOCKPILES OF MINERALS • 159

and expecting us to pay in cash for whatever items the
returning ships bring back to us, we have a right neverthe-
less to insist upon something like reciprocation. Take Spain
as an example. Whether we should have any dealings with
that country is a question that will continue to be argued.
But there is no question, whatever, that Spain is one of the
world's best sources of mercury, one of the strategic min-
erals, and has abundances of many other valuable ores. If
we do loan money to Spain, certainly it seems that we
should receive from her, as payments against the loan,
shipments of mercury and other minerals.

Each mineral must be stored with the resolve that its
stockpile will never be broken into until a major war has
actually come. Unless this is done, reserve storage will
become the cause of instability in the metal markets, and
the whole value of the stockpile will be lost. For example,
if thousands of tons of copper are bought and placed in
war reserve storage when black clouds of war are threaten-
ing, only to be sold back into the markets when the sun
breaks through the clouds and the "peace of a thousand
years" appears to have come, the dumping of the copper
could ruin the copper industry. With any other metal it
would be the same.

9

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS

JDESIDES expanding the areas of the cities, much disper-
sion of population can be effected by making it possible
for several million of our people who prefer rural life to
urban to move from the cities onto farms and ranches. This
can be done by our Congress putting into use an improved
homestead system of acquiring land, which is the subject
of this chapter— homesteads not alone for farmers and
stockmen, as in the past, but also homesteads of smaller
acreage for gardeners and orchardists.

Any proposed method that will aid in atomic defense
is of course doubly worthy of support if it will at the
same time benefit the nation in other ways. The perpetual
homestead is an example. A law putting it into force not
only would help in reducing the population densities of
the cities but also would bring about a more healthy
division between rural and urban populations than now
exists in most of the states. Moreover, in course of time
such a law should almost completely eliminate the damn-
able share-crop system of holding land— a system that
means poverty and a low social scale wherever it is in
general practice— and replace it with a system of small

1 60

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • l6l

proprietors, which system wherever used means a high
sense of freedom and individual liberty.

The owner of a farm of a size which he and his family
ordinarily can till without hiring others to do a major
part of the work, or without leasing a part of the land
to a share-cropper, belongs in the class of small proprietors,
and it is among this class that the principal improvers are
found. So at least said Adam Smith, the greatest of econo-
mists, who gave incisive facts to support all his conclusions.
But if a man's portion of the earth is extremely large it
seldom happens that he is a great improver. So again said
Adam Smith. The large proprietor not only is seldom an
improver himself but by his dominion over a number of
tenants he sustains feudalism. He is likely to make of him-
self something of a petty tyrant within his land domain
and to make peasants in spirit and outlook of the tenants
beneath him. In early America, in the main, it was the
owners of the large plantations who were responsible for
the growth of slavery. If the matter had been left to the
decision of the plantation nobility it is not improbable
that the business of buying and selling human lives still
would be in practice in this country.

Thomas Jefferson, probably even more clearly than had
Adam Smith, saw the small landowner as the most precious
portion of the state. The political philosophy of this re-
markable man was deeply rooted in the conviction that
personal independence and democracy reside in small land
proprietors more than in any other class. In the early years
of our nation he advocated a division of its public lands
among its citizens, limiting purchase to those already in

1 62 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

possession of little or no land, and setting a top limit to
the number of acres any one man might purchase. This
idea on land Jefferson carried with him to the presidency.

In the office of president, and after he had started the
United States on the way to territorial expansion by pur-
chasing from Napoleon the Territory of Louisiana, ex-
tending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean,
Jefferson's hope was that this immense domain, the largest
piece of real estate ever to be transferred from one nation
to another through outright purchase, might eventually
become settled with small proprietors. The leaders of the
Lewis and Clark expedition sent by him to explore the
great area across its northern breadth were instructed to
bring back to him in Washington samples of soil and
species of plants collected along the way, and to report
on the conditions of climate. Those who understand Jef-
ferson's philosophy on land do not wonder that he seemed
to find more pleasure in thinking of the new land becom-
ing filled with homes of actual settlers than he did from
speculating on the fact that the area, by reason of its enor-
mous extent, gave the United States a place among the
great nations.

The Homestead Act, passed by Congress just prior to
the Civil War, was an act designed for apportioning the
public lands among actual settlers. Framed in particular
for the settlement of the public lands of the West, it called
for selected areas to be surveyed into townships, each a
rectangle of six miles square. The township was then
divided into thirty-six sections, each section exactly a
square mile in area. Then the section was quartered into

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 163

four equal squares, or quarter-sections. The quarter-sec-
tion contained 160 acres, and was the amount of land that
was allowed to one person as his homestead right.

Land offices were established on the public lands, under
which worked an army of surveyors required to get the
land sub-divided into quarter-section claims, and in the
West for many years the surveyor and his transit were
familiar figures on the skyline. After a considerable area
in a region had been surveyed and plotted through the
land office it was thrown open to settlement, and the land
office served as the place of record and administrative
control until a particular claim had been proved up. When
this was done, the administrative control passed over to
the state or territory, and the county clerk became cus-
todian of the title record. It was then known as patented
land, and the right of the state and county to assess taxes
upon it followed as a matter of course.

The history of the Old West covers three distinct eras.
First there was the fur era, during which Britain and
France, and later the United States, which replaced France,
competed fiercely for the rich harvest of peltry of the
forest and streams of the Northwest, the territorial claims
of the rival nations broadly overlapping one another. In
no long time all the prized fur-bearing animals were all
but extinct. Then the fur companies abandoned the area,
and the log stockades and warehouses they had erected
fell into ruin.

With the discovery of gold in California in 1 848 came
the gold era. Into California poured people from all cor-
ners of the world, all in wild hope of sluicing their for-

164 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

tunes from the gold-bearing gravel beds. When every
foot of the gold region of California had been staked and
prospected, the feverish miners by the thousands started
spreading into other regions. Soon every stream in the
West was being searched with the gold pan as thoroughly
as it had been searched forty years earlier with the steel
trap. But like the fur era, the gold era, too, was soon to
pass, with the last deposits of placer gold washed from
the sands and gravel of the stream beds, and the mining
towns that had sprung up like mushrooms on their way to
becoming ghost towns.

The short, feverish gold era was followed by the home-
stead era, which the Homestead Act had brought about.
Out of the States came the land seekers. For years their
trains of covered wagons crossing the grass-sodded plains
appeared clouds of dust by day and rings of blinking
campfires by night. Of the three distinct eras of the West
—fur, gold and homestead— the last was the only one to
live and bring to the West stable settlement and enduring
prosperity. Indeed, the rapid and stable colonization of the
West that took place under the Homestead Act was in
many respects the greatest event of peaceful progress that
history records.

The two decades from 1870 to 1890 were the greatest
years of expansion in the West. In those twenty years,
thanks to the Homestead Act, the population of the land
now comprising the two Dakotas, Colorado, Wyoming,
Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon increased nine-
fold. By 1 890, in fact, so rapidly had grown the West that
almost every important city of the present West had been

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 165

founded, and had its railroad station, schools, churches,
stores, flour mill perhaps, and its three-storied Odd Fel-
lows Hall.

The first of these two stirring decades was still within
the era of the covered wagon and stage coach, although
the first railroad to reach the Pacific had been completed
in 1869. During the next decade the railroads spread hither
and yon over the West in the greatest epoch of railroad
building the world has ever known. In fact, before the
end of that second decade more than half of all the rail-
road mileage ever built in the West had been completed.
The covered wagon had had its day, and was only a wagon
on the farm, and the stage coach was a relic, falling apart
in the sun in the backyard of some livery stable.

After the best of the farming lands had been settled
under the original Homestead Act, various other acts were
brought into being for the settlement of other kinds of
lands. Thus there came about the desert claim, the timber
claim, the grazing claim and others. Eventually, in order
to reclaim certain desert lands with irrigation, acts were
passed allowing companies to capitalize for the purpose of
building irrigation dams and canals, and authorizing the
selling of water rights to the settlers on the new tracts
opened for irrigation.

The free land grew more and more scarce, naturally,
and as each new region was surveyed and thrown open,
or an Indian reservation purchased from a tribe was sur-
veyed and opened to white settlers, there was a rush upon
the land office. Finally, because the number seeking land
exceeded the available number of claims, the question of

1 66 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

priority had to be settled by drawing, or by some other
method of chance. When parts of the Colville reservation
in Washington, the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho, and
the Missoula reservation in Montana were opened, the
railroad had to run special trains to the places of drawing,
and the number of registrants at each place was more than
ten times the number of available quarter-sections.

Famous among the land rushes was the Oklahoma open-
ing of 1889. There a large tract had been purchased from
the Creeks and Seminoles, to be opened for settlement by
white people. Instead of holding a drawing for places, or
handling the matter in some other reasonable manner, the
government chose to make a horse race out of it. At the
border on the day of the opening waited twenty thousand
people, some mounted on fast horses, some in surreys drawn
by spans of flash trotters, and thousands who could not
afford to put race stock into the contest mounted on
ordinary cayuses or driving in hacks and light wagons
pulled by horses taken from the plow. These twenty
thousand waiting at the border were armed with an
assortment of pistols, rifles, and shotguns, to give the ag-
gregation an appearance described as more like that of an
army of the homeguards turned out to repel a band of
Comanches on the warpath than it did a group of land-
hungry people seeking homesteads.

At high noon on April the twenty-second the signal
to start was given, and the race literally was on in a cloud
of dust. In the stampede that followed horses went down,
vehicles were upset, limbs and shoulder bones broken, and
dozens of other mishaps met with. Within a few hours

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 167

of the start the men mounted on race horses and those
flying across the hills of prairie grass in buggies pulled by
fleet trotters began arriving at the area of the homesteads.
Luckiest of all, though, were a number of men who the
night before had sneaked under cover of darkness inside
the excluded area, hidden in the bushes, and already had
their claims staked and their Winchesters ready to defend
them before even the fastest of the horse gallopers arrived.
Because the men who hid in the bushes got to their claims
sooner than others, they became known as the "Sooners,"
and the name has stuck as a nickname for all Oklahomans
to this day.

