Give Me Shelter: The Failure of sa国际传媒's Cold War Civil Defence
By Andrew Burtch
UBC Press in association with the Canadian War Museum, 288 pp., $32.95
At 10: 20 a.m. on April 23, 1952, the Soviet Union dropped an atomic bomb on the centre of Ottawa.
The blast toppled the Parliament Buildings; downtown was levelled; fires threatened most remaining homes and offices; underground waterpipes were ruptured; bridges to Hull were crippled.
As sunset approached, dazed survivors crowded into Lansdowne Park seeking food and water. Casualties were horrific: 25,000 people were dead, 50,000 were injured and 105,000 were homeless.
How's that for the beginning of a book? Not a science-fiction novel, but a serious, sobering look at sa国际传媒's ineffective plans during the Cold War to deal with a nuclear holocaust.
The book is Give Me Shelter: The Failure of sa国际传媒's Cold War Civil Defence. The title is inspired by the Rolling Stones' 1969 song Gimme Shelter which, according to Mick Jagger, is an apocalyptic "end-of-theworld song." Hum that song as you read this book by Andrew Burtch, the Canadian War Museum's post1945 historian.
Burtch has produced a very chilly blast from the past. The book's opening scenario about the destruction of Ottawa was one of many penned by government officials in the Cold War as they contemplated Soviet aggression. Various measures, including mass evacuations and bomb shelters, were dreamed up to try to save at least some Canadians from nuclear annihilation.
But it is doubtful the feared apocalypse from Soviet bombs and missiles could have been averted, even if there had been adequate funds spent by the government and a greater willingness by the provinces, the military and ordinary citizens to plan for a nuclear attack.
Initially, as the Cold War began, the Liberal government of the day decided citizens should take responsibility for saving themselves and their families.
The plan was for armies of civilian volunteers (all male, of course) fighting fires and other volunteers (all female, of course) running soup kitchens.
Canadians generally did not buy into the plans.
Next came schemes for mass evacuations in advance of bombings.
Some trials in places such as Brockville and St. Johns, N.L., were relatively successful. But then came the big trial, a planned mass evacuation of 40,000 residents of northeast Calgary in September 1955. A freak snowstorm delayed the evacuation for a week. (One can only wonder if the storm would have delayed bombs and missiles.)
When the evacuation finally happened, only 15 per cent of the residents of the target area actually joined the exodus out of Calgary to surrounding small towns.
And then there was the effort, beginning in 1959, to build bomb shelters.
The Diefenbunker in Carp, Ont., is a product of that Cold War effort. The prime minister, key cabinet ministers and top mandarins were supposed to take shelter there in case of nuclear war. The rest of us were supposed to hide out in makeshift shelters in the basements of our homes, even though a hydrogen bomb dropped nearby would destroy basements as well.
And even if you did survive, what would you do? The breezes above would be blowing radioactive fallout your way, food and water would be scarce and life might not be worth living.
Only about 2,000 individual bomb shelters were built in the Cold War. People simply did not believe the shelters were the solution. They figured diplomatic efforts to tame the Soviets were more realistic options.
"sa国际传媒's civil defence [CD] program failed for a constellation of reasons," Burtch writes. "Successive governments pursued and altered CD and drafted plans behind closed doors, but they never provided the public with the tools required to create a meaningful defence. Civil Defence sa国际传媒 and its officials meanwhile limped by on a fraction of a percentage of the billions of dollars committed to the military defence of the country during the same period.
"This support was insufficient to provide the public with concrete evidence of the progress in implementing CD measures for their defence and made it an easy target for criticism and ridicule. In the public eye, air-raid sirens, additional fire trucks and do-it-yourself shelter designs were no match for Soviet thermonuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles and they were never enough to convince Canadians that their contributions to CD would satisfy the public good."
Luckily, the Soviets never did bomb us or we would not be around to read Give Me Shelter, an extremely detailed and shocking analysis of how a government and its people failed to connect and collaborate on one of the most important issues facing the world during the Cold War.
The book is scarier than science fiction because it shows how unprepared we were to save our own skin had the Russians ever decided to attack.
