which are at least partially checkable. But research and development for civil defense has the unfortunate character-or fortunate, depending on which side you are on-that you don't test it in a war and except for the kinds of things Jerry Strope discussed, you don't test it in any other way, by and large. Therefore, you must be very imaginative. I realize that I certainly could have made this remark even if we had been more imaginative than we have been, and it would have been easy to be less imaginative, so I am not making a serious charge against the previous work. But let me refer, say, to Jerry Hill's testimony. I think of his testimony as being about the first sober description I have seen of what might be called the environmental fire problem; I would doubt that Dr. Hill spent more than 4 or 5 weeks on it.

Dr. HILL. Just about right. When I first heard I was going to testify-I had been reading some in the area but hadn't written anything.

Mr. KAHN. It just shouldn't be possible upon a thing as important. as that to turn out an important document in 4 or 5 weeks. It shouldn't be possible. It is only possible because we haven't worried about it sufficiently. We haven't worried about it sufficiently partly because of a lack of imagination.

EFFECT OF WAR ON THE SOCIETY

This comment or a similar one can be made on the complete range of problems that can be lumped together as the soft problems-the social, political, economic, psychological, and moral problems.

I am not saying that this area has not been studied at all. It has been. For example the Committee on Disaster Studies has been conducting research for many years on catastrophe, panic, and so forth, but almost all the reports

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Excuse me. There is a rollcall vote on the Freedmen's Hospital bill. I assume we will have to go and answer the rollcall.

We will adjourn for about 20 minutes, while we answer the rollcall. (At this point a short recess was taken.)

Mr. HOLIFIELD. The subcommittee will be in order.

Mr. KAHN. The Committee on Disaster Studies has for many years looked at, collected information on, and analyzed data on national disasters, on panic and matters of that sort. However, almost all of their reports will contain a statement to the effect that it is dangerous to apply this experience to thermonuclear war because conditions then are different.

This is, of course, correct. But the net result is that there is almost no work aimed directly at thermonuclear war. That is, there is no attempt to apply the data at all. The number of reports and I speak here not as an expert but a person who tries to get these reports and read them-that actually seriously address themselves directly to the social science aspects of the postattack world is negligible. I know of about six that really make a serious attempt and at least three could still be regarded as off-the-top-of-the-head variety. The others are either too slight or insignificant even to be considered.

INSURING SURVIVAL OF FREE INSTITUTIONS

This task is important for two separate reasons. It is important because it is possible such studies may show that we may need special preparations which will facilitate recuperation or prevent damage. For example, I could imagine special preparations to preserve the free press, preserve the political system, preserve the political parties, labor unions, church, and things of this sort, which will help us recuperate a free society. I could imagine a situation in which if we didn't make preparations for the preservation of such institutions, we might find that it was more difficult, or impossible, to restore the kind of society we had previously. This is an almost unexplored field except for some financial measures, and even there it is a barely explored field.

PROBLEMS OF PANIC AND GRIEF

There is another reason for looking at what might be called the soft aspects. This is because even if you can't make preparations you still want to predict what will happen, or at least understand the possibilities. You want to do the analysis, even if you can't affect the events. The main reason for doing this is first to understand what the risks of thermonuclear war are, and secondly to justify or condemn, as the case may be, various proposals.

Let me discuss a rather specialized example. I don't know how many people have taken up with me the question of postattack grief. This is the notion that because of the enormous number of casualties, all of the pleasure, all of the taste will permanently go out of life for almost everyone.

Now, as far as I know, that just hasn't happened in anything that has occurred before, and one would not expect it to happen even as a result of a large thermonuclear war.

One reason I would not expect it to happen is because, in a sense, grief is family-sized. If one loses a close relative or close friend, one will grieve. If one loses one's family, one will grieve even more. But, in some sense, that is about as far as one can go. Most people would not mourn for a million people much more than they would mourn for their family.

I speak not as an expert but just as a man who has observed human behavior under varying conditions, but I have some confidence in these observations.

It is very hard to make a statement such as I have just made. Let me refer for a moment to my previous testimony when I discussed the problem of the grieving woman who has lost a child and trying to explain to her that the world is not ended. People are not accustomed to discussing such problems or thinking about them. As a result, I find all kinds of stories, attitudes, views, being held by people who I would have thought would know better.

Unless we learn to think soberly about these effects, to estimate correctly those which seem actually to be there and to dismiss or discount those which are not, I don't believe we will have serious programs in this country. Nobody is going to work hard for a program of just saving life, unless they feel that the quality of life is somehow worthwhile.

This is an intrinsically unpleasant problem and an unpleasant subject. In addition, discussion is hampered by the tendency of critics to misquote or to quote out of context.

I have had some stark experiences. Let me discuss one which is directly relevant.

The last time I testified before the Joint Committee I was trying to give a feeling for the ability of human beings to live with tragedy. I was focusing on the genetic effects of a war and discussing the situation where the average survivor had gotten 250 roentgens. Using the standard estimates, this means that 1 percent of the next generation would be born with serious defects, and then there would also be somewhat smaller long-term effects for some generations.

This looks like an enormous number. In fact, the first time I discussed this problem, a woman got up in the audience and said, "I don't want to live in your world where 1 percent of the children are born defective. I would rather be dead."

I said, "Madam, this is not my world," and, pointing to the chart before her, I observed that currently 4 percent of the children are born

with serious defects.

"You live in that world right now," I said. "If you don't want to live in that world, you have a serious problem."

I was very angry, too, at the time.

I went on to say that if there had never been a defective child born and we had been told that as a result of an action by the Government or as a result of a war, that 4 percent of the children would be born with serious defects, we might literally wonder whether life would go on. We would wonder whether people would have children, whether the economic, social, medical, and emotional cost would be too much to risk.

