For every person who sticks a jug of water and a carton of freeze-drieds into their basement, theres at least a hundred who dont. More disturbing, for every hundred who dont theres probably at least one who subscribes to the Mutually Assured Destruction theory. Thats the theory that says if you wear body armour it’ll promote violence because then you no longer risk being fatally shot. Imagine tow guys in a room with a loaded pistol pointed at each others heads.. thats MAD. ‘Tis true…theres a schoool of thought that says if you take precautions to survive a nuclear war (Civil Defense) you are removing the motivation to prevent nuclear war. That is to say, if you could survive a nuclear war, you might actually engage in one…so remain vulnerable in order to keep your risk high. Yes, the arguement is that you prevent nuclear war by being vulnerable to it. Go figure.

For better or worse, this kind of thinking only surfaces rarely these days (usually in regard to ABM defense systems). Replace ‘nuclear war’ with ‘terrorist acts of mass destruction’ and you get the same concrete shelter but without the dose of liberal guilt.

One of my favorite authors, Dean Ing, wrote a book I picked up the other day called ‘The Chernobyl Syndrome’. Normally a sci-fi/drama author (“Systemic Shock’, ‘Pulling Through’, ‘Blood Of Eagles’, etc), this book is Ing’s little primer on preparing and surviving the upcoming Soviet/US nuclear war (ca. 1988). In it theres mention of an organization called Doctors for Disaster Preparedness….sort of an opposite version of Physicians For Social Responsibility, which, according to Ing, believed that a good way to prevent nuclear war was to not have a Civil Defense program.

Anyway, my curiousity piqued, I Yahoo’d DDP and found this link to DDP. Scroll down the left-hand menu to ‘Civil Defense’ and theres one or two interesting links. Esp. one about one of the doctors recommended list of shelter medical kit contents.

Its an interesting website and the links from there landed me here, which eventually dropped me into  The American Civil Defense Assoociation website.…which begat this very nice page of links..esp the bottom links.

An interesting morning of browsing. Check em out.