It was the vision of the planners of the original home-
stead act that once the public land of the West had
been apportioned among actual settlers it would remain
throughout the centuries a land covered with fruitful
farms, none so small as to deny its owner a reasonably
comfortable living for himself and family, and yet none
so large as to create in America a system of land tenantry.
This was a revival of Jefferson's ideas about land. But
unfortunately it was not in the course of history for the
West to keep itself rooted in the fundamental land policy
with which it got started. Once a piece of land had been
proved up and title to it obtained the land became eligible
for a mortgage, and it was not long before most of the
original farms had gotten these deadly pieces of paper
hung upon them. When hard times came, beginning with
the Panic of 1893, during the second administration of
Grover Cleveland, mortgage holders took many of the
farms. The original owners who survived were those who

1 68 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

were a little better than their neighbors at managing their
farms, or whose luck was a little better. Some of these
were not only able to hold down their own pieces of land,
but were able also to enlarge their holdings by buying
land from the neighbors who were going broke. But far
more often it was not the few farmers who had fared well,
but rather the bankers and storekeepers in the city who
held the mortgages of the farmers out of luck, and suc-
ceeded to their hard-earned property. These gentlemen
of the city seldom were farmers by instinct. Typically,
when one of them acquired a new piece of land through
a mortgage foreclosure, he rented it out to a tenant to
farm for him on a share-crop basis, and he himself only
drove out to the farm once or twice a year in his red-
wheeled buggy behind a high-stepping span of Hamil-
tonians to have a look at how things were going. Thus in
spite of all early hopes and intentions that the ownership
of farms would preserve individual freedom, a tenant sys-
tem of farming, with the owner living in the city and a
sharecropper living on the land, gradually became an es-
tablished way in the West, as it had already done in the
South and to a less extent in the East— a system which,
wherever it comes into practice, degrades the occupation
of farming with poverty, backwardness and peasantry.

For a homesteader to lose his homestead by mortgage
foreclosure, after he had spent years improving it, and
had gone through all the hardships and deprivations of the
homestead life, was a tragedy of failure and defeat the
sorrow of which no one who has not seen a case of it
with his own eyes can fully understand. Usually the home-

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 169

steader was a man who had come West with his wife and
children to find his freedom in land. He had become at-
tached to his quarter-section, and farming for him was the
only occupation he knew about or about which he really
cared. For him, consequently, the day the sheriff came out
from the city with a mortgage foreclosure in his pocket
and served it upon him was the end of his world. He
could take down his rifle and shoot the sheriff even though
he was only performing his duty, and was not one of the
persons who had wronged him. He could go into the barn
and hang himself to a rafter with a halter rope. Or he
could pile stoves, beds, chairs, and his family into a wagon
and drive off to the city, there to search for any kind of
work his strong but unskilled hands might find. The last,
of course, is what the farmer who had gone flat broke did
do— drive off to the city with his family. But his shoulders
were bowed, and for him all of hope and glory had gone
out of his life.

In many a rural region, as its farms grew larger and
larger, coming under the ownership of the few unusually
successful farmers, or, more numerous than they, the mort-
gage holders who lived in the city, school districts were
broken up, two districts or even three being consolidated
into one, for there were no longer enough school children
to fill all the schoolhouses that had been built back in the
days when the region was a thriving community of home-
steaders. It is a sorry fact that by the year 1905, in many
places in the West it was more difficult for a boy or girl
living in the country to get a grammar school education
than it had been back in the homestead days twenty years

1 70 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

earlier, when there had been a family living on every
quarter-section of land.

No nation that has the best of its farming lands held
by land overlords and farmed by share-croppers can ex-
pect to become and remain as prosperous, happy, and
strong as a nation whose lands are mainly in the possession
of small proprietors. That is what Adam Smith and
Thomas Jefferson and other great economists had thought
and said, and the subject is one to which they gave years
of deep study. Looking back now upon the lamentable
endings to which came a large number of homesteaders in
the West, whose homes were lost by the mortgage fore-
closure, it is seen how much better for the country as a
whole it would have been had a man losing his homestead
been permitted to travel into a newer region of the West,
there to take up another homestead, and begin life anew
upon it. But this he could not do. Having used his home-
stead right once, by the homestead act itself his right to
further homesteading was barred.

It would have been even better, both for the individual
and the nation if public lands once settled as homesteads
must always be held, under the government, as homesteads
owned by the homesteader occupant. Such method of pos-
sessing land is possible. In fact, there were many home-
steaders who did choose of their own accord to hold their
claims in this manner for many years beyond the required
minimum time for making final proof upon them. On
homesteads held in this manner the occupants enjoyed all
profits from the land just the same as they would on pat-
ented land, and they were not required to pay any land

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 171

taxes to the state. If the option of continuing to hold a
piece of land as a homestead or proving upon the land and
obtaining title to it had not been given to the individual
but, instead, all land had been apportioned under a sys-
tem of perpetual homesteads, each quarter-section always
would have retained its identity, and could never have
become merged in ownership with another piece of land.
Moreover, if the land had been handled in this way it
never could have become mortgaged, to run the risk of
being lost. If sold or relinquished in any other way, such
relinquishment would have been at the owner's volition
or by reason of his death, not by mortgage foreclosure,
and the new owner would necessarily have been a person
with a right to hold a homestead.

Because of the unfortunate endings to which most of
the homestead farms and ranches did eventually come, it
is not advocated that the federal government buy land
and resell it to individuals, who will run the risk again
of mortgage foreclosures, but, instead, it is recommended
that a new set of homestead laws be enacted. Under this
law the government would establish land offices through-
out the country, and through these offices buy land
wherever it can be found at reasonable prices, and resell
it as perpetual homesteads to those holding homestead
rights. A third of the cost of the land, or of the value of
the buildings and other improvements upon it—whichever
is the larger amount — would be required as a down pay-
ment, and the balance, plus a reasonable interest, would
be paid over a period of ten years.

Each adult, both man and woman, would be entitled

172 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

to one renewable homestead right. This right could be
used to hold possession of a homestead farm of 160 acres,
a ranch of 320 acres, or a garden-orchard tract of 10 acres.
Ownership of one homestead would bar ownership of
another, except that in order to permit a man desiring a
change in locations to buy a new homestead before dis-
posing of his old one, or to permit him to come into
possession of a second homestead through inheritance, a
reasonable overlapping time, say six months, would be
allowed him. Within this overlapping period he must dis-
pose of either the old or the new homestead. If he should
fail to comply with the law in this respect, it would be-
come the duty of the land office to take possession of the
new homestead and sell at public auction, and turn over
the money received for it, less charges to cover the ad-
ministrative expenses involved, to the owner. Probably a
case requiring such action would be extremely rare.

The owner of a homestead, no matter what its class,
desiring to sell his land would be free to name his price
and bargain with prospective buyers just as he can at the
present time with a piece of patented land. Or the land
could be sold back to the government at a price offered
by the land office, to be disposed of by the government
as the law might require.

If the land is sold to an individual and the transaction
is for cash, the transfer papers will be handled by the
land office. But if the new owner seeks to buy on terms,
the land office would determine whether it would be fair
to require a third or more than a third as the down pay-
ment, with the understanding that the balance would

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 173

be divided over a period of ten years, with interest. In
this case the new owner would owe the balance to the
government, exactly the same as if this were the original
sale by the government as a homestead. The seller would
get the full amount of the selling price in any case, less
any fixed administrative charge by the government, and
of course less any unpaid balance the seller might owe
the government at the time of making his sale. If the
transaction is made through a real estate broker, he would
have his fee. The part that the realtor would play in this
homestead set-up is important, and will be more fully ex-
plained further along in this chapter.

Whatever the causes for the alarming decline of the
rural population in most of the states during the past two
decades most certainly a scarcity of farming land is not
among them. Throughout the United States there are
lying idle many millions of acres of land that could be
growing crops and livestock, and giving homes to millions
of people who love farming and have no skill or trade or
professional qualifications that fit them for the city. One
need only drive out the back way of the District of
Columbia, across the Anacostia Bridge, and thence south-
ward along the peninsula in Maryland to a region where
some of the earliest colonial homes were built, to meet
with terrain once covered with farms and farmhouses, and
to all appearances good land still, but now overgrown with
second growth pine and wild blackberry bramble, and the
farmhouses that once dotted the landscape represented
here and there by an old building given over, long since,
to the woodrats and wasps, or an old chimney still stand-

174 * TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

ing where fire has destroyed a house, or a grove of shade
trees that can be recognized as a site where a farmhouse
once stood. There seems no good reason why this land
might not be turned into good farms again, if a different
system of land possession can ever be put into law to re-
place the present system of land holding by which the
farming land of the nation steadily has become degraded.
The same condition of neglected farms and the same fac-
tors accounting for it can be found in almost every other
state.

The homestead act here recommended would provide
that a homestead could never for any reason be taken away
from an owner during his lifetime against his will. If the
land is a farm, ranch, or a garden-orchard tract, purchased
on terms, and the owner becomes delinquent in his pay-
ments, the government by a special provision of the act
itself would be empowered to take over the property, all
except the house and a garden space of defined area sur-
rounding it, and rent the land at public auction on a long-
term rental basis, crediting against the indebtedness the
amount received, less a fixed administrative charge. When
the amount due the government, either through the cash
rentals received, or these amounts supplemented by any
payments the owner may later be able to make, is fully
paid, the government would allow the owner to come
again into complete possession of the property at the expi-
ration of the period of the lease. By such method of han-
dling, the owner of a ranch, farm or garden-orchard tract,
if delinquent on payments, would be deprived of the full
possession and use of his land until such delinquency be-

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 175

comes extinguished. This, though it may have the appear-
ance of harsh treatment in some instances, is much better
than that the owner who cannot keep up his payments
should lose his land completely through a mortgage fore-
closure. Besides, he will have left for his home the house
on the land and a garden plot around it during the time he
is delinquent.

Probably there seldom would be a case in which the
government would lose money on a homestead of any
kind. If the owner should die before the land has been
fully paid for, but was not delinquent in payments, the
heir would simply take up the yearly payments where the
original owner left off. But if the owner was delinquent
in payments, it would be the obligation of the heir to
eradicate the delinquency as a qualification for his coming
into possession of the property. If the heir failed to do
so, the government would cause the land to be sold at
public auction, paying to the heir any amount left over
from the sale after the government's accounts have been
completely satisfied.

Another important feature of the proposed new home-
stead law is that the land could not be willed to several
heirs in any way that would cause the land to be divided.
The homestead act itself would require a system of tenure
by which the land would always remain intact. Ways are
open, and have been used in the past, by which property
remains intact after the death of an owner. In England,
for example, landed estates have been held intact in the
same family for hundreds of years. This could be accom-
plished for homesteads by requiring the owner to file at

176 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

the land office the name of the heir to his homestead. Or
the owner could specify at the land office that he desires
the land to be sold by the government upon his death, and
the net amount received to be divided among named heirs.
These are only suggestions. The point is that many ways
are available for the f ramers of the homestead act to devise
a form of tenure which will prevent the physical division
of a homestead.

Still another important feature of the proposed home-
stead act would be the exemption from property taxes,
although the owner would pay income taxes on any rev-
enue derived from the land, as he now must do. In case
of a failure to pay an income tax to the United States, or
any other indebtedness to the United States, the amount
could be charged against the land, just like an install-
ment payment. If after a specified period the indebted-
ness is not satisfied, the government could take the same
action as for delinquency on the purchase payments. In
case of an income tax due a state or any other indebted-
ness to a government inferior to the federal government,
no possession of the property could be taken, because, in
the final analysis, the land would be the property of the
United States. This would be only another example of a
conflict that has been steadily growing between state and
federal governments over the right of each to tax the
same piece of property or the same income. This conflict
is not likely to be resolved until and unless the federal
government will discontinue all sales taxes, internal rev-
enue taxes and excise taxes, in order that the state govern-
ments may have the sales taxes as their principal source of

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 177

tax incomes rather than property taxes and state income
taxes.

