. 293 a five or sixemonth period in which no instructions were forthcoming, no information was forthcoming. The people were trying to do something and it ended up with pretty much chaos. By the time the governmentacted and was able to get the instructions out, the interest had died off. Also during that time I remember n eetings. I know I attended one PTA meeting where a speaker had beet. asked to talk on nuclear effects. Unfortunately, he was one nf those experts who become expert by hearing and reading auch things as On The Beach, and he managed to terrorize the audience, I got up about half-way during his talk and started trying to «:k him questions that [ hoped would bring the thing back into perspective. but it was a losing battle all _ the way. Later on in our area we did put out speakers, people who could talk about the effects to some degree. But we were talking earlier in this conference about not giving out any information. This was a case of not telling the people the problem or the facts early and in detail, This was a case where we gave out the basic fact that a nuclear war could occur too early and without any information to pro- vide guidance for people. Since that time there has been apathy with respect to the Civil Defense program even though the Government in fact, as I said, came out with instructions later on, It just died off. I worked with the Illinois Civil Defense people alter that and it was very difficult to bring the people, the public, back to the point again because the impetus was no longer coming from Washington. The instructions were there and had been put out, but there was no push to use the instructions, FREMONT-SMITH: Did any of you see the article in Progressive magazine at about that time entitled, "It's a Problem," a satire? TAYLOR: Yes, I did. FREMONT-SMITH: I think it's one of the best I've ever seen and I really think it points up exactly every single issue that came up. A man put up a Civil Defense thing in this smali town and a friend of his learned of it through a plumber because nobody else knew about ' it, and he took his ll-year-old-boy over to see what his friend had made and then he asked him a series of questions. He said, ''What do you do about air and what do you do about a filter and what do you do about your neighbors coming in?" At each question the man who was building the defense thing contempiated 11 and ended up, "Well," he said, ‘It's a problem!" Pera ee SESSION VI