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DASA 2019-2
CONARD: Were you able to get anything from the questions as to
the depth of underatanding of the situation?
DUNHAM:
There were one or two staff members who felt very
strongly and there waa obviously one disciple of Stonier's, for instance. The idea just shows that you shouldn't even think in terms
of Civil Defense. [think there were specific questions about how
reliable such a statement is, etc.; it was generally quite accurate.
TAYLOR: It seems to methat it is very difficult to get dispassion-
ate accounts of what might happen because there is a strong tendency
to choose sides inthis,
There is a labelling of people.
People who
examine various types of Civil Defense measures and promote them
tend to be in the hawkish column. And they tend to be for ABM, etc,
This tendency for many of ua to get polarized by statements about
Civil Defense, is, I think, one of the reasons why it looks as though
many people are not interested, I find that when I think someone is.
not interested in the subject, it’s very often the case that he is not
interested in what I have to say about the subject, but he has his own
ideas.
If he is in an argumentative mood, he will talk zbout them.
If he's not, he acts as though he has not thought about it and ie not
willing to.
“FREMONT- SMITH: Isn't this a very human factor, that people find
it very uncomfortable to stay on the fence about anything that ie im-
portant?
I wish Jack would speak to this.
MILLET: We're stuck with the possibility of being at one end or
the other of the spectrum; either "Yes, it's going to happen” or "No,
it can't possibly happen, " while in the middle are all the mugwumps,
The mugwumps have the hardest time of all because that involves a
lot of thinking and the use of imagination. {'m trying to come up with
something new in the way of solution or at least something half way
logical as far as one's experience can show it. It seems to me that
that is fundamentally the situation here from a paychological standpoint, The same was true when we were trying to sort out the prospects for good government in Germanyafter the war. There were at
one end the people who you knew would repeat the Nazi thing while at
the other were people who couldn't possibly do it as far as we could
tell, Then in the middle were those calling for judgment as to who
could be trusted to handle this or that level of government. Fundamentally, the same psychological situation of obsessional horror at
one end or the other existed, you see.
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