The philosophy of exempting homesteads from prop-
erty taxes requires explanation. A farm is the farmer's
tool for earning his income, which income is not, in the
usual case, as much as a carpenter's or a brick mason's or
even that of an unskilled laborer. On whatever income he
does earn from his farm he pays income taxes, as all other
people pay taxes upon their incomes. But in addition to
that the farmer who owns patented land must pay to the
county and state a real estate tax. This makes him the
victim of double taxation, being required to pay both a
tax on the tool by which his income is earned and on the
income itself.

Many years ago, before the Sixteenth Amendment to
the Constitution permitted the federal government to im-
pose taxes on incomes, and we were much less an indus-
trial nation than we have since become, a tax on land was
a necessity. A land tax is still justifiable along with an
income tax in the case of a large area of land owned by
one person. Just as much as it is right that a corporation
should be taxed by the state for its worth in buildings,
grounds, machinery and other fixed property, and in addi-
tion to that required to pay the federal government a cor-
poration tax on its earnings, so also is it right that the
owner of a large farm should be taxed by the state on the
valuation of the land, and by the federal government on
the income from the land. But in case of a homesteader,
whose land by its size presumably would be limited to a
family income, a different principle is involved. To give

• TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

him a slug of taxation from both barrels would be no
more right than that a carpenter be required to pay not
only an income tax on his earnings, but also a tax of a
hundred dollars or so on the hammer and saw by which
these earnings are made, or that a trombone player have
to pay a stiff yearly tax on the instrument by which his
pay with an orchestra is earned.

Under the homestead system as it is here advocated,
although tillable land would be classified as ranch, farm,
or garden-orchard according to its potential productivity,
there would be no restriction as to the kind of crop the
owner could plant. The fact, for instance, that a piece
of land was sold as a homestead of 320 acres instead of a
farm of 160 acres, because deemed better suited for graz-
ing than for cultivated crops, would not mean that the
owner could not grow or try to grow cultivated crops
upon it. It would mean simply that when the land is
divided into ranches, farms, and garden-orchard areas, the
land office would make an honest attempt to classify the
land according to prospective availability. In each case the
amount of land would be that deemed sufficient to earn
for the owner and his family a decent living, if properly
managed. If time should prove that a particular homestead
was in the wrong classification, and should the land ever
return to the possession of the government it would be
within the province of the government to change its classi-
fication. Whether crop price support should be allowed
on a crop grown on land outside its classification is a
question that probably should not be answered until there

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 179

have been enough factual cases on which a considered de-
cision can be based.

1 60 acres has been used here to designate the proper
size of a farm and 320 acres for a ranch. These figures
have been taken because in times past they have been used
and, in general, found satisfactory in dividing land in the
West among homesteads, using the smaller acreage for the
farm lands and the larger one for land deemed suitable
only for grazing purposes. But it is realized that much
of the land throughout the nation, particularly in the
original thirteen states, was not originally surveyed into
farms of uniform size as was the land of the West, but
the boundaries in many instances were determined by land
marks. To try now to put such pieces of land into farms
and ranches of exactly 160 acres and 320 acres, respec-
tively, could not be accomplished without having left
over a large number of odds and ends in every general
area. For this reason, the figures 160 and 320 must be
used only as guides. In some areas because a piece of land
could not be cut exactly into a farm of 160 acres, it might
have an acreage anywhere from 100 to 200 acres. Simi-
larly, a ranch might have acreage from 200 to 400 acres.
Also, a garden-orchard tract could not always be exactly
10 acres in area, but might contain a few acres more or
less than the standard size.

Naturally, the owner of a homestead would not be re-
stricted from owning patented land in addition to his
homestead. In any given area, then, the two classes of land
would be found. First, as now, there would be the pat-

l8o • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

ented and taxable land, and the office of the county clerk
would have custody of its title record. But here and there
throughout the region, wherever the homestead seekers
might find pieces of land, the price of which the land
office considers fair, would be the farms and ranches pur-
chased through government financing and held as home-
steads, and the land office located somewhere in the gen-
eral region would be the custodian of the papers. It could
be hoped and expected, though, that eventually the home-
stead land would increase in acreage over the patented
land, because it would be to the advantage of the small
proprietor to own a homestead farm rather than a farm
of patented land, and it is the small proprietor most of
all that the government should be interested in getting into
possession of the soil. But during the time the two classes
are in existence side by side in any area, there would be
nothing by which the eye could distinguish the one from
the other, except that the homestead, because it would be
a bona fide home, probably would have about it more of
an improved appearance than a piece of land farmed by a
share-cropper. The owner of the perpetual homestead
would have every right in his land that the owner of a
piece of patented land would have, including the right to
sell or trade it. Besides, he would have freedom from land
taxes, and the assurance that the farm could never against
his will be taken away from him.

The purpose is not to make country people a pampered
class, nor to devise any magically easy way in which to
come into possession of a homestead. The man who seeks
to buy one through government financing must be able to

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • l8l

make a cash down payment of a third of the purchase
price, and that might not be easy for him to do. He might
have to put aside a part of his earnings for several years,
and deny himself and his family many things, in order to
be able to make this required down payment. But this does
mean that once a man has come into possession of a home-
stead of his choice, the land during his lifetime can never
be taken away from him against his will. For him a piece
of land once acquired would be a rock of refuge for the
remainder of his life.

Because the homestead under the new homestead act
would be purchased land, there would not be any require-
ment, of course, that the owner must live upon it in order
to hold it, as was the case of the old homestead, which was
won by settling upon it for a required period rather than
through purchase. There would be an advantage in this
change. It would make it possible for a worker in a fac-
tory, a business man, or any other person whose employ-
ment or trade is in the city to acquire the farm upon which
he would like to live when he retires, without waiting
until his retirement has become a fact. In the meantime,
if the land is too distant from his place of employment
to permit his living upon it, he should be able to rent the
land to the owner of a neighboring piece of land, and, if
the farm was not overpriced when he bought it, the rent
should provide the annual payments to the land office.

But if the land is within convenient daily driving dis-
tance from his place of employment, he can, if he wishes,
live on it with his family and avail himself or hired agri-
cultural machinery service to do his own farming. This

l8l • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

hired machinery service has only recently become avail-
able, but it is rapidly growing in popularity throughout
many sections of the country, because the farmers using
it are put to less expense and risks for plowing, harrow-
ing, sowing and harvesting crops, than they are when
owning the expensive machinery for the jobs and doing
the work themselves. For many men living on a farm
before retirement, however, a more interesting arrange-
ment would be to keep the land planted in grasses for
grazing and haying, and raise beef cattle for the market.
If a man is at heart a livestock man, he can spend his week
ends and vacations with branding, dipping, mending
fences, putting up hay for winter feed, dickering with
cattle buyers, or, if nothing else to do, with just sitting
on a fence watching cows eat grass, and never grow tired
of the life.

The proposed act creating the perpetual homestead
would not allow any method of government financing
for home building. Neither could a contractor build a
home on the property, to be secured by a mortgage on
the property and paid for in installments over a period
of years, because a feature of the homestead would be that
it could not be mortgaged. This restriction is mentioned
here as a blessing and not as a shortcoming. The owner
of a house, if required to pay in full for the material and
labor to build it, would not be likely to overstrain his
finances on buildings, as so many have been doing this
past decade— a practice which has been largely responsible
for the rise in prices on all homes. The homestead house
need not be pretentious. A rustic house, warm and com-

PERPETUAL HOMESTEADS • 183

fortable, but not costing much will do in the country,
whereas in the city the same house might seem too humble.

If the homesteader must have a financed home, how-
ever, he could purchase a removable, pre-fabricated house,
which can be sold to him on installments the same as an
automobile, with a mortgage upon the house itself, not
upon the ground on which it sits. There are already on
the market pre-fabricated houses of this kind. They are
not the best houses in the world, but they can be roomy,
clean, warm and comfortable.

Earlier in this chapter it was said that the owner would
have the same right to sell a homestead as he now has to
sell any piece of patented land he may own. The only
difference is that the buyer must be a person at the mo-
ment of the purchase who has a right to purchase a home-
stead, and the transaction would be handled through the
regional land office. But distinctly the land office would
not become a real estate office, no more than does the
county clerk's office at the present time function as a real
estate office.

The real estate broker, consequently, would not be
ruled out by a homestead system of holding land. On the
contrary, his office would become an important part of
the system. To it normally would come those in search
of rural homes, as only here could specific information
be readily obtainable on farms, ranches and garden-
orchard property in particular localities, and general in-
formation on climate and other pertinent matters. The
real estate agent, who would be a qualified and registered
realtor, would handle the transaction between buyer and

184 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

seller, and would have his fee, which would be a fixed fee
graded to the purchase price of the property, and would
be collected in full at the land office from the money
paid down by the buyer, and turned over to him.

Also it was earlier said that at the start of the new
homestead system the government, through its regional
land offices, would buy land wherever bargains can be
found and resell it as farms, ranches, and garden-orchard
ranchitas. This method, however, probably would seldom
be used except in cases of large estates, where several
hundred acres could be purchased in one deal, to be divided
into several homesteads. In most other cases, an owner
wishing to sell a piece of land that presumably could
qualify for a homestead, and for which he could, when
the time comes, be able to furnish a guaranteed title, would
list his property with a realtor. Then the regional land
office would be contacted by the realtor. If the maximum
price to be asked for the land and other factors involved
are acceptable to the superintendent of the regional land
office, the land would be offered for sale by the realtor
for his client. A buyer for it found, the transaction would
be completed through the land office, by which the title
to the land would pass to the government, and in the same
transaction be turned over to the buyer as a perpetual
homestead. The realtor's fee would be collected by the
government at the time of the sale and turned over to him.

10

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE
CAPITAL CITY

WORD picture that has been painted often enough
since the atomic bomb first became a threat against our
own country shows Washington completely and suddenly
destroyed in an attack. The President, Vice-President, the
Cabinet and all members of Congress present in Washing-
ton at the time of the attack are among the thousands of
dead. In one blinding flash federal government passes out
of existence, and there is no constitutional machinery by
which it could immediately be restored.

The presumption by some is that in such event trust
would have to be placed in the legislatures of the several
states and committees of citizens to set up a new national
capital at some other place, cloak it with national authority,
and get it functioning somehow. To others the situation
would seem to call for a military leader stepping forth and
proclaiming military government as the law of the pros-
trate nation, and himself as the head of it. In which case,
under his declared dictatorial authority the nation, it
would be hoped, could be successfully led through the
war and, after that, the military hero would modestly re-

185

1 86 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

fuse the crown that screaming thousands would be trying
to slap on his head, and restore elective authority to the
people. Horrifying as this picture of a destroyed Wash-
ington is, it is scarcely overdrawn.