We live in that world right now, and by and large people do not notice it unless they have a close relative or friend who has been hurt in this fashion. Unless they personally experience the tragedy, they literally don't realize how much tragedy there is in the world.

I went on to make some comments to the effect that certainly war is horrible, war has its horrors, but that peace also has some horrors, and that in trying to estimate the impact of war, it is perfectly reasonable to compare it to the impact of peace. This may be the only way we can get a feeling for how much horror we can live with.

The above testimony was quoted in several places to the effect, "scientist testifies that peace is horrible."

An even more startling thing occurred. I had put this whole story in a note in my book to illustrate the misquotation problem and a distinguished psychoanalysist quoted from that particular section out of context. I felt this last was really outrageous, but this is the kind of problem you get into if you try to discuss these problems in a plain and direct fashion.

Let me give another example of this kind of problem that could affect our research program in an unfortunate way.

UNPLEASANT PROBLEMS MUST BE FACED

In RAND Report RM 2206-RC, I suggested that it might be a wise thing to look at historical examples of overcrowding conditions-for example, concentration camps, lifeboats, Russian or German freight

cars, and so on-to try to get a feeling of what human beings can take, to show that people who had to live under these conditions had been able to survive, and to pick up any hints that one could for guiding our own preparations.

Such overcrowding can happen to us. Before we can build all the shelters we need, we have to build half of them. If the war occurred when only half were built, then the shelters would be overcrowded. Therefore, we might want to build the first half of the shelters to accept severe overcrowding.

I have tried to have designs made, in order to define and understand overcrowding, in which 1 percent of the inhabitants would die in the shelter. This is overcrowding in a severe but not the most severe sense. Everything that we add to this "1 percent death shelter" is a luxury, in the sense that if the worst came to the worst, we would prefer going into such a shelter rather than being unprotected. To the extent that we build shelters which had a greater performance than this, rather than build more shelters for other people, we have misdirected the early part of the program.

Well, several people suggested I leave this whole section out because of the misquotation problem. Indeed, it has been widely quoted, sentence by sentence. But I think I was right in insisting on leaving it in. If we are afraid to face some unfair discussion on such an important issue, what are we willing to face? We cannot study the civil defense problem in a reasonable way unless we are willing to look at such problems.

Let me give another example. One of the problems which often comes up when people protest against civil defense is, "How would you bury the dead?" Now, it is quite clear that this is not going to be a serious problem in the sense of jeopardizing survival. If there were danger of pestilence and we couldn't go through the normal rites, we would resort to mass burial.

This is a quiet way of saying it. If I wanted to be clearer or to shock I might talk about ditches and bulldozers and things like that. But it is quite clear that as a practical matter, the burial problem is not going to jeopardize general survival; it is not even going to disrupt recuperation.

I believe most people raise this problem in a conscious or unconscious attempt to stop thinking, and when they raise the problem to a speaker on a platform, or somebody else trying to explain about civil defense, they are trying to stop him from thinking also. They feel the person questioned will find it is impossible to answer without looking incredibly callous or brutal.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. In other words, you are turning away from thinking about the so-called unthinkable."

Mr. KAHN. Yes. If it is going to be that bad, let us not think about it at all.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. And it will go away.

Mr. KAHN. Yes. It is as if a person were trying to deal with the problem by trying to ignore it.

I just wrote an article in which I made the point that these people are acting like those ancient kings who used to kill the messenger who brought bad news. He had to take it out on somebody, so why not the messenger.

All that does is slow down the delivery of bad news. As far as I know, it had no effect on the news itself.

Well, this is one of a whole series of nonsurvival attitudes. We must somehow be willing to conquer these reactions. The only way is to go ahead and treat these problems in a straightforward way, with good taste, with discretion, but in a very straightforward fashion. If you get into trouble, you have to live with it. Eventually all but the most frantic critics will get tired of misquoting. The others will just understand that that is what the world is like.

I once saw a cartoon which describes my attitude perfectly. "Stop the world; I want to get off." But if you cannot get off, then you must face it. To do this we need hardheaded detached research.

Let me give another example with which we had trouble in our own team. I worked for many years with Dr. Mitchell, who just testified. I consider him a really first-rate person to work withboth personally and technically and also a man who is very hard headed. However, when I asked him to look into the possibilities of using drugs in shelters to alleviate the problem of boredom and discipline, he got up and said, "The medical profession will never allow you to use drugs as a punishment."

Well, I fired him. The firing didn't stick. But the medical profession is wrong if that is their attitude. You don't have any place in a shelter to incarcerate a person. If somebody is going to act in a way which cannot be accepted, it is much better to drug him than to shoot him. This may be an important problem in mass shelters. Well, there are a great many such problems and they have to be treated and considered years before they arise.

We have to have research projects on unpleasant subjects and it is not immoral to have them. It is only immoral to evade one's responsibilities by not doing these things. Some of these projects will look awful to the superficial and thoughtless, but that is a reflection of the world, not of the Government. Unless we are willing to do such projects, there will be important things undone. We simply cannot afford to spend all our time looking at the less unpleasant aspects.

Let me now move on from the psychological and social problems of research to some of the psychological and social problems the Government must face in having a complete program.

EXPLAINING CIVIL DEFENSE TO THE PUBLIC

I said I was going to talk about the less important things first. The second thing I would like to discuss is closely connected with the attitude problem I have just finished discussing, but now I would like to consider the effects of such attitudes on the procurement of capabilities in being as opposed to the effect on research by experts. I do not know if it is possible for the Government to change people's attitudes but I think it is possible for the Government to try. In particular, our leaders should try to explain things in a careful and defensible way. I think they are making such an attempt.

President Kennedy, for example, has come under some criticism from civil defense people and from others interested in civil defense,