CONFIDENTIAL Only after dispersion of activities has been planned is the designer ready to establish construction priorities for specific underground shelter projects. First priority should go to shelters located at dispersed developmentsites near existing high-speed radial freeways. These shelters should be assigned to central-area activites not due to be furnished shelters in the central area, and movement priorities established by a metropolitan survival plan or nonmilitary defense plan should be assigned to these activities. Second priority should go to construction of shelters for those activities allotted shelter space in the central area. Those activities whose shelters will be located in the most prob- able crater area should be.so informed. At this point, if it has not been done previously, decision must be made concerning the depth at which shelters in the most probable crater area will be constructed. Third priority for construction should go to the-large zones between the congested central area and the planned dispersed developmentsites. In this intermediate territory there may be much private activity in strengthening or hardening best existing shelter during the time interval required to reach third-priority underground shelter construction. Fourth priority for underground shelter construction should go to dispersed development sites that are to be madereadily accessible for peacetime intercourse with the central area through construction of new freeways. Shelter construction here should be timed to coincide with freeway construction. Since the possibility of submarine-launched missile attack with very short warning exists today for coastal cities, it is obvious that first-priority dispersed development site shelters for personnel in centra!-area activities would not be accessible within the warning time. Therefore for coastal cities central-area shelters should be given equal priority with dispersed development site shelters. This procedure is advocated with reluctance, however, since land for centra!-area shelters, if purchased, would have to be acquired at prices representing capitalization of income based on existing congestion in the central area, while the national shelter program itself would be operating to spread land values in any metropolitan area over a wider and larger territory, thus tending to reduce present peak land values in the central area. There would be a serious danger that low-value land might be bought at high prices to the detriment of the shelter program as a whole. UNDERGROUND SHELTER PLAN AS PART OF A METROPOLITAN REGIONAL PLAN It may be felt that too much trouble and complexity are wrapped up in the proposed shelter plan, and that the problem is 4 relatively minor one. Areair-raid shelters important enough to justify this much disruption of peacetime economic activity? So much govern- ment control would be required to accomplish the plan that the country might lose before a war the very freedom it planned to defend by the waritself. This is indeed a powerful argument. Project EAST RIVER, which has gone furthest in exploring the possibility of reducing vulnerability through use of space, reported opposition to its recommendations: 8. In terms of what had been hoped for in the way of progress in carrying out our 1952 Project EAST RIVER recommendations, it may be useful to state certain of our disappointments as of 1955. They can be listed as a. While Project EAST RIVER placed great stress and considerable emphasis on the reduction of urban vulnerability (Part II-B — Federal Leadership to Reduce Urban Vulnerability, and Part V — Reduction of Urban Vulnerability), it is disappointing to observe that suchlittle progress has been made. Itis fair to state that the political and economic obstacles to any such program were underestimated by Project EAST RIVER. ORO—R-17 (App B) 85