Our federal government has in course of time grown
more and more complex in its functions, like the evolution
of the human body, until today Washington, the capital
city, is to the nation what a handful of gray matter in
his skull is to the body of a man. This was not always so.
At the time of our Revolutionary War, for instance, if
the lack of a highly centralized authority was a short-
coming when it came to trying to organize a great con-
certed offensive action against the British, at other times
it was the salvation of the cause of independence that
there was nowhere a nerve center at which the foe could
strike and thereby paralyze the whole of the confederated
colonies.

In the War of 1812 we were still so loosely knit as states
that when, in 1814, the British captured and burnt the
city of Washington, its fall had no serious effect, one way
or the other, on the course of the war. During the period
1861-1865, when the Civil War was on, our country was
still a nation whose strength was segmented among its
several states. The armies that comprised its forces, except
for a few regiments of the Regular Army that had been
needed to protect the frontiers against the Indians, were
state troops.

Indeed, so much had the strength of the nation always
been partitioned among its several states, that when eleven
of these states withdrew from the Union in 1861 and set

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE CAPITAL CITY • 187

up their own government, so little machinery of federal
government was required to bind them together and start
them functioning as a new nation that they were almost
successful in making their secession from the Union per-
manent. Among the states that remained in the Union,
too, because of the same segmented strength, there was no
single spot among them highly critical to the whole.

Time and gain the North's capital at Washington was
threatened with capture. Even when the war seemed to
be nearing its close a Confederate battery of field artillery
succeeded in getting inside the city, unlimbered at a spot
near where now stands Walter Reed Hospital, and from
its positions plopped cannon balls upon Pennsylvania Ave-
nue. On that day, as on other excited days, the govern-
ment was prepared to start moving, bag and baggage,
upon a moment's notice, if ever the order became neces-
sary, but by a fraction it never was. Had the capital been
forced to move from Washington, the outcome of the
Civil War could hardly have been different from what it
was. The North put down the South in the end, not be-
cause it was able to save its capital from capture, but
because its manufacturing facilities for the replacement
of cannon, rifles and ammunition, and its facilities for
transportation were better than those of the South, and
because it was strong enough at sea to blockade the ports
of the South.

Between the time of the Civil War and the present day
there has been a great change in the functioning of our
government, one by which the national capital has become
a unique spot whose indestructibility is absolutely essen-

1 88 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

rial to the life of the nation as a whole. It is necessary to
understand the reason for this great change. Persons who
do not understand it are in danger of being led into a false
sense of security by imagining that our capital could again
be destroyed by the enemy in time of war, as it was in
1814, without fatal injury to the national government.

February 15, 1913, though seldom mentioned as a mem-
orable date, actually is a point of time marking the greatest
change in the government of the United States that has
ever been made during its long history. It was on
February 15, 1913, that the Secretary of State declared
by proclamation that the Sixteenth Amendment to the
Constitution had been ratified. The Sixteenth Amendment
gave Congress "power to lay and collect taxes on incomes,
from whatever sources derived, without apportionment
among the several states." In 1916, under authority of
the Sixteenth Amendment the Federal Income Tax Law
was passed. Ever since that year, and as a result of the
working of this law, our nation has continued to grow
more and more centralized in its power, in proportion
to the increase in the rates of income taxes, and the state
governments, correspondingly, have continued to wither
into less significance.

At first the change-over from a nation with its strength
segmented among its several states to a nation of cen-
tralized strength was not easily noticeable, because the
rates of the original income tax law were not excessive.
Now it is a different story, as every man and woman in
the land who has an annual income exceeding $600 knows.
The Federal Income Tax Law in its present form, which

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE CAPITAL CITY • 189

can tax above seventy-five per cent on the upper brackets
of individual earnings, has drawn into the federal govern-
ment an immensity of power it never had before. Indeed,
the Income Tax Law has made our nation probably the
most centralized nation in the world.

Here is not the place to question the right of the federal
government to reap with its big income tax scythe an
almost unlimited share of the earnings of the citizens,
leaving to the states only the gleanings, and pinching the
states until they must come begging at the door of the
national treasury for social security, unemployment relief,
highway construction, and funds for dozens of other local
activites which, in former times, properly were the sole
province of the state, county and local governments. Nor
is it here the place to discuss any proposed way by which
overcentralization of federal government might be done
away with, and a form of government with its strength
segmented among its several states restored to the country.
The fact to be emphasized here is that our national capital
at Washington is a different organ today than it was dur-
ing either the War of 1812 or the Civil War. It is now
such a highly centralized nerve center that if ever de-
stroyed the whole body of the nation will become in-
stantly paralyzed.

We can be certain that no one knows better than does
our potential enemy, who has made it his scientific duty
to prod and explore us for all our spots of greatest vul-
nerability, how difficult it would be for us to resist an
invasion, to say nothing of trying to mobilize, train and
equip an army of five million to send overseas, if on the

190 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

very first day of the war all of the elected and appointed
federal officials, together with the thousands of civil serv-
ice employees and all the records and machinery by which
the entire office of federal government is administered,
are buried under mounds of smoking ruins in Washington.
This initial blow would be a bullet through the national
brain. Given a stockpile of 2000 atomic bombs with which
to start the war, the enemy could afford to send the entire
number against Washington all at once, if he might be
sure that at least one bomb in the batch would find the
target, for it would require only one scored atomic ex-
plosion over Washington to put our federal government
virtually out of existence.

Of course it would be ridiculous to imagine that the
enemy might have to think about spending his entire stock-
pile of bombs in trying to place one good hit on Wash-
ington. No ring of antiaircraft guns or police of planes
could be depended upon to bring down every approaching
enemy plane bearing an atomic bomb. Indeed, it has been
estimated by persons highest in authority on the subject
that seven out of every ten enemy bombers could get past
our air defenses. And besides bombers there would be
available to the enemy rockets launched from submarines
surfacing off the coast of Delaware or from the decks of
his commercial ships in waters off our shores.

But with all the warnings on how easily the national
capital at Washington could be destroyed that recently
have come from many responsible persons, including many
members of Congress and officers in high rank among the
armed forces, the warnings so far have produced almost

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE CAPITAL CITY • 191

no feasible actions or even suggestions for defending our
nation from a disaster so staggering. The whole ghastly
matter has seemed like one of those disgusting murder
dramas in which a household has been thoroughly warned
that there is going to be murder by the clock, but not a
person of the group seems to have enough sense or the
courage to move to another place or arm himself with a
weapon. All just sit in a huddle at the center of the room
as helpless and horror-struck as so many cornered sheep,
waiting for the murderer to come and carry out his threat.

It is not exactly true to say that there have been no
suggestions whatever to meet the threat of a destroyed
Washington. Recently some proposals have been made for
building at a short distance from the capital some auxiliary
buildings into which, when war becomes imminent, some
of the operating personnel and the records of the several
departments of government could be moved. But it is
obvious that the enemy hardly could be kept completely
in the dark about the locations of these auxiliary buildings,
and if he thinks the destruction of them important enough,
certainly should be able to destroy them as easily as he
can destroy the capital itself. The trouble with an idea
of this kind is that, if ever put into effect, the false sense
of security it will give and the funds it will use up could
preclude a solution really capable of saving the nation's
capital from being destroyed.

What the nation needs is a new capital city, one in
which, when war becomes imminent, the President, Vice-
President, members of Congress, the Judiciary and the
heads of the several departments of government and their

192 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

staffs will be able to live and work without the constant
fear that at any moment they may be blasted into eternity.
Moreover, the nation needs a capital city which, when war
does come, can be expected to stand and function as the
capital as long as there is left any corner of the United
States to serve. This last can never be expected of present
Washington, one of the most vulnerable spots in all the
United States.

No nation that expects to live and preserve its place
among the strong nations of the world can consider the
retention of the present site of its national capital, for his-
torical or sentimental reasons, or by reason of present in-
vestments in buildings, grounds and facilities, to be of
greater importance than the preservation of the nation as
a whole. After all, the purpose of a capital is to serve its
nation, and it is not the nation that should be sacrificed
to save the capital. France in 1941 is a warning example.
In strength France's fleet was in Europe second only to
the fleet of her ally, Great Britain, and her army was
strong in numbers and equipment. Though beaten in the
field by the greater might of the German machine, France
could have moved her army and its equipment to North
Africa and from that segment of her empire as her pro-
visional base, and with her navy to prevent the Germans
from pursuing across the Mediterranean, might have per-
severed as a nation while the war was being decided by
events elsewhere. But as the German armored columns
approached La Belle Paris, the threatened destruction of
the city was more than the weak heart of the French gov-
ernment could bear. The government chose to sacrifice

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE CAPITAL CITY • 193

the nation instead. By the surrender Paris was saved, but
France, the nation that had lived magnificently in glory
and courage through so many centuries, lost in that one
evil hour of surrender something it may never be able to
regain.

Our own capital has no claim upon the heart of the
nation that should cause one tear to be shed if it must
be moved to another location. It covers no battlefield or
other spot of sanctified soil. It stands on ground the gen-
eral location of which was agreed upon in a horse trade
between the leaders of the two major political parties of
the day. The selection of the exact site was left to a board
of three persons, who went out to look for it in much
the same way as might a board of army officers set out
to look for a location for a new cantonment.

And in its history since that time the city has won no
laurels for itself. On the contrary, during the war of 1812
it was disgracefully abandoned with scarcely a shot fired
in its defense. A fortress located just outside the city,
which had been planned by the brilliant French engineer
Major L 'Enfant, planner of the city itself, whose solid,
unscalable walls might have withstood all the infantry
and artillery thrown against them, was given up to the
enemy in as cowardly a fashion as the city itself. This
great piece of masonry, which was built at heavy expense
for its day, complete with drawbridge, moat, massive-
walled magazines for the storage of ammunition and pro-
visions, and well sunk below the bed of the Potomac for
its supply of water, has been treated by time and the ele-
ments better than it has deserved, and today it can be

194 * TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

seen by those who go to look for it probably not greatly
changed in exterior appearance from what it was on the
day it was turned over to the army by its builders a century
and a half ago. Yet today there are thousands of persons
who have lived in Washington all of their lives who have
not used an hour of their time to visit this great fortress,
and it is never listed nor mentioned as one of the capital's
sights, such a disgraceful blot was its spineless surrender
upon the nation's escutcheon.

In further argument on this point about the location
of the capital it can be said that back in the days when
the capital had to be moved from one place to another
for any urgent reason, the government did not hesitate
for a moment to move it. In all, the nation's capital occu-
pied seven different cities before it came to rest where it
now stands.

It is true that when the present site was selected for
Washington in 1800, the location was a convenient one,
all things considered, to the population comprising the
sixteen states which at that time made up the nation. But
the expansion of the nation westward since that time, be-
ginning with the Louisiana Purchase, has left Washington
sitting upon a flank of the nation.

After minds have been made up that the national capital
must be moved completely from its present woefully de-
fenseless location, a decision must be made as to where it
will be relocated.

