A 374-page book that sells 500,000 copies is a best-seller in any language. A book that sold that many copies inside Russia has just been published in the United States. I wonder if it will sell even 1,000 here. The book has no sex appeal. The people pictured in the book are covered with many layers of clothing.
The book is entitled, simply, “Civil Defense.” For the Russians, it is a how-to-do-it manual on how to survive a nuclear war. For Americans, it is a manual to dispel the four myths that our government and people have swallowed during the last decade.
1. “Nuclear war is unthinkable.” While Americans have engaged in the mass delusion that they could cram the nuclear genie back into the bottle by NOT thinking about it, the Soviets have been doing a great deal of imaginative thinking about it. They think about how to fight a nuclear war, how to win it, and how to survive it.
2. “Detente and disarmament are the key to peace.” The Soviets don’t buy that American myth at all. The Soviets believe and proclaim that nuclear Superiority of One nation is the key to peace — on their terms, that is.
The top Russian military strategist and Marshal of the Soviet Union, A. Grechko, stated shortly before he died: “The greater the combat ability of the armed forces of our country, the more powerfully they are equipped, and the better the personnel are trained, the more peace there will be on earth.”
3. “Nuclear war will be deterred by mutual assured destruction.” The theory of this myth is that each country will be deterred from striking the other by the knowledge that the other will strike back. The civilian population of each side is, thus, hostage to the other.
The trouble is, the Soviets haven’t the Slightest intention of cooperating in this mutuality, and their book on civil defense proves it. The Soviets believe that one side can carry out a preemptive first-strike so massive that it will preclude the other from striking back at all.
4. “Nuclear war would be so destructive that, once one side pushes the button, it will be the end of the human race.” This was the message of such popular books and movies as On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove. The Soviets reject this theory in toto. Their book on civil defense shows how they plan to save lives in the event of nuclear war.
Dr. Leon Goure of the Center for International Studies at the University of Miami has said that “the United States might lose as many as 100 million people in the event of a Soviet attack; … the Soviet Union, on the other hand, might lose less than it did in World War II.”
General Daniel James, Jr., Commander-in-Chief of NORAD, recently explained why the United States stands to lose so many: “We have NO [antiballistic missile] defense against ballistic missiles.”
The best-selling Soviet book on civil defense explains why substantially all the Russian population will survive. Their civil defense plans are detailed, comprehensive, and expensive. They include urban evacuation, shelter construction, the training of civil defense units and of the general population, and the protection of industry, services, and agriculture.
Civil defense in the United States is best described in one forceful four-letter word: a joke.
The underlying theory of the Soviet civil defense program is that, as Grechko emphasized, “the winning of victory in a war depends in the final analysis on the standard” of the country’s preparation for defense against a nuclear attack, and that it “must have the same organized and planned character as the training of the army and navy.”
If the Soviet manual on civil defense could become a best-seller in the United States, we might have a chance to replace the false myth of mutual assured destruction with the safety of mutual assured survival.
