MIT prepares for nuclear attack

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 helped bring World War II to a close. But it also launched a nuclear arms race that made the world a far more dangerous place. 

The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, and its first hydrogen bomb on November 22, 1955. The US countered by building a computerized air defense system and bombers that could reach the USSR. The Soviets responded by developing nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, which left the US scrambling to upgrade its nascent Nike antiballistic missile system. 

“This country guessed wrong in 1945 when it [decided to concentrate on] heavy bomber development and ignored Russia’s interest in missile experimentation,” Professor Charles Stark Draper ’26, SM ’28, ScD ’38, told The Tech in December 1957.

It was soon clear that the planned upgrade to the Nike system would be way too expensive—$15 billion—and would protect only 40% of the US population. Nor would there be time to evacuate the cities. “A hydrogen-tipped missile can travel from Russia here in 37 minutes,” an article that ran in the Boston Globe reported in 1960. 

And what then? Anyone who survived the detonation of an H-bomb—the odds of doing so went up if you were protected or at least five miles from the initial explosion—would still be in danger from radioactive ash, better known as “fallout.” Yet the government had an answer for that. The most energetic radioactive particles created by a nuclear explosion also have the shortest half-life: After two weeks the radiation level is only 0.1% of the initial intensity. US civil defense officials concluded that survivors would need places to shelter from the fallout for 14 days, after which they could emerge and rebuild. 

Some form of civil defense had been part of the nation’s wartime plans for decades. In 1942, MIT covered the oculus of the Great Dome under blackout restrictions so that it would not be visible at night to German bombers. But the US lacked fallout shelters.

Six months after John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, he issued Executive Order 10952, directing the Department of Defense to work with state and local leaders to establish such shelters. 

That fall, MIT’s president, Julius A. Stratton, appointed a 10-person committee chaired by his vice president, General James McCormack, to determine whether any existing spaces on campus might offer protection from fallout, figure out how to convert those spaces into shelters, and develop shelter criteria for new construction on campus. Its Subcommittee on Shelter Criteria was chaired by Robert J. Hansen, a professor of structural engineering.

“It would be a cruel hoax to lead people to believe that fallout shelters in schools would protect children from nuclear attacks.” ­

William Schreiber, MIT professor emeritus

The issue of whether to create shelters deeply divided the MIT community. “The building of bomb shelters on a national scale would practically turn the country into a peacetime armed camp with an entirely different outlook on the meaning of survival,” read an editorial in the October 4, 1961, issue of The Tech, which also questioned “the value of preserving life in a world made unfit for habitation by a nuclear war.” 

James A. Moore Jr. ’64 responded in another letter: “Has America become so degenerate that we are now afraid to defend ourselves or our principles?”

That November, 183 professors from Boston University, Brandeis, Harvard, MIT, and Tufts took out a large ad in the New York Times to publish an open letter to President Kennedy attacking the shelter program. “The nation has not yet faced up to the real dangers of thermonuclear war … We believe that most of our people do not understand what the world would look like the day after an attack or what problems would be involved in recovering from a war which killed, injured, poisoned, and destroyed on such a large scale … The principal danger of the present program is the false sense of security engendered. It is much like a quack cure for cancer.” 

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Indeed, fallout shelters would not prevent the intense heat of a nuclear blast from igniting wooden buildings, papers, and even people. Thus, “it would be a cruel hoax to lead people to believe that fallout shelters in schools would protect children from nuclear attacks,” MIT professor William Schreiber testified in 1962 before the Massachusetts Legislative Committee on Education.

A building-by-building examination of the campus determined that there was room to shelter 16,874 people—more than enough for the Institute’s 6,139 students and 6,176 faculty and staff. Each area was rated as good, fair, poor, or useless. 

The US government’s shelter program would provide MIT with food rations to stock the shelters once they were licensed by the Massachusetts Civil Defense Agency. Water would come from the MIT pool; the municipal water system would probably not survive the attack, and even if it did, Cambridge’s water treatment system would only remove “about 70 percent of the fallout material from raw water,” according to a March 1962 report by committee member George T. Bryant, associate professor of sanitary engineering.