If terrain alone ruled for the new site of the capital,
California, Oregon, or Washington could offer many spots
in their rugged, beautiful mountains. But any location on

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE CAPITAL CITY • 195

the Pacific Coast would again be putting the capital upon
a flank of the nation. Also, in case of invasion from the
direction of the Pacific Ocean a capital along that side
of the continent would be within the territory first to fall
to the enemy. In the Virginias, the Carolinas and Tennes-
see, there are many spots of excellent mountain terrain,
but for reasons similar to those for the Pacific Coast, a
location for the new capital should not be selected from
among them. Further inland, in the region of Sun Valley,
Idaho, the area of the Tetons in Wyoming, and the north-
east corner of Utah, there are areas of rugged terrain, yet
accessible by train and the other means of transportation,
but too far to the west to serve the nation as a whole with
the greatest convenience. If a central location combined
with ruggedness of terrain and accessibility were the only
deciding factors, Arkansas could offer her beautiful Ozark
Mountains. A disqualifying feature about the Ozarks,
however, would be their openness to an attack from the
south, and the terrain, although rugged, cannot in this re-
spect match the terrain of many other regions.

If the approximate geographical center of the United
States is determined by the intersection of two lines, one
drawn from the tip of Florida diagonally across the United
States to Cape Flattery in Washington State, and the other
line drawn from the tip of Maine to the southwest corner
of California just below San Diego, the center will be
found to be only a short distance from the place where
the continental divide extends farthest east. Here is located
the Rocky Mountain National Park, and it is the area
within and about this park that seems to have a better

196 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

claim than any other place as the new capital of the United
States. Within an area comprising the park, the Roosevelt
National Forest adjoining it, and open land lying to the
east that could be purchased by the government, could be
located a capital city with terrain to give it the maximum
protection that terrain can give. Yet the area would be
approachable by rail, highway and air, and it would be
centrally located with respect to the whole of the United
States.

The site for the new capital city having been selected
here, care would be taken to give much greater space to
it than now is contained in the District of Columbia, so
that the various bureaus and agencies of the several de-
partments of government might be segregated into separate
buildings and the whole widely dispersed. Into the solid
rock of the buttes and ridges that abound about the area
would be tunneled caverns for the storage of permanent
records, and chambers where personnel could work and
hold assembly during times of great peril, safe against the
most powerful atomic bomb that might be projected into
the area. Care also would be taken that within the area
of the capital proper only buildings strictly pertaining to
the government would be placed. The commercial city
to serve the capital would be spread over a wide semi-
circular area about the eastern side of the capital area.
Here would be space for the homes of the officials of
the government, the thousands of civil service employees,
hotels, railroad stations, bus terminals, air fields, and all
the other establishments presently connected with the
capital city. With proper zoning for this commercial city,

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE CAPITAL CITY • 197

like any other city achieving atomic defense through dis-
persion, it would never be allowed to exceed a certain
population density.

It is true that the Constitution authorizes for the na-
tional capital an area not exceeding ten miles square, but
this provision would not prevent the government from
putting additional land into the capital area, as already it
has done about the present Washington. Later, if deemed
necessary or desirable to have all of the enormous capital
area, including the commercial city to serve it, to come
under the unique rule of the Congress, an amendment to
the Constitution could authorize this. But if the people to
occupy the commercial city have any choice in the mat-
ter they would probably ask that this area be left as a
part of the state, in order that its residents may have the
right to vote and to rule their own city the same as the
citizens of any other community.

If the purpose here were the promotion of real estate
or tourist trade, it would be interesting to tell how Wash-
ington, moved to the Rocky Mountain National Park
region, certainly would have the most beautiful and in-
spiring location of any capital city in the world. In variety
of features and beauty there is not another spot in the
world to outrival it. From the area you drive in an easterly
direction and in less than an hour you are in a semi-arid
land, where grow the short buffalo grass and sage bush,
and the chirp of the prairie dog is heard, and jack rabbits
bound across the road ahead of you. Here on the low
hills are grazing sheep and white-faced cattle, and the
valleys, wherever irrigation water can be brought to them,

198 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

are green with fields of sugar beets and alfalfa. Gorgeous
golden pheasants stand at the roadside as you pass, seem-
ingly as tame as domestic fowls. Further on, you meet with
fields of winter wheat and barley. You are in Colorado
still, but it is not the kind of terrain that mention of the
name of Colorado connotes; rather it is an extension of
the great plains of west Kansas. You are already back
East, it seems; before you the highway, with not another
hill to climb, leads to Kansas City, Chicago, Cleveland.

But in the Park area, if you travel west you are soon
inside an immense upland valley walled about with moun-
tain chains. All about you are dense forests, alpine
meadows, crystal streams tumbling among great boulders,
and glacier lakes clinging to the sides of the mountains.
Above you, in the realm of the clouds, glisten peaks of
everlasting snow. Altogether the scene is like a grouping of
scenery painted on an enormous spread of canvas for the
backdrop of a stage.

Moreover, this incomparable land offers what only a
few regions of the West can offer, well-defined variety
among the four seasons of the year, rivaling the charm of
New England in this respect. Whichever season you start
with is beautiful, and each successive season seems to try
to surpass the last. In the winter the ground is covered
with snow crystals, glistening in the sun, but so dry is the
atmosphere and so cloudless the skies on a typical day that
a face can tan as quickly as on a Florida beach. Then comes
spring and the soft, warm chinook winds awaken life in
the earth. Canyons gush and roar. Wild flowers in rare
profusion of bloom and fragrance tapestry the moist hill-

AN INDESTRUCTIBLE CAPITAL CITY • 199

sides. Then comes summer and the great air-conditioned
basin is neither hot nor cold, just as near perfection in
weather as any place will ever have. Hay fever is prac-
tically unknown. Then comes the first frost of autumn,
and in a day the leaves of the aspen tree are turned to
purest gold. Through the extended Indian summer, the
interspersed groves of aspen, firs, spruce, and pine along
the mountain slopes are a symphony of gold and green.
Below is a kodachrome of blue and white tumbling
streams and banks flaming with scarlet leaves like a forest
afire.

It does seem strange and very wonderful that of the
many spots of rugged terrain combined with accessibility
to transportation that deserve to be discussed and consid-
ered as the new location for the capital of the United
States, the one of these that stands nearest the heart point
of the nation, which is the Rocky Mountain National
Park in Colorado, should also be chosen by many of those
who have seen it as the most beautiful spot of nature in
all the world.

APPENDIX

All cities reported by the 1950 Federal Census to have a population of
15,000 or more are shown in this table, and also the pro rata shares these
cities would receive from a Federal appropriation of 15 billion dollars for
civilian atomic defense, such as is recommended in Chapter 4 of this book.

ALABAMA

Anniston

Bessemer

Birmingham

Decatur

Dothan

Florence

Gadsden

Huntsville

Mobile

Montgomery

Phenix City

Prichard

Selma

Tuscaloosa

ARIZONA

Mesa

Phoenix

Tucson

ARKANSAS

Blytheville
El Dorado
Fayetteville
Fort Smith
Hot Springs
Jonesboro

Population
1950

16,790

106,818

45454

16,234
23,076
17,071
47,942

29,307
16,310

200

Pro rata
share

31,066

$ 6,834,520

28,445

6,257,900

326,037

71,728,140

1 9,974

4,394,280

21,584

4,748,480

23,879

5,253,380

55,725

12,259,500

1 6,437

3,616,140

129,009

28,381,980

106,525

23,435,500

23,305

5,127,100

19,014

4,183,080

22,840

5,024,800

46,396

10,207,120

3,693,800

23,499,960

9,999,880

3,571,480
5,076,720
3,755,62o
10,547,240
6,447,540
3,588,200

APPENDIX

2OI

Little Rock
North Little Rock
Pine Bluff
Texarkana

CALIFORNIA

Population
1950

102,213
44,097
37,162

Pro rata
share

$ 22,486,860
9,701,340
8,175,640
3,492,500

Alameda

64,430

14,174,600

Albany

i7>590

3,869,800

Alhambra

5M59

11,298,980

Arcadia

23,066

5,074,520

Bakersfield

34»784

7,652,480

Bell

i5»43°

3,394,600

Berkeley-

113,805

25,037,100

Beverly Hills

29,032

6,387,040

Burbank

78>577

17,286,940

Burlingame

19,886

4.374,920

Chula Vista

1 5.927

3,503,940

Compton

47»99 i

10,558,020

Culver City

19,720

4,338,400

Daly City

15,191

3,342,020

El Cerrito

18,011

3,962,420

Eureka

23,058

5,072,760

Fresno

91,669

20,167,180

Glendale

95.702

21,054,440

Hawthorne

16,316

3,589,520

Huntington Park

29,450

6,479,000

Inglewood

46,185

10,160,700

Long Beach

250,767

55,168,740

Los Angeles

1,970,358

433,478,760

Lynwood

25,823

5,681,060

Manhattan Beach

'7.33°

3,812,600

Merced

15,278

3,361,160

Modesto

17.389

3,825,580

Monrovia

20,186

4,440,920

Montebello

2i,735

4,781,700

Monterey

16,205

3,565,100

Monterey Park

20,395

4,486,900

National City

21,199

4,663,780

202 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population

1950

CALIFORNIA— Cont'd

Oakland

384,575

Ontario

22^2

Oxnard

21,567

Palo Alto

25.475

Pasadena

I04.577

Pomona

35.4°5

Redlands

18,429

Redondo Beach

25,226

Redwood City

25.544

Richmond

99.545

Riverside

46,764

Sacramento

'37.572

San Bernardino

63,058

San Buenaventura

'6,534

San Diego

334.387

San Francisco

775.357

San Gabriel

20,343

San Jose

95,280

San Leandro

27.542

San Mateo

41,782

Santa Ana

45.533

Santa Barbara

44.9 J 3

Santa Cruz

21,970

Santa Monica

71.595

Santa Rosa

17,902

South Gate

51,116

South Pasadena

'6,935

South San Francisco

Stockton

^0,853

Torrance

22,241

Vallejo

26,038

Whittier

23,820

COLORADO

Boulder

19,999

Colorado Springs

45.47 2

Denver

415,786

Pro rata
share

$ 84,606,500
5,031,840
4,744,740
5,604,500
23,006,940
7,789,100
4,054,380

5^549.7 20

5,619,680

21,899,900

10,288,080

30,265,840

13,872,760

3,637,480

73,565,140

170,578,540

4,475,460

20,961,600

6,059,240

9,192,040

10,017,260

9,880,860

4,833,400

15,750,900

3,938,440

11,245,520

3.725.7°°
4,257,220
15,587,660
4,893,020
5,728,360
5,240,400

4,399,780
10,003,840
91,472,920

APPENDIX

203

Englewood

Greeley

Pueblo

CONNECTICUT

Ansonia

Bridgeport

Bristol

Danbury

Hartford

Meriden

Middletown

Naugatuck

New Britain

New Haven

New London

Norwalk

Norwich

Stamford

Torrington

Waterbury

DELAWARE
Wilmington

FLORIDA

Clearwater
Coral Gables
Daytona Beach
Fort Lauderdale
Gainesville
Hialeah
Jacksonville
Key West
Lakeland
Miami

Miami Beach
Orlando

Population
1950

16,869

20.354
63,685

110,356

15,581

30,187
36,328
26,861
19,676
204,517

26,433
30,851

249,276
46,282
52,367

Pro rata
share

$ 3,711,180

4,477,880

14,010,700

18,706

4. "5.3 20

158,709

34,915,980

35.961

7,911,420

22,067

4,854,740

177.397

39,027,340

44,088

9,699,360

29,711

6,536,420

17.455

3,840,100

73.726

16,219,720

164,443

36,177,460

3°.55 !

