Conformity and Challenges in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Years 353plans were limited to specific areas. In Houston, Texas for example, only a
275-block area downtown was designated for evacuation, though a nuclear
bomb could destroy a much more immense amount of land. In the capital,
as Eisenhower again evacuated, few took the drill seriously, and a Deputy
Director for Civil Defense even lost his job for saying the event was not a
drill “but a show.”
The New York Times was also not impressed, saying that the plans showed
that a nuclear bomb would kill millions “in a holocaust that makes the imag-
ination falter.” About 2 developments emerged from the drills. Congress
created an evacuation center for itself, at the Greenbrier resort in White
Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a $14 million bunker with 800 beds where
military and political leaders could flee. And it provided justification to
expand the nation’s highway system, which was created, government officials
said, to help people evacuate from a nuclear attack and military vehicles to
get to areas where they could provide aid faster. In reality, the highways
would be far more useful for commerce, for trucks delivering goods from
coast-to-coast. Even with such pessimistic results from the various drills,
Americans continued to build fallout shelters, over 200,000 by 1965. Most
were badly-built, and would have been of little use anyway, but the companies
that made them did get handsome profits from the hysteria, another benefi-
ciary of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Europe—Thaw and Heat
As American anxiety over the possibility of nuclear war grew, U.S. relations
with the Soviet Union seemed to be changing; in reality, they were not.
Perhaps a great opportunity for cooperation and negotiations was lost at the
time of Stalin’s death, and the “New Look” was naturally interpreted in
Moscow, and elsewhere, as an aggressive and offensive strategy. The Cold War
would continue, with arms buildups and threats still ever present, but with
occasional possibilities for a new relationship between the Soviet Union and
America. Germany, as it had since 1945, remained at the center of the conflict
in Europe. In September 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had sent shock
waves through Europe by proposing that the FRG [West Germany], just five
years removed from Nazi rule, create a 10-division army. As NSC-68 envi-
sioned, this would push the global militarization program forward. Both the