Scientists, especially at Cal Tech and MIT, spent their summers in the early and mid 1950s working out the civil-defense problem. Project East River and the Summer Studies at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory were the most notable, recommending elaborate and expensive nationwide shelter programs as essential elements of an overall defense program.
By the beginning of January 1957, enough analysis had been made of civil defense for the FCDA, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, to urge a massive shelter program for protection in the event of nuclear attack. It recommended that the federal government spend from fiscal years 1958 through 1965 $28.6 billion, and state and local governments another $3.8 billion, on shelters. The Federal Housing Administration would provide mortgage insurance for privately built backyard shelters, up to $2,500 per shelter, and tax codes would be changed to allow taxpayers to deduct up to $2,500—$500 a year spread out over five years—for expenses incurred in home-shelter construction. With these incentives, the FCDA estimated, another $15 billion or more might be spent privately, in addition to the $32.4 billion spent with public revenue.
On March 29, the NSC Planning Board told James Lay, the NSC’s executive director, that the board was “unable at this time to make a recommendation which would enable the Council and the President to act upon any shelter proposal on the basis of an informed judgment.” It recommended that various executive agencies carry out studies, to be presented to the NSC. Among the assignments was: “A study by the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization as to the relative value of various active and passive measures to protect the civil population in case of nuclear attack and its aftermath, taking into account probable new weapons systems.” On April 4, the NSC approved the Planning Board’s recommendation; on April 8, President Eisenhower signed the NSC’s approval.
Not quite two weeks earlier, on March 26, just three days before the NSC Planning Board made its report on the FCDA recommendations, Nelson Rockefeller met for lunch with President Eisenhower, the President’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, and the budget director, Percival Brundage. At the time, Rockefeller was chairman of Eisenhower’s Psychological Warfare Panel and was obsessed with civil defense. At the luncheon, Rockefeller stressed that “the will to resist” was central in deterring the enemy. He said that the Russians might start a war without warning; that some of their planes and missiles would get through, no matter how good our continental defenses might be; and that “the side preserving its manpower resources and maintaining its will to resist would have a major advantage.”
Rockefeller urged Eisenhower to establish a Presidential commission to examine in detail the whole civil-defense issue, a commission composed of “men who believe in the importance of having an optimum defense for the United States and who are open-minded about how that is to be achieved.” Eisenhower had no particular penchant for civil defense, but so many reputable people whom he knew did have an intense feeling about it that he decided to turn one of the studies proposed by the NSC on April 4—the one by the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization—into the Presidential commission that Rockefeller advocated.
One prominent member of the Science Advisory Committee, and later Eisenhower’s chief science adviser, was James R. Killian, Jr., president of MIT. Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s national security adviser, asked Killian for names of prominent people who might head up this special committee. Killian recommended H. Rowan Gaither, whom Killian knew from the days when Gaither was business manager of the MIT Radiation Lab during World War II and, more recently, from some “future studies” on American society that Gaither had sponsored as president of the Ford Foundation. Eisenhower formally invited Gaither to direct the special committee on May 8, 1957; one week later, Gaither accepted “with humility and with a full sense of the magnitude and urgency of the task.”
Gaither’s deputy would be Robert C. Sprague, president of the Sprague Electric Company in western Massachusetts and a man with active interest in defense. Sprague had worked on two highly classified studies evaluating U.S. continental defenses, the first in 1953 for the Senate Armed Services Preparedness Sub-committee, the second in 1955 for a special committee headed by James Killian on the possibilities of a Soviet surprise attack.
Gaither, Sprague, Gordon Gray, and national security adviser Robert Cutler listed other names to serve on the panel. They chose William C. Foster, deputy secretary of defense in the early 1950s; James Phinney Baxter III, president of Williams College, former member of Killian’s committee, and author of Scientists Against Time, a history of operations research during World War II; William Webster and James Perkins, who had both worked on civil-defense studies; Jerome Wiesner of MIT, a participant in many studies on weapons analysis; Robert Prim and Hector Skifter of Bell Labs and Airborne Instruments; Robert Calkins and John Corson, two economists; and the panel’s technical adviser, Edward P. Oliver, an engineer from RAND.
Rowan Gaither had been the wealthy San Francisco lawyer who, not quite a decade earlier, helped Frank Collbohm turn RAND into an independent nonprofit corporation. Now he was chairman of the board of the Ford Foundation and chairman of the board at RAND. After accepting Eisenhower’s offer, he called on several of the top analysts at RAND for advice on how to pursue the matter at hand.
One of those he called upon was Albert Wohlstetter. Wohlstetter had only recently begun to brief R-290 around the Pentagon, and firmly believed that the issues raised in that study were the most important in the entire realm of national security. This round of briefings was progressing more briskly than had been the case with the early months of his overseas-base study of a few years earlier. Already, he had briefed R-290 to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, and accompanying him to that briefing had been not only a fair number of Air Force generals but also General Nathan Twining, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But now Gaither was talking about something potentially larger—a Presidentially appointed commission, packed with prominent names, that might change the whole focus of the Eisenhower Administration’s skimpy and unimaginative defense policies.
Wohlstetter tried to convince Gaither that civil defense did not lie at the heart of the matter. He reminded Gaither of the R-290 and overseas-base studies, which Wohlstetter had briefed to him as chairman of RAND’s board of directors. Wohlstetter suggested that the vulnerability of SAC was the most critical issue facing the country, far more critical than civil defense, and that perhaps Gaither should broaden the terms of his mandate to include the problem of maintaining a ready and effective second-strike capability in the face of a Soviet surprise attack.
Gaither agreed and when the panel began to meet very secretly that summer in the Executive Office Building next door to the White House, he had little trouble convincing the other members that they should perhaps consider civil defense in the context of broader security issues. Certainly Robert Sprague and Phinney Baxter had no problems with the idea, having served just two years earlier on Killian’s surprise attack panel.
By August the project was under way. An advisory panel of still more prominent men had been established to give the committee greater prestige and credibility—Ernest Lawrence of Livermore Lab, former Defense Secretary Robert Lovett, John McCloy of Chase Manhattan Bank, Frank Stanton of CBS, Mervin Kelly of Bell Labs, General Jimmy Doolittle, General John Hull, former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Robert Carney. And the steering panel—the original group composed of Gaither, Sprague, Baxter, Foster and the rest—organized a team of seventy-one scientists, economists, weapons experts, and past and present government officials to serve as a vast research staff.