6,721,220

49,460

10,881,200

23.429

5,154,380

74.293

16,344,460

27,820

6,120,400

104,477

22,984,940

24,278,320

3,427,820
4,364,140

6,641,140
7,992,160
5,909,420

4,328,720

44.993.740
5,815,260
6,787,220

54,840,720

10,182,040
11,520,740

204 ' TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

FLORIDA— Cont'd

Panama City

Pensacola

St. Petersburg

Sarasota

Tallahassee

Tampa

West Palm Beach

GEORGIA

Albany

Athens

Atlanta

Augusta

Brunswick

Columbus

Dalton

Decatur

East Point

La Grange

Macon

Marietta

Rome

Savannah

Valdosta

Waycross

IDAHO

Boise City
Idaho Falls
Nampa
Pocatello
Twin Falls

ILLINOIS

Alton

Aurora

Belleville

Population
1950

25,814

43*479
96,738

18,896

27*237

j 24,68 1

43,162

34*393
19,218
16,185
26,131
17,600

Pro rata
share

$ 5,679,080
9,565,380

21,282,360
4,157,120
5,992,140

27,429,820
9,495,640

3M55

6,854,100

28,180

6,199,600

33MH

72,889,080

71,508

15,731,760

1 7*954

3,949,880

79,611

17,514,420

15,968

3,512,960

21,635

4*759*7°°

21,080

4,637,600

25,025

5,505,500

70,252

1 5*455*44°

20,687

4*55I*I4°

29,615

6,515,300

119,638

26,320,360

20,046

4,410,120

18,899

4,157,780

5°*576
32»721

7,566,460
4,227,960
3,560,700
5,748,820
3,872,000

7,161,000
11,126,720

7,198,620

APPENDIX

205

Population

Pro rata

1950

share

Berwyn

51,280

$ 11,281,600

Bloomington

34^3

7,515,860

Blue Island

17,622

3,876,840

Brookfield

15,472

3,403,840

Calumet City

1 5,799

3,475,780

Champaign

39,5^3

8,703,860

Chicago

3,620,962

796,611,640

Chicago Heights

24,55i

5,401,220

Cicero

67,544

14,859,680

Danville

37,864

8,330,080

Decatur

66,269

14,579,180

East St. Louis

82,295

18,104,900

Elgin

44»2 2 3

9,729,060

Elmhurst

21,273

4,680,060

Elmwood Park

1 8,80 1

4,136,220

Evanston

73,64*

16,201,020

Freeport

22,467

4,942,740

Galesburg

3M25

6,913,500

Granite City

29,465

6,482,300

Harvey-

20,683

4,550,260

Highland Park

16,808

3,697,760

Jacksonville

20,387

4,485,140

Joliet

51,601

11,352,220

Kankakee

25,856

5,688,320

Kewanee

16,821

3,700,620

Mattoon

'7,574

3,860,340

Maywood

27,473

6,044,060

Moline

37,397

8,227,340

Mt. Vernon

15,600

3,432,000

Oak Park

63,529

13,976,380

Ottawa

'6,957

3,730,540

Park Ridge

16,602

3,652,440

Pekin

21,858

4,808,760

Peoria

111,856

24,608,320

Quincy

41,450

9,119,000

Rockford

92,927

20,443,940

Rock Island

48,710

10,716,200

Springfield

81,628

17,958,160

206

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

ILLINOIS— Confd

Streator
Urbana
Waukegan
Wilmette

INDIANA

Anderson

Bloomington

Columbus

Connersville

East Chicago

Elkhart

Evansville

Fort Wayne

Frankfort

Gary

Hammond

Huntington

Indianapolis

Kokomo

Lafayette

La Porte

Logansport

Marion

Michigan City

Mishawaka

Muncie

New Albany

New Castle

Richmond

South Bend

Terre Haute

Vincennes

IOWA

Ames
Burlington

Population
1950

16,469

22,834
38,946
18,162

Pro rata
share

$ 3,623,180
5,023,480
8,568,120
3,995,640

46,820

10,300,400

28,163

6,195,860

18,370

4,041,400

15*550

3,421,000

54*263

11,937,860

35,646

7,842,120

128,636

28,299,920

133,607

29,393,540

15,028

3,306,160

*33*911

29,460,420

87»594

19,270,680

15*079

3*3I7*38<>

427*'73

93,978,060

38,672

8,507,840

35*568

7,824,960

17,882

3,934,040

21,031

4,626,820

30,081

6,617,820

28,395

6,246,900

32*9J3

7,240,860

58,479

12,865,380

29,346

6,456,120

18,271

4,019,620

39*539

8,698,580

115,911

25,500,420

64,214

14,127,080

18,831

4,142,820

22,898
30*613

5,037,560
6,734,860

APPENDIX

207

Cedar Rapids

Clinton

Council Bluffs

Davenport

Des Moines

Dubuque

Fort Dodge

Iowa City

Keokuk

Marshalltown

Mason City

Muscatine

Ottumwa

Sioux City

Waterloo

KANSAS

Coffeyville

Emporia

Hutchinson

Kansas City

Lawrence

Leavenworth

Manhattan

Pittsburg

Salina

Topeka

Wichita

KENTUCKY

Ashland

Bowling Green

Covington

Henderson

Lexington

Louisville

Newport

Owensboro

Paducah

Population

Pro rata

1950

share

72,296

$15,905,120

30,379

6,683,380

45*429

9,994,380

74*549

16,400,780

177,965

39,152,300

49,671

10,927,620

25,115

5*525*30°

27,212

5,986,640

16,144

3,551,680

19,821

4,360,620

27,980

6,155,600

19,041

4,189,020

33,631

7,398,820

83,991

18,478,020

65,198

14,343,560

i7*n3

3,764,860

15,669

3,447,180

33*575

7,386,500

129,553

28,501,660

23*35!

5,137,220

20,579

4,527,380

19,056

4,192,320

I9*34I

4,255,020

26,176

5*758,720

78,79!

17,334,020

168,279

37,021,380

3M31

i8,347
64,452
16,837

55*534
369,129

31,044

33*65'
32,828

6,848,820

4,036,340

14,179,440

3,704,140

12,217,480

81,208,380

6,829,680

7,403,220

7,222,160

208

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population
1950

LOUISIANA

Alexandria
Baton Rouge
Bogalusa
Bossier City
Lafayette
Lake Charles
Monroe
New Iberia
New Orleans
Shreveport

