ORGANIZING FOR CIVIL DEFENSE
Fallout shelter is only one part of a complete Civil Defense Program. The details of a Civil Defense Program may change with changes in the kinds of missiles that might be used against us. But the essential elements of the program remain the same. They consist of a warning system to alert the civilian population to an imminent attack; a system of shelters equipped and provisioned to furnish protection against those effects of an attack for which protection is feasible – i.e., radioactive fallout; and a system to provide training and equipment, so that the survivors can monitor the effects of the attack and carry out the tasks of decontamination, fire fighting, rescue, and reconstruction, that would be necessary to restore a functioning society.
An effective civil defense requires the participation of every citizen. It calls for advance planning at every level of government – local, State, and national. This planning must be flexible enough to adapt itself to changes in enemy weapons and tactics. It must be comprehensive enough to cover people living under widely different conditions from ranch houses, to apartment buildings, to frame cottages.
Shelter, warning, radiological monitoring, training and education are all parts of a total community civil defense program. The responsibility for integrating these parts, and relating the whole to the needs and capabilities of the community, necessarily falls on the State and local civil defense organizations. The Federal Government is prepared to help in major ways. As had been indicated, it has already begun, through the National Shelter Survey, to make civil defense a reality.
Department of Defense, Office of Civil Defense, December, 1961