New York at War (47 page)

If fallout shelters were ineffective, what about evacuation? In 1956, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
asserted that “Run Like Hell” made more sense than “Duck and Cover.” Officials came to agree, or at any rate drafted contingency plans for “defensive dispersal” from New York and other large cities. Indeed, the ongoing postwar flight of middle-class city dwellers into suburbia easily dovetailed with Cold War priorities. When the $100 billion Interstate Highway Act passed by Congress in 1956 funded the building of forty-one thousand miles of roadways, President Eisenhower justified the expense in civil defense terms: “[In] case of atomic attack on our key cities, the road net must permit quick evacuation of target areas.”
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As early as 1955, Mayor Robert Wagner met with New York governor Averell Harriman and the governors of New Jersey and Connecticut to discuss the emergency evacuation of the city. That same year, Lieutenant General Clarence Huebner, New York State’s Civil Defense director, presented a plan for the evacuation of New York City, Buffalo, Albany, and nineteen other communities in the event of nuclear attack. A more detailed state plan, drafted in 1958, came with elaborate tables showing the number of New Yorkers who, in the first phase of an evacuation, would be directed by train and highway to Orange County, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks (724,000 people) or to northern and central New Jersey (866,000). Homeowners and businesspeople in these outlying counties would be expected to take in “an average of two persons to a room, with family units being kept intact or as close together as possible.” Other urban refugees would be deployed around the region in successive, orderly phases.
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But the challenge of moving eight million people on terrifyingly short notice and dumping them in the suburban and rural hinterland was a quixotic proposition, unrealistic even to some civil defense proponents. How much advance notice would New Yorkers have of a bomb falling on them? Mayor Wagner’s experts argued optimistically in 1955 that the new radar systems being installed by the Pentagon for continental defense would provide “from two to six hours’ warning,” sufficient time for an “emergency traffic plan, controlled from helicopters,” to be implemented—although up to three million people in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx might have to walk to safety along roads and highways into Nassau and Westchester counties.
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By the mid-1950s, analysts correctly assumed that the Russians would soon have intercontinental missiles that would reduce warning times to half an hour at most—hardly time even to prepare a fraction of the city’s population to flee. “Getting out of the city on short notice—as any pre-holiday traveler can testify—is no mean feat,” Bernard Stengren reminded
New York Times
readers in 1955. And some questions remained unanswered. “Who is to go first,” Stengren asked, “school children, mothers with children, families?” Recalling Orson Welles’s 1938
War of the Worlds
broadcast, he suggested that panic might turn any orderly movement into a free-for-all. And would fallout, carried by unpredictable winds, really spare the suburbs?
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Then there was the question of how welcoming the suburbs might actually be. In April 1955, William J. Slater, Westchester County’s director of Civil Defense, warned New Yorkers against seeking safe haven in his jurisdiction when he declared that he would “mobilize civil defense forces to prevent an evacuation of New York City in the event of an enemy attack.” Evidently the vision of millions of city dwellers swarming over the Bronx border into Westchester—a county already beset by tensions over the arrival of Jewish, black, and Puerto Rican migrants from the city—did not appeal to Slater.
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City and state administrators tried to prevent outlying communities from shutting their doors to New Yorkers in the case of a nuclear emergency. Indeed, New York City had recently gone toe to toe with Slater, removing a billboard erected on the Hutchinson River Parkway stating that “the boundary would be closed in case of enemy attack.” Slater insisted that similar signs posted on the Boston Post Road, the Bronx River Parkway, and the Sawmill River Parkway would remain in place. State officials quickly overrode him, announcing that civilian cars would be permitted to evacuate into and through Westchester. Such confusion—along with numerous science fiction stories depicting gun-toting suburbanites driving nuclear refugees away from their private bomb shelters—must have given many New Yorkers further reason to doubt the realism of evacuation.
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If all else failed, the government would try to shoot Russian bombers and missiles out of the sky. In the mid and late 1950s, residents of such New York City suburbs as Huntington, Long Island, and Spring Valley, New York, and Summit, New Jersey, began to encounter barbed wire fences, gated roadways, and even soldiers with guard dogs keeping them out of mysterious compounds in remote corners of their towns. Behind the fences and dogs, army and National Guard troops manned installations equipped with batteries of Nike antiaircraft missiles. By 1961, the city was encircled by a ring of nineteen Nike batteries. New York was not alone; fifty-six other major cities, air force bases, and power plants obtained Nike batteries.
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If Russian Tu-4 bombers managed to elude American fighter jets once they crossed early-warning radar networks strung across Canada and the Great Plains and on “Texas Towers” (modified oil rigs) off the New England coast, Nike bases would use their own radar systems and computers to home in on the bombers. Stored underground in protective magazines, the one-ton, thirty-two-foot long Nike Ajax missiles would be lifted by elevator to their ground level launch rails and fired at a range of about thirty miles to demolish the incoming Russian planes. In 1958, new, more powerful Nike Hercules missiles—armed with forty-kiloton nuclear warheads, equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb—began to replace the Ajax series in order to meet the threat of Soviet intercontinental missiles. Aimed at a cluster of incoming missiles detected by radar, the “Hercs” would theoretically climb to a height of a hundred thousand feet, exploding and destroying the enemy projectiles before they got within seventy-five miles of New York City. By 1959, New York City—Fort Tilden at Rockaway Beach, Queens, to be exact—was home to a battery of operational atomic warheads; nine other suburban bases nearby were also armed with “Hercs.”

The families enjoying the summer surf at Jacob Riis Park, a few hundred yards down the beach from Fort Tilden, may have taken some comfort from the presence of such formidable defenses, if they knew or thought about them at all. The army made no attempt to conceal the presence of defensive warheads in the metropolitan area, seeking instead to win over worriers (and, perhaps, discourage the Russians) by holding press conferences and organizing public exhibits. The “possibility of any nuclear explosion occurring as a result of an accident . . . is virtually non-existent,” Major General Nathaniel A. Burnell 2nd of the First Region, Army Air Defense Command at Fort Totten, assured reporters in 1957.
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But Burnell was wrong. On May 22, 1958, maintenance work being done on a Nike Ajax missile at a base at Middletown, New Jersey, somehow went awry; the missile exploded, detonating others nearby, costing six soldiers and four civilians their lives. Fortunately, the Ajax was not nuclear. But two years later, a nuclear missile at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey caught fire and leaked melting radioactive plutonium. The accident could not trigger a nuclear reaction, and crews quickly sealed off the contaminated area (it remains off-limits to this day and will be for centuries). Yet when news of the fire reached New York City, at least fifty people placed anxious calls to civil defense offices, pressing for information on the danger of drifting radioactive fallout; McGuire operators had to field a “flood” of incoming phone queries. While officials continued to insist that defense against Russian nuclear assault was crucial, some wondered whether the local “protection” might be more deadly than the foreign threat.
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Nike Hercules missiles stand ready at Fort Hancock, Sandy Hook, c. 1969. NPS / GATEWAY NRA MUSEUM COLLECTION.

Acknowledging in 1950 that New York would be a “first target” in a nuclear strike, the editors of the liberal Catholic magazine
Commonweal
expressed the resignation that many felt: “A man knows that he is a part of it—these buildings, these streets, these subway crowds . . . and that if one day they are blasted into nothingness, then he should be there. . . . One stays where one is, hopes for the best and plans to do his part should the worst come.” But by the mid-1950s, some New Yorkers were shedding such fatalism and daring to challenge the prevailing assumptions propounded by the government and mainstream press. During Operation Alert 1955, twenty-seven pacifists led by the indefatigable Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement were arrested after refusing to leave City Hall Park to seek shelter once the alarm siren sounded. “We will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide . . . ,” Day declared in a pamphlet. “We know this drill to be a military act in a cold war to instill fear, to prepare the collective mind for war.”
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Over the next few years, Day and her fellow pacifists—including A. J. Muste of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and leaders of the War Resisters League such as the black activist Bayard Rustin—led others in public acts of civil disobedience during Operation Alert. They faced fines imposed by hostile judges and physical abuse endured in detention; Day and several others repeatedly served brief prison terms. Day and Muste were seasoned veterans of the struggles to gain conscientious objector status for pacifists during World War II; Muste’s New York antiwar activism, in fact, dated back to 1915. In different ways they each embraced a vision of a peaceful Christian and socialist society that rejected the inhumanity of both Soviet communism and American-style capitalism.

But “ordinary” New Yorkers, fearing for the lives of their families, also began to take part in the growing pacifist movement. On April 15, 1959, twenty-four-year-old Mary Sharmat, pushing her young son Jimmy’s stroller, sat down on a bench in the center island of Broadway at Eighty-Sixth Street. As the Operation Alert siren sounded, and as hundreds of pedestrians stopped to watch, she quietly explained herself to a civil defense officer: “I cannot take shelter. I do not believe in this.” A policeman threatened her with a fine, then smiled, and let her go, to the fury of the civil defense men. Five miles downtown, another young mother, twenty-one-year-old Janice Smith, brought her two-and four-year-old children to Dorothy Day’s fifth annual demonstration in City Hall Park. “All this drill does is frighten children and birds,” Smith told policemen and reporters. “I will not raise my children to go underground.” She was arrested but then released without being charged. Sharmat and Smith quickly linked up, and through phone calls and playground recruitment they mobilized a growing network of young middle-class mothers and their husbands to practice civil disobedience. “PEACE is the only defense against nuclear war,” declared a leaflet drafted by Smith and Sharmat’s new group, the Civil Defense Protest Committee. The committee’s literature looked to Gandhi for inspiration.
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On May 3, 1960, one thousand women, children, and men crowded into City Hall Park. As Sharmat recalled, “Many men came down. Our skirts gave them courage. We loaned out extra babies to bachelors who had the misfortune to be childless.” Five hundred adults willing to be arrested stayed put as the sirens blared; when a civil defense official mounted a bench and declared them all under arrest, the crowd cheered. The fifteen men and eleven women actually arrested were sentenced to five days in jail. The following year, 2,500 New Yorkers practiced civil disobedience in City Hall Park during Operation Alert. By then, demonstrations were also being held in cities across the country and on college campuses throughout the Northeast.
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Operation Alert 1961 was the last such drill. The Kennedy administration, embarrassed by news coverage of the protests and increasingly adverse editorial opinion, quietly canceled 1962’s exercise. Just as importantly, the protests—the first large-scale public demonstrations against the prospect of nuclear annihilation—energized middle-class New Yorkers who otherwise might have thought twice about joining radical leftist groups. They filled the ranks of new disarmament organizations such as SANE and Women Strike for Peace, which would play an active role nationwide as the 1960s unfolded. Women Strike for Peace became a proving ground for New Yorkers like the lawyer Bella Abzug, the pacifist Cora Weiss, and other women activists. Their lobbying and public relations savvy helped persuade John Kennedy to sign a limited nuclear test ban treaty in 1963 and also paved the way for their impending roles in national politics.