MAINE

Auburn

Augusta

Bangor

Biddeford

Lewiston

Portland

South Portland

Waterville

MARYLAND

Baltimore

Cumberland

Frederick

Hagerstown

Salisbury

MASSACHUSETTS

Attleboro

Beverly

Boston

Brockton

Cambridge

Chelsea

Chicopee

Everett

125,629
1 7,798
I5»47°
33.541
38,572

- 38,572
16,467

57°»445
127,206

949,708

18,142
36,260
15,141

23,809
28,884

801,444
62,860

120,740
38,912
49,211
45,982

Pro rata
share

$ 7,680,860

27,638,380

3,915,560

3,403,400

7,379,020

9,079,840

8,485,840

3,622,740

125,497,900

27,985,320

23,i34

5,089,480

20,913

4,600,860

3i»558

6,942,760

20,836

4,583,920

40,974

9,014,280

77.6*34

17,079,480

21,866

4,810,520

18,287

4,023,140

208,935,760
8,289,380
3,991,240

7,977,200

5,237,980

6,354,48o

176,317,680

13,829,200

26,562,800

8,560,640

10,826,420

10,116,040

APPENDIX

209

Fall River

Fitchburg

Gardner

Gloucester

Haverhill

Holyoke

Lawrence

Leominster

Lowell

Lynn

Maiden

Marlborough

Medford

Melrose

New Bedford

Newton

North Adams

Northampton

Peabody

Pittsfield

Quincy

Revere

Salem

Somerville

Springfield

Taunton

Waltham

Westfield

Woburn

Worcester

MICHIGAN

Adrian
Ann Arbor
Battle Creek
Bay City
Benton Harbor
Berkley

Population

Pro rata

1950

share

111,963

$24,631,860

42,691

9,392,020

19,581

4,307,820

25,167

5*536*740

47,280

10,401,600

54,661

12,025,420

80,536

17,717,920

24*°75

5,296,500

97»M9

21,394,780

99»738

21,942,360

59,804

13,156,880

1 5*75^

3,466,320

66,113

14,544,860

26,988

5,937,360

109,189

24,021,580

81,994

18,038,680

21,567

4*744*74°

29,063

6,393,860

22,645

4,981,900

53*348

11,736,560

83*835

18,443,700

3^*7^3

8,087,860

41,880

9,213,600

102,351

22,517,220

162,399

35,727,780

40,109

8,823,980

47*l87

10,381,140

20,962

4,611,640

20,492

4,508,240

203,486

44,766,920

18,393
48,251

48,666

52*523
18,769

I7*93I

4,046,460

10,615,220

10,706,520

11,555,060

4,129,180

3,944,820

210

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population

1950

MICHIGAN— Confd

Birmingham

*5,467

Dearborn

94,994

Detroit

1,849,568

East Detroit

21,461

East Lansing

20,325

Ecorse

17,948

Escanaba

15,170

Ferndale

29»675

Flint

163,143

Grand Rapids

17^,515

Hamtramck

43,355

Hazel Park

'7,77°

Highland Park

4^,393

Holland

15,858

Inkster

16,728

Jackson

51,088

Kalamazoo

57,704

Lansing

92,129

Lincoln Park

29,310

Livonia

'7,534

Marquette

17,202

Monroe

21,467

Mt. Clemens

17,027

Muskegon

48,429

Muskegon Heights

18,828

Owosso

15,948

Pontiac

73,681

Port Huron

35,725

River Rouge

20,549

Roseville

15,816

Royal Oak

46,898

Saginaw

92,918

St. Glair Shores

19,823

Sault Ste. Marie

17,912

Traverse City

16,974

Wyandotte

36,846

Ypsilanti

18,302

Pro rata
share

$ 3,402,740

20,898,680

406,904,960

4,721,420

4,471,500

3,948,560

6,528,500
35,891,460
38,833,300

9,53s,1 0°

3,909,400

10,206,460

3,488,760

3,680,160

11,239,360

12,694,880

20,268,380

6,448,200

3,857,480

3,784,440

4,722,740

3,745,940

10,654,380

4,142,160

3,508,560

16,209,820

7,859,500

4,520,780

3,479,520

10,317,560

20,441,960

4,361,060

3,940,640

3,734,280

8,106,120

4,026,440

APPENDIX

211

MINNESOTA

Austin

Duluth

Faribault

Hibbing

Mankato

Minneapolis

Richfield

Rochester

St. Cloud

St. Louis Park

St. Paul

South St. Paul

Winona

MISSISSIPPI

Biloxi

Clarksdale

Columbus

Greenville

Greenwood

Gulfport

Hattiesburg

Jackson

Laurel

Meridian

Natchez

Vicksburg

MISSOURI

Cape Girardeau

Clayton

Columbia

Hannibal

Independence

Jefferson City

Jennings

Joplin

Population
1950

23,100
104,511
16,028
16,276
18,809
521,718
17,502
29,885
28,410
22,644

1 5>9°9
25,031

21,578
16,035

3 '.974
20,444
36,963
25,099

15,282
38,711

Pro rata
share

5,082,000

22,992,420

3,526,160

3,580,720

4,137,980

114,777,960

3,850,440

6,574,700

6,250,200

4,981,680

68,496,780

3,499,980

5,506,820

37425

8,233,500

i<>.539

3,638,580

I7»I72

3,777,840

29,936

6,585,920

1 8,06 1

3.973420

22,659

4,984,980

29474

6,484,280

98,271

21,619,620

25,038

5,508,360

41,893

9,216,460

22,740

5,002,800

27,948

6,148,560

4,747,160

3.527.700
7,034,280
4,497,680
8,131,860
5,521,780
3,362,040
8,516,420

212

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population

Pro rata

1950

share

MISSOURI— Confd

Kansas City

456,622

$100,456,840

Kirkwood

1 8,640

4,100,800

Poplar Bluff

15,064

3,314,080

Richmond Heights

1 5»045

3,309,900

St. Joseph

78,588

17,289,360

St. Louis

856,796

188,495,120

Sedalia

20,354

4,477,880

Springfield
University City

66,731
39,892

14,680,820
8,776,240

Webster Groves

23»39o

5,145,800

MONTANA

Billings

3I>®34

7,003,480

Butte

33,251

7,315,220

Great Falls

39,2i4

8,627,080

Helena

17,581

3,867,820

Missoula

22,485

4,946,700

NEBRASKA

Grand Island

22,682

4,990,040

Hastings

20,211

4,446,420

Lincoln
North Platte

98,884
1 5,43 3

21,754,480
3,395,260

Omaha

251,117

55,245,740

NEVADA

Las Vegas

24,624

5,417,280

Reno

32,497

7, '49,340

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Berlin

16,615

3,655,300

Concord

27,988

6,157,360

Dover

1 5,874

3,492,280

Keene
Manchester

15,638
82,732

3,440,360
18,201,040

Nashua

34,669

7,627,180

Portsmouth

18,830

4,142,600

APPENDIX

213

Population
1950

Pro rata
share

NEW JERSEY

Asbury Park

17,094

$ 3,760,680

Atlantic City

61,657

13,564,540

Bayonne

77>2°3

16,984,660

Belleville

32,019

7,044,180

Bergenfield

1 7><H7

3,882,340

Bloomfield

49.3°7

10,847,540

Bridgeton

18,378

4,043,160

Camden

I24.555

27,402,100

ClifTside Park

17,166

3.7<$5.52<>

Clifton

64,511

14,192,420

Collingwood

15,800

3,476,000

East Orange

79.34°

17,454,800

East Paterson

15,386

3,384,920

Elizabeth

112,817

24,819,740

Englewood

23.H5

5,091,900

Fair Lawn

23,885

5,254,700

Garfield

27.55°

6,061,000

Hackensack

29,219

6,428,180

Hoboken

50,676

11,148,720

Irvington

59,201

13,024,220

Jersey City

299,017

65.783.74°

Kearny

39.95 2

8,789,440

Linden

30,644

6,741,680

Lodi

'5.392

3,386,240

Long Branch

23,090

5,079,800

Millville

16,041

3,529,020

Montclair

43.927

9,663,940

Morristown

17,124

3,767,280

Newark

438,776

96,530,720

New Brunswick

38,811

8,538,420

North Arlington

1 5.970

3,513,400

Nutley

26,992

5.938,240

Orange

38,037

8,368,140

Passaic

57.7°2

12,694,440

Paterson

J39.336

30,653,920

Perth Amboy

4I.33°

9,092,600

Phillipsburg

18,919

4,162,180

214

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population

1950

NEW JERSEY— Cont'd

Plainfield

42,366

Rahway

21,290

Ridgewood

17,481

Roselle

17,681

Rutherford

17,411

South Orange

15,230

Summit

17,929

Trenton

128,099

Union City

55,537

Westfield

21,243

West New York

37,683

West Orange

28,605

NEW MEXICO

Albuquerque

96,815

Carlsbad

17,975

Clovis

17,318

Roswell

25,738

Santa Fe

27,998

NEW YORK

Albany

134,995

Amsterdam

32,240

Auburn

36,722

Batavia

17,799

Binghamton

80,674

Buffalo

580,132

Cohoes

21,272

Corning

17,684

Cortland

18,152

Dunkirk

18,007

Elmira

49,716

Endicott

20,050

Freeport

24,680

Geneva

i7,'44

Glen Cove

15,130

Glens Falls

19,610

Pro rata
share

9,320,520
4,683,800
3,845,820
3,889,820
3,830,420
3,350,600
3,944,380
28,181,780
12,218,140
4,673,460
8,290,260
6,293,100

21,299,300
3,954,500
3,809,960
5,662,360
6,159,560

29,698,900
7,092,800
8,078,840
3,915,780

17,748,280
127,629,040
4,679,840
3,890,480
3,993,440
3,961,540

10,937,520
4,411,000
5,429,600
3,771,680
3,328,600
4,314,200

APPENDIX

215

Gloversville

Hempstead

Hornell

Ithaca

Jamestown

Johnson City

Kenmore

Kingston

Lackawanna

Lockport

Long Beach

Lynbrook

Mamaroneck

Middletown

Mount Vernon

Newburgh

New Rochelle

New York City

Niagara Falls

North Tonawanda

Ogdensburg

Clean

Ossining

Oswego

Peekskill

Plattsburg

Port Chester

Poughkeepsie

Rochester

Rockville Centre

Rome

Saratoga Springs

Schenectady

Syracuse

Troy

Utica

Valley Stream

Watertown

Population

Pro rata

1950

share

23»634

$ 5,199,480

29,'35

6,409,700

15,049

3,310,780

29»257

6,436,540

43,354

9,537,880

19,249

4,234,780

20,066

4,414,520

28,817

6,339,74°

27,658

6,084,760

25,'33

5,529,260

15,586

3,428,920

17,314

3,809,080

15,016

3,3°3,520

22,586

4,968,920

71,899

15,817,780

3'»956

7,030,320

59,725

13,139,500

7,89^957

1,736,230,540

90,872

19,991,840

24,73'

5,440,820

16,166

3,55<5,52°

22,884

5,034,480

16,098

3,541,560

22,647

4,982,340

17,731

3,900,820

17,738

3,902,360

23,970

5,273,400

41,023

9,025,060

332,488

73,147,360

22,362

4,919,640

41,682

9,170,040

1 5,47 3

3,404,060

9^785

20,192,700

220,583

48,528,260

72,311

15,908,420

101,531

22,336,820

26,854

5,907,880

34,350

7,557,000

2l6

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population

1950

NEW YORK— Cont'd

Watervliet

I5»I97

White Plains

43,466

Yonkers

152,798

NORTH CAROLINA

Asheville

53,000

Burlington

24,560

Charlotte

134,042

Concord

16,486

Durham

7I»311

Fayetteville

34,715

Gastonia

23,069

Goldsboro

21,454

Greensboro

74.389

Greenville

16,724

High Point

39.973

Kinston

18,336

New Bern

15,812

Raleigh

65,679

Rocky Mount

27,697

Salisbury

20,102

Shelby

15,508

Statesville

16,901

Wilmington

45.°43

Wilson

23,010

Winston Salem

87,811

NORTH DAKOTA

Bismarck

18,640

Fargo

38,256

Grand Forks

26,836

Minot

22,032

OHIO

Akron

274,605

Alliance

26,161

Ashtabula

Z3,696

Pro rata
share

I 3.343.34°

9,562,520

33,615,560

11,660,000
5,403,200

29,489,240
3,626,920

15,688,420
7,637,300
5,075,180
4,719,880

16,365,580
3,679,280
8,794,060
4,033,920
3,478,640

14,449,380
6,093,340
4,422,440
3,411,760
3,718,220
9,909,460
5,062,200

19,318,420

4,100,800
8,416,320
5,903,920
4,847,040

60,413,100

5.755.420
5,213,120

APPENDIX

Population

Pro rata

1950

share

Barberton

27,820

$ 6,120,400

Canton

116,912

25,720,640

Chillicothe

20,133

4,429,260

Cincinnati

503,998

110,879,560

Cleveland

914,808

201,257,760

Cleveland Hts.

