Boom Town
The Federal Civil Defense Administration and Nuclear Testing in the 1950s
by Roger Mullins
The atomic bomb fundamentally changed the nature of warfare. In the uneasy peace following the end of World War II, the two global superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - worked to forge a new international balance in light of the American monopoly on the atomic bomb.
When the Soviets exploded their own nuclear weapon in late 1949, the wary standoff between the two nations solidified into a full-fledged Cold War. Both sides continued to develop newer and stronger weapons in an arms race that would continue unabated for the next four decades.
This created a problem within the planning areas of the U.S. government. With the growing realization that citizens, not soldiers, would be on the front lines of future conflicts, demand grew for a Civil Defense program to protect the public in time of war.
President Harry Truman signed the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 creating a new federal agency charged with exactly that goal. Unfortunately for civil defense planners, however, the agency never received from Congress the necessary funds to build the agency they envisioned. Faced with this perennial shortfall, the FCDA found increasingly creative ways to accomplish their goals.
Starting in 1952, the agency worked closely with the Atomic Energy Commission to conduct civil defense research in conjuction with nuclear weapons testing already underway at the Nevada Test Site. Various structures, from houses populated by mannequins to railroad bridges and bank vaults, sprang up in the desert in prototype communities that existed solely to be destroyed by the power of the Bomb - literal Boom Towns.
The sections below look more closely at three of these programs.
Operation Big Shot
To give the public a better idea of the nature of atomic weapons, the FCDA arranged for one of the regularly-scheduled tests, code-named by the AEC as Charlie, to be televised coast to coast. Reporters, invited to the secretive Test Site for the first time, dubbed the exercise Operation Big Shot.
Since Las Vegas didn't even have a network television affiliate at the time, engineers at KTLA in Los Angeles rigged an ingenious series of mountaintop microwave relay towers to get the live footage of the test to their studios and out on the airwaves.
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Operation Doorstep
Building on public interest following the first live telecast, the FCDA in 1953 designed an even more elaborate test.
Operation Doorstep featured the first full-scale test of structures and automobiles to determine how such everyday items would fare against nuclear war.
Due to lack of funding the agency solicited assistance from private industry. The National Automobile Dealers Association arranged for members to provide vehicles to be used in the test. The L.A. Darling Company, a supplier of department store fixtures, provided mannequin "familles" to populate the "typical" houses constructed at strategic distances from the blast. J.C. Penney provided clothing.
The test results gathered through Operation Doorstep helped the FCDA modify shelter designs which it offered later in the year in the publication Home Shelter Against Atomic Attack. The blasted automobiles were recovered, decontaminated, and returned to the car dealers who had provided them. They became publicity items for the dealerships.
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Operation Cue
Building further on the success of Doorstep, the FCDA undertook what was arguably its most ambitious test program in 1957.
Operation Cue featured a full-fledged town (named either 'Survival Town' or 'Doom Town' in the press, depending on the reporters' attitude) designed to test a wide variety of consumer goods under actual nuclear detonation conditions.
FCDA scientists tested radios and other electronics, a range of automobiles and heavy equipment, medicines, mobile homes, and canned, fresh, and frozen foods. The two two-story "typical" houses were rebuilt using calculations and modifications based on the test results from Operation Doorstep. Several other home designs of differing construction were also built at the site. Gas and electric utility companies ran services to the structures.
The results gathered in the wake of Operation Cue continue to influence governmental advice even today in plans offered by the Department of Homeland Security.
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