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The article examines the civil defense program of the Soviet Union, and suggests conclusions that the United States can draw from it. It surveys the supposed program to train citizens for military deployment, evacuation and sheltering plans, assumptions held about the nature of a U.S. attack, and post-attack recovery estimates, and concludes that much of these are unrealistic, inadequate in the face of large-scale nuclear attack, or spurious. It notes that there is little evidence that Soviet leaders have planned their economy with civil defense in mind, and that there is not much basis for claiming that Soviet leaders would risk war with the U.S., which has more than sufficient capability to nullify whatever passive-defense measures may have been taken by the Soviet Union.

The article focuses on the civil defense proposals in the U.S. Accordingly, it should prove useful to discuss here the wide range of questions civil defense raises concerning our national strategy and the arms interaction process. Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of a civil defense program might be to pile a civil defense race upon the arms interaction process and thus open up, as it were a new cold war front in an area in which there has been something approaching tacit agreement. There would be an increased risk inherent in adding this new dimension to the arms race. A substantial civil defense program would be inordinately tension heightening because it would involve large scale community action.