59.H1

13,011,020

Columbus

375.901

82,698,220

Cuyahoga Falls

29^95

6,422,900

Dayton

243,872

53,651,840

East Cleveland

40,047

8,810,340

East Liverpool

24,217

5,327,740

Elyria

3°>3°7

6,667,540

Euclid

41,396

9,107,120

Findlay

23.845

5,245,900

Fremont

i*S37

3,638,140

Garfield Heights

21,662

4,765,640

Hamilton

57.95 i

12,749,220

Ironton

l6.333

3,593,260

Lakewood

68,07 1

14,975,620

Lancaster

24,180

5,319,600

Lima

50,246

11,054,120

Lorain

51,202

11,264,440

Mansfield

43.564

9,584,080

Maple Heights

15,586

3,428,920

Marietta

16,006

3,521,320

Marion

33.8l7

7,439,740

Massillon

29.594

6,510,680

Middletown

33.695

7,412,900

Newark

34.275

7,540,500

Niles

'6,773

3,690,060

Norwood

35.°01

7,700,220

Parma

28,897

6,357.34°

Pigua

'7.447

3,838,340

Portsmouth

36,798

8,095,560

Sandusky

29.375

6,462,500

Shaker Heights
South Euclid

28,222
I5i432

6,208,840
3,395,040

Springfield

78,508

17,271,760

2l8

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population

Pro rata

1950

share

Omo-Cont'd

Steubenville

35.872

$ 7,891,840

Tiffin

18,952

4,169,440

Toledo

303,616

66,795,520

Warren

49,856

10,968,320

Youngstown

168,330

37,032,600

Zanesville

4°.5I7

8,913,740

OKLAHOMA

Ada

1 5.995

3,518,900

Ardmore

17,890

3,935,800

Bartlesville

19,228

4,230,160

Chickasha

15,842

3,485,240

Duncan

3.37I.5°°

Enid

36,017

7,923,740

Lawton

34.757

7,646,540

McAlester

17,878

3,933,160

Muskogee

37,289

8,203,580

Norman

27,006

5.94^320

Oklahoma City

243,504

53,570,880

Okmulgee

18,317

4,029,740

Ponca City

20,180

4,439,600

Shawnee

22,948

5,048,560

Stillwater

20,238

4,452,360

Tulsa

182,740

40,202,800

OREGON

Corvallis

16,207

3.565.540

Eugene

35.879

7,893,380

Klamath Falls

'5.875

3,492,500

Medford

'7.3°5

3,807,100

Portland

373,628

82,198,160

Salem

43,140

9,490,800

PENNSYLVANIA

Aliquippa

26,132

5,749,040

Allentown

106,756

23,486,320

Altoona

77t*77

16,978,940

APPENDIX

219

Population

Pro rata

1950

share

Ambridge

16,429

$ 3,614,380

Beaver Falls

'7.375

3,822,500

Bethlehem

66,340

14,594,800

Braddock

16,488

3,627,360

Bradford

17.354

3,817,880

Butler

23,482

5,166,040

Carbondale

16,296

3,585,120

Carlisle

16,812

3,698,640

Chambersburg

17,212

3,786,640

Chester

66,039

14,528,580

Clairton

19,652

4.323.44°

Dunmore

20,305

4,467,100

Duquesne

17,620

3,876,400

Easton

35.^32

7,839,040

Erie

130,803

28,776,660

Greensburg

16,923

3,723,060

Harrisburg

89,544

19,699,680

Hazleton

3 5.49 J

7,808,020

Jeannette

16,172

3.557,840

Johnstown

63,232

13,911,040

Kingston

21,096

4,641,120

Lancaster

63i774

14,030,280

Lebanon

28,156

6,194,320

McKeesport

51,502

11,330,440

McKees Rocks

16,241

3.573.020

Meadville

18,972

4,173,840

Monessen

17,896

3.937.'20

Munhall

l6.437

3,616,140

Nanticoke

20,160

4,435,200

New Castle

48,834

10,743,480

New Kensington

25,146

5.532.120

Norristown

38,126

8,387,720

OH City

19,581

4,307,820

Philadelphia

2,071,605

455.753.ioo

Pittsburgh

676,806

148,897,320

Pittston

15,012

3,302,640

Pottstown

22,589

4,969,580

Pottsville

23,640

5,200,800

22O

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population

1950

PENNSYLVANIA— Cont'd

Reading

109,320

Scranton

125,536

Shamokin

16,879

Sharon

26,454

Shenandoah

State College

v 17,227

Sunbury

Swissvale

16,488

Uniontown

20,471

Washington

26,280

West Chester

15,168

West Mifflin

17,985

Wilkes-Barre

76,826

Wilkinsburg
Williamsport

31,418
45,°47

York

59,953

RHODE ISLAND

Central Falls

23,550

Cranston

55,060

Newport

37,564

Pawtucket

81,436

Providence

248,674

Warwick

43,028

Woonsocket

50,211

SOUTH CAROLINA

Anderson

19,770

Charleston

7°,I74

Columbia

86,914

Florence

22,513

Greenville

58,161

Orangeburg

'5,322

Rock Hill

24,502

Spartanburg

36,795

Sumter

2O,l85

Pro rata
share

$24,050,400
27,617,920

3>7I3,38°
5,819,880
3,454,880
3,789,940
3,425,400
3,627,360
4,503,620
5,781,600
3,336,960
3,956,700

16,901,720
6,911,960
9,910,340

13,189,660

5,181,000
12,113,200

8,264,080
17,915,920
54,708,280

9,466,160
11,046,420

4,349,400

15,438,280

19,121,080

4,952,860

12,795,420

3,370,840

5,390,440

8,094,900

4,440,700

APPENDIX

221

SOUTH DAKOTA

Aberdeen
Rapid City
Sioux Falls

TENNESSEE

Bristol

Chattanooga

Clarksville

Jackson

Johnson City

Kingsport

Knoxville

Memphis

Nashville

TEXAS

Abilene

Alice

Amarillo

Austin

Baytown

Beaumont

Big Spring

Borger

Brownsville

Brownwood

Bryan

Corpus Christ!

Corsicana

Dallas

Denison

Demon

El Paso

Fort Worth

Galveston

Harlingen

Houston

Population
1950

21,051
25,310
52,696

16,771
131,041
16,246
30,207
27,864

!9»57*
124,769

396,000
1 74>3°7

Pro rata
share

$ 4,631,220

5,568,200

11,593,120

3,689,620
28,829,020

3>574>I2°
6,645,540

6,130,080

4,305,620

27,449,180

87,120,000

38,347,540

45.57°

10,025,400

1 6,449

3,618,780

74,246

16,334,120

'3M59

29,140,980

22,983

5,056,260

94,014

20,683,080

17,286

3,802,920

18,059

3,972,980

36,066

7,934,520

20,181

4,439,820

18,102

3,982,440

108,287

23,823,140

19,211

4,226,420

434,462

95,581,640

I7»5°4

3,850,880

21,372

4,701,840

130,485

28,706,700

278,778

61,331,160

66,568

14,644,960

23,229

5,110,380

596,163

131,155,860

222

TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population
1950

Pro rata
share

TEXAS-Cont'd

Kingsville

16,898

$ 3>7I7>56°

Laredo

51,910

11,420,200

Longview

24,502

5,390,440

Lubbock

7f»747

15,784,340

Lufkin

15^35

3,329,700

McAllen

20,067

4,414,740

Marshall

",327

4,911,940

Midland

**tf*j

4,776,860

Odessa

29>495

6,488,900

Orange

21,174

4,658,280

Pampa

16,583

3,648,260

Paris

21,643

4,761,460

Pasadena

22,483

4,946,260

Port Arthur

57»53°

12,656,600

San Angelo

52>°93

1 1 ,460,460

San Antonio

408,422

89,852,840

Sherman

20,150

4,433,000

Temple

25A67

5,602,740

Texarkana

24»753

5,445,660

Texas City

16,620

3,656,400

Tyler

38,968

8,572,960

University Park

24>275

5,340,500

Victoria

16,126

3>547>720

Waco

84,706

18,635,320

West Univ. Place

I7»°74

3,756,280

Wichita Falls

68,042

14,969,240

UTAH

Logan

Ogden

Provo

Salt Lake City

VERMONT

Burlington
Rutland

16,832
57>112

28»937
182,121

33^55

3,703,040
12,564,640

6,366,140
40,066,620

7,294,100
3,884,980

APPENDIX

223

Population

Pro rata
share

VIRGINIA

Alexandria

Bristol

Charlottesville

Danville

Lynchburg

Martinsville

Newport News

Norfolk

Petersburg

Portsmouth

Richmond

Roanoke

Staunton

WASHINGTON

Aberdeen

Bellingham

Bremerton

Everett

Longview

Olympia

Renton

Seattle

Spokane

Tacoma

Vancouver

Walla Walla

Yakima

WEST VIRGINIA

Beckley

Bluefield

Charleston

Clarksburg

Fairmont

Huntington

Martinsburg

61,787

$ 13,593,140

15,954

3,509,880

25,969

5,713,180

35,066

7,714,520

47,727

10,499,940

17,251

3,795,220

42,358

9,318,760

213,513

46,972,860

35,054

7,711,880

80,039

17,608,580

230,310

50,668,200

91,921

20,222,620

19,927

4,383,940

34,112

27,678

33»849

20»339

15,819

16,039

467,591

161,721

H3»673
41,644
24,102
38,486

21,506

73»5oi
32,014
29,346

86,353
15,621

4,323,660

7,504,640

6,089,160

7,446,780

4,474,580

3,480,180

3,528,580

102,870,020

35,578,620

31,608,060

9,161,680

5,302,440

8,466,920

4,267,340

I ' I ^ ' ^

16,170,220
7,043,080
6,456,120

18,997,660
3,436,620

224 • TOTAL ATOMIC DEFENSE

Population

Pro rata

1950

share

WEST VIRGINIA— Cont'd

Morgantown

25>525

$ 5,615,500

Parkersburg

29,684

6,530,480

South Charleston

16,686

3,670,920

Weirton

24,005

5,281,100

Wheeling

58,891

12,956,020

WISCONSIN

Appleton

34,010

7,482,200

Beloit

29,590

6,509,200

Eau Claire

36,058

7,932,760

Fond du Lac

29,936

6,585,920

Green Bay

52>735

11,601,700

Janesville

24,899

55477.78o

Kenosha

54,368

11,960,960

La Crosse

47>535

10,457,700

Madison

96,056

21,132,320

Manitowoc

27»598

6,071,560

Milwaukee

637.392

140,226,240

Oshkosh

41,084

9,038,480

Racine

7^93

15,662,460

Sheboygan

42.365

9,320,300

Shorewood

16,199

3,563,780

Stevens Point

16,564

3,644,080

Superior

35.325

7.77 i» 50°

Waukesha

21.233

4,671,260

Wausau

30,414

6,691,080

Wauwatosa

33.324

7,331,280

West Allis

42.959

9,450,980

WYOMING

Caspar

23.673

5,208,060

Cheyenne

3L935

7,025,700

Laramie

15,581

3,427,820

TERRITORY OF HAWAII

Hilo

27,019*

5,944,180

Honolulu

245,612*

54,034,640

* Preliminary count, 1950

Expansion of the cities can be handled by the cities
themselves, but they will need financial assistance. An
estimate, calculated with great care, puts at 15 billion
dollars the amount of federal aid that will be re-
quired. This is in addition to what the cities must do
for themselves and the aid they should receive from
their state governments. (The Appendix lists all cities
reported in the 1950 Census as exceeding 15,000
population, and gives the pro rata stiare each would
receive from an appropriation of 15 billion dollars.)

The author does not overlook the fact that 15 bil-
lion dollars even in these days is a huge sum, and that
appropriations for many other things may have to be
pruned to make such a sum available. But cost is not
to be weighed against the terrible probability that
837 cities will be destroyed, all their millions of resi-
dents killed or made homeless and destitute, and
practically all of the manufacturing facilities of the
nation ruined, if complete atomic defense for the cities
is not achieved.

In addition to the cities, the author analyses the
vulnerability to atomic attack of the gigantic dams,
irrigated regions, wheat lands, areas of dense forests,
and other major objects — and recommends measures
for their defense.

Total Atomic Defense, we believe, is the first pub-
lished work to insist that, if we can be stirred to the
right kind of efforts, we can have in America a defense
that will spare our homes, industries, and resources
from the weapons of atomic warfare. This is a book
that should be read by everyone. And the measures of
civilian defense it recommends might well be dis-
cussed by civic organizations, business and professional
clubs, posts of veterans, chapters of farm societies,
farmers' cooperatives, and at the meetings of various
other groups.