I think your predecessor, Mr. Hoegh described himself as civilian chief of staff. You know what a chief of staff does in an emergency? Mr. ELLIS. Yes.

Mr. ROBACK. Are you the civilian chief of staff?

Mr. ELLIS. I do not think the President has given me that title. Mr. ROBACK. Do you think Mr. Hoegh promoted himself?

Mr. ELLIS. I do not know that he did that. I think the strength and the power that this agency would have would emanate from the President. But it conceivably could be a very important and really a more important role than we enjoyed when we had operational functions within the organization which took up so much of the time. Mr. HOLIFIELD. I think you can if you are given the authority by the President to do that.

Mr. ELLIS. That is the pulse of it.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. It would be the hope of this committee that the Office of Emergency Planning would be given a strong

Mr. ELLIS. Role.

Mr. HOLIFIELD (continuing). Role by the President, and with the authority of the President behind it to do the job that is going to have to be done in national planning and national coordination and in informing the President of the implementation of the various segments of the plan.

If it does not get that kind of a mission and that kind of support, why, it is going to be futile, and we would not want to see that. We will proceed a little further in order not to have an afternoon session.

Mr. ELLIS. Yes, sir.

FORMER OCDM SHELTER PROGRAM PLANS

Mr. ROBACK. Will you restate now, so that the record is clear, Mr. Ellis, what, beyond the marking and improvement program for existing shelters, your office was prepared to do in the way of a shelter program for the United States?

It is important to get clearly in the record that information, because the words are used by many people in different senses and they are used loosely. As I say, we frequently see references to shelter construction. Somebody has got to do the constructing, who digs the dirt, who puts in the foundation? Does your office have a program or was it going to have a program which went beyond the identification, marking, and improvement of existing structures?

Mr. ELLIS. Well, sir, we did contemplate, and have sought, as you know, from the Congress the necessary money to place fallout shelters in existing Federal buildings, in new Federal buildings, including developing a pilot plan to place fallout shelters in existing Federal buildings.

In addition to that, we had recommended a medical procurement program substantially in excess of the procurement program that has been granted, and also in the area of food distribution and in the area of construction of community shelters or in the area of attempting to aid in the construction of home shelters. We did not recommend a program on that basis to the President because of the cost involved, and in the framework of the cost we made other recommendations.

We made recommendations on incentives and matters of that character to stimulate the do-it-yourself programs at the local levels.

We also recommended a new and changed matching program in order to liberalize that feature, and we were preparing to go into the program of possible construction of shelters under loans or through matching funds for eleemosynary institutions and hospitals and other areas throughout the country; all combined with a really stepped-up public education program that would, perhaps, bring about more local cooperation under Federal leadership.

We have not been idle. Our program section has been reviewing every program. We assessed all the programs and all of this we made available to the Secretary of Defense.

EDUCATION AND INCENTIVES FOR PRIVATE SHELTERS

Mr. ROBACK. In the shelter program, now the responsibility resides with the Secretary of Defense. To a large extent and over a period of years, the incentives were emphasized, because of the do-it-yourself program, and you really require incentives for such a program. The Secretary did not talk about family shelters or basement or home shelters because that has to do with incentives, and we might suppose that the Department of Defense is not the appropriate agency to encourage individual families to do things like that. That might be a more appropriate function of a civilian agency, wouldn't you say? Mr. ELLIS. Well, it is a matter of the overall interpretation of the public information program, and certainly the President of the United States plays a very important role in setting that leadership and disseminating public information, which I would think would be more openly received than possibly it would coming from another

source.

Mr. ROBACK. What I am trying to get at is, what is the division of labor here in the shelter field so far as education, incentives, and construction are concerned?

Mr. ELLIS. Yes.

Mr. ROBACK. We might assume that the Department of Defense would concern itself with that part of the shelter effort which is distinctly Federal building and planning, a Federal building program.

When we are talking about Bureau of Docks and Engineers, we do not see these burly seamen and Army officers knocking at the garden gate and talking to housewives about a basement shelter. That concept does not seem to add up.

They have got a rather special function, and if they do not have a program, maybe the assignment does not make any sense. I am trying to find out what the program is.

Mr. ELLIS. Well, you are in the area of public information, I am going to answer it and tell you that I have suggested that, as the first order of business, in order to capitalize on what seems to be a new and invigorated public attitude of acceptance toward a shelter program, that we immediately get out to every home, and it is going to be a very expensive project, this pamphlet which would contain a letter from the President, and a joint letter from the Secretary of Defense and myself, and other certain selected documentation, saying to the people, "This is what you can do."

Immediately following the President's inaugural address, you recall his statement that it is not what the Nation can do for you but it is what you can do for the Nation, to paraphrase what he said.

Today the public are writing in and recognizing this problem, saying, "What do you want us to do?" And I think we have got to get this public information to them as rapidly as possible.

Mr. ROBACK. Congressman Kilgore made a point that is very serious and important.

Mr. ELLIS. Yes.

Mr. ROBACK. And it has to do with exhorting people to do things which they are unable to do, while the Government does not do its part or else asks the people to do the wrong things.

