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manner calculated to reduce the number of casualties and the amount of physical
destruction that a given mimber of atomic bombs can cause.
in their most drastic
form these plans, many of which will shortly reach the public eye, involve the re-
distribution of our urban concentrations into "linear" or "cellular" cities.
The linear or "ribbon" city is one which is very much longer than it is wide,
with its industries and services. as well as population distributed along its entire length,
Of two cities occupying nine square miles, the one which was one
mile wide and nine long would clearly suffer less destruction from one atomic
bomb, however perfectly aimed, than the one which was three miles square.
The
principle of the cellular city, on the other hand, would be realized if a city of
the same nine-square-miles size were dispersed into nine units of about one square
distant from another.
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mile each and situated in such a pattern that each unitwas three to five miles
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such "planning" seems to this writer to showSsinetlar lack of appreciation
of the forces which have given birth to our cities and caused them to expand and
multiply,
There are always important geographic and economic reasons for the
birth and growth of a city and profound political and social resistance to interference with the resuits of "natural" growth,
Cities like New York and Chicago
are not going to dissolve themselves by direction from the government, even if
they could find areas to dissolve themselves into,
As a linear city New York
would be as long as the state of Pennsylvania, and would certainly have no organic
meaning as a city.
"Solutions" like these are not only politically and socially
unrealistic but physically impossible,
Nor does it seem that the military benefits would be at all commensurate
with the cost, even if the programs were physically possible and politically
feasible.
We have no way of estimating the absolute limit to the number of bombs
which will be available to an attacker, but we lmow that unless production of
atomic bombs is drastically limited or completely suppressed by international
agreement, the number available in the world will progress far more rapidly and
On