With only “minor valve changes in existing lines and the installation of an emergency power supply,” the pool’s water could be diverted into MIT’s water supply network, providing plenty to drink for the shelter period, the report said. Bryant noted, however, that “the swimming pool structure is very vulnerable to blast damage,” which would “destroy the glass front and expose the surface of the pool to the fallout.” He recommended that MIT purchase an emergency plastic cover that could be pulled over the pool after the blast but before the fallout arrived.

By January 1962, the committee had decided to plan for four scenarios. The first was for “relatively light fallout” from attacks outside New England. The second was for “moderate to heavy fallout” resulting from an attack on Westover Air Force Base, roughly 80 miles west of Boston. The third was for “heavy fallout—light blast damage,” including extensive broken windows and fires within the main Institute buildings when drapes and papers ignited. This would result from an attack on the “Bedford facility,” which probably meant Hanscom Air Force Base and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The fourth scenario was for “heavy fallout” from an attack on Boston. 

The consequences of a New England strike would be dire. An attack on West­over was expected to produce two-day accumulated doses of 500 to 2,000 roentgens (a measure of radiation exposure more widely used at the time) in people without shelter—a sobering prospect given that 50% of humans exposed to as little as 400 R typically die within 30 days. Radiation doses from an attack on Boston were expected to range from 2,000 R to 20,000 R; at Hiroshima, people exposed to 4,000 R to 6,000 R died instantly.

“In no case do I expect a fire storm involving M.I.T., although a portion of Boston could be a fire storm area,” Hansen wrote. “M.I.T. has largely fire resistive construction and is also near areas having no or little construction, i.e., the River.”

Because the main buildings and East Campus were built primarily of concrete, people sheltering in the basements might receive a protection factor of 300, meaning that they would get 1/300th the exposure of someone outside. That would be good enough to survive fallout—and those who made it to the basement in time might be protected against fire or even a low-level blast. However, work on the basements would be required. “They could be used as is for a few hours as fallout shelters,” Hansen noted. “There are modifications varied in nature that would serve to increase the time of stay in shelters, reduce fire and smoke hazards, and reduce hazards from air blast.” MIT would also need to provide chemical toilets.

But although the committee developed plans for turning various spaces into shelters, debate over the wisdom of executing them continued. 

MIT ARCHIVES

Other area universities were similarly divided. Harvard designated and stocked some shelters, resulting in protests and sit-ins. In 1965 the university had had enough and said it would not allow Cambridge’s civil defense authority to stock any more Harvard shelters until MIT decided to stock the 35 buildings that it had designated—something that could not happen until MIT signed and submitted its shelter license application. There is no evidence in the archives that MIT ever did so.

Ultimately, Congress didn’t fund a national shelter program, possibly because shelters wouldn’t have saved many lives. According to a once-classified report in the MIT archives from Jerome Wiesner’s time as President Kennedy’s science advisor, a Russian attack with 800 missiles would have killed 60% to 80% of the US population, even assuming tens of billions of dollars were spent on both shelters and the antimissile program. A 1966 National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the Soviets would be able to deploy 800 to 1,100 launchers by 1971.

Nevertheless, some faculty were dumbfounded by MIT’s lack of action.

“All that institutions like MIT are being asked to do is basically to paste some signs on some walls and to store a certain amount of emergency food and water in their protected areas,” Professor Holt Ashley wrote to McCormack in June 1964. 

“I think I never tried harder for so long to be thoughtful about a subject and came up with so little to show,” McCormack wrote back. “At least we now have a detailed survey of shelter in our existing buildings and could move quickly at any time we might decide to do so. Also, shelter considerations are included in all new building designs.”

We now know that MIT fallout shelters would have been useless. Institute planning assumed a single nuclear explosion, but Wiesner’s archives reveal that the Soviets likely had multiple targets in the Boston area, including Logan Airport, other transportation facilities, the city’s petroleum handling facilities, and Boston Harbor. Sheltered or not, few people who experienced such an attack could have survived.