‘
-g6involve infinitely less cost of production and use than any concurrent dissolution or realignment of cities designed to offset that multiplication,
If a city
three miles square can be largely destroyed by one well aimed bomb, it will require only three well spaced bombs to destroy
one mile wide.
utterly a city nine miles long and
And theeffort required in producing and delivering the two extra
bombs is infinitesimal compared to that involved in converting a square city into
a linear one.
Unquestionably an invulnerable home front is beyond price, but there is no
hope of gaining such a thing in any case,
What the city—dispersion-planners are
advocating is a colossal effort and expenditure (estimated by some of them to
amount to 300 billions of dollars) and a ruthless suppression of the inevitable
resistance to such dispersion in order to achieve what is at best a marginal dir
inution of vulnerability.
Wo such program has the slightest chance of being
accepted,
(e™
However, it is clear that the United Ste ‘es can be made a good deal less
.
o ayy
vulnerable to atomic bomb attack than it is at present, that such reduction can
be made great enough to count as a deterrent in the calculations of future
aggressors, and that it can be done at immeasurably less economic and social cost
and in a manner which will arouse far less resistance than any of the drastic
solutions described above,
But first we mist make clear in our minds what our ends are.
Our first pur-
pose, clearly, is to reduce the likelihood that a sudden attack upon us will be
So paralyzing in its effects as to rob us of all chance of effective resistance,
And we are interested in sustaining our power to retaliate primarily to make the
prospect of aggression much less attractive to the aggressor,
In other words,
we wish to reduce our vulnerability in order to reduce the chances of our being
hit at all,
Secondly, we wish to reduce the number of casualties and of material
damage which will result from an attack upon us of any given level of intensity.
These two ends are of course intimately interrelated, but they are also to a