I ask you this question: Are you asking people to do the wrong things in building a basement shelter if, for example, they are in an area, as someone recently remarked, where the blast feature of an explosion would have them looking at the sky? The house would be blown away with the basement or the roof would be blown off, and the fallout protection would not do them any good; that is, the shelter would not do them any good? So the question then is, does it make sense, does it make sense, let me repeat, to ask people to do these things without asking them to do other things?

Mr. ELLIS. I think the chairman has made a point that there is certainly some blast protection in shelters which are constructed in basements, depending upon the degree of strength of that construction. It may have considerable blast protection and, furthermore, you cannot altogether take a target area and write off every home in it because of the inaccuracy of a possible ICBM attack, and other factors.

You, of course, assume all sorts of things, including a direct hit and, perhaps, that survival would be more or less impossible.

I think that we have got to go forward to build these things on the supposition that errors do creep in, conditions do arise where lives will be saved, and I think they will be.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. There are simple methods of providing overhead construction in a basement.

Mr. ELLIS. Absolutely.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. In addition to that which is normally there, just the very fact of placing sandbags over an aperture in the basement between the joints of the floor above and some type of supportMr. ELLIS. It makes a lot of difference.

Mr. HOLIFIELD (continuing). Is one of the simple ways to do it. That is, readily accessible dirt in sacks, and so forth; sandbags have been used for a long time by people in foxholes in a conventional war. Mr. ELLIS. All sorts of things.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. And it just so happens that dirt has a shielding quality against radiation-I am not saying a high order of several thousand roentgens, but certainly on some types of radiation it has quite a shielding property.

Mr. ROBACK. Mr. Chairman, I have a letter from an engineer in Michigan written to you-probably you have been too busy to look at it—which says, among other things, that basically the official shelter recommended by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization in their bulletin MP-15 gives no weight whatever to the blast or fire hazard.

It says that they admit this shelter was designed for fallout for rural areas, and yet its major distribution is in cities:

As there is no alternative for proper city design, although they are so close to the target areas, they must give consideration to some blast or fire protection or else the public is being deluded.

He writes an article which is to be published in some publication dealing with that subject.

What do you think about that?

Mr. ELLIS. I do not think that a shelter was designed for blast, but if it happened that it was placed in an underground location and with concrete walls around it it would have blast protection, and if you wanted to put it up on top of the ground, why, then, of course, you do not have protection except for radioactive fallout.

I am not completely discounting the proposition of going forward in the future with discussion and with a study and, perhaps, some action in the area of blast protection.

To what extent it would be done is still a matter that we have been studying and working upon and giving lots of thought to.

Mr. ROBACK. The Department of Defense seems to have concerned itself, or to have persuaded itself, that a fallout shelter does not compete with, let us say, antimissile defense and other defense measures, whereas a blast shelter would. They would have to weigh the benefits of comparative returns from different outlays for, say, Nike-Zeus or blast protection. They did not want to touch blast protection, but fallout protection seems to be more palatable.

Mr. ĤOLIFIELD. I objected yesterday to the use of the word "blast" without modification, and I also objected to the use of the word "radiation" without modification.

These are both elements which have to be considered, and can be considered from the standpoint of degree.

Mr. ELLIS. That is right, sir.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. No one is saying that a fallout shelter will provide any type of protection to persons near ground zero. To go into the field of 100 pounds per square inch or higher, as is done in our Vandenberg Missile Base and other missile bases to get higher protection is also ridiculous, because all of the people will not be subjected to that type of pressure any more than they will be subjected to 8,000 or 10,000 roentgens, as they would be in certain areas on a megaton blast.

Mr. ELLIS. Yes.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. But you have got to look at this thing from the standpoint of the hazards to the majority of the people, and then give them that protection from the greatest hazard, which is radioactivity, lethal radioactivity, and in so doing you are going to automatically give them protection from some degrees of blast.

It will vary in different areas according to the type of structures they have, and the size of the weapon that is exploded.

So when we start talking about this subject, we should not use these rigid terms of "blast" and "radiation" without some intelligent modification as to degree.

NEAR HOME WARNING SYSTEM

Mr. ROBACK. Mr. Ellis, can you tell the committee about the so-called NEAR system? Mr. Garmatz had a constituent making several inquiries in this field. They are in the business of producing black boxes that go into the house.

Would you describe briefly the components of this program and what are the problems, and I ask you to do that in light of the statement which I recall from Secretary McNamara that the Federal Government would pick up the tab for the generating costs.

Mr. ELLIS. Well, I do not specifically recall his statement, but I will either file this for the record-I will read it-it analyzes the system, it is only two and a half pages.

Mr. ROBACK. You do not have to read the technical description of the system; you can submit it for the record.

But let me ask you this: How long has this program, this development program, been operated?

Mr. ELLIS. It had its beginnings 2 years before, but it has been actually in full force of operation for the past year.

Mr. ROBACK. Well, Secretary McNamara says that "if an extensive system test in Michigan proves successful," and then he goes on. Now, when is this going to prove out?

Mr. ELLIS. We feel that it has already been completely proven. Mr. ROBACK. He is giving it a second check from the Department of Defense point of view, is that the idea?

Mr. ELLIS. Well, I do not know. Perhaps that has been done