Just a little tidbit from “Fat Man” by Louis Menand, a June New Yorker review of a biography of Herman Kahn, one of the architects of the theory of mutual assured deterrence. Maybe it explains why the 9/11 Commission didn’t give out very good grades last week (emphasis added):
RAND was leery of civil defense for client-relations reasons: money spent on fallout shelters and dosimeters was less money for the Air Force. Eisenhower, too, opposed civil-defense programs, in part because he didnt think that nuclear war was survivable, and in part because he was a cheapskate. Facilities for the evacuation of millions cost too much to construct. In the nineteen-fifties, the people who were enthusiastic about fallout shelters and evacuation drills, the now derided emblems of Cold War domestic culture, were liberals. All of the hundred million black-and-yellow fallout-shelter signs that appeared in the United States during the Cold War were put up by the Kennedy Administration—which also made Kahn happy by distributing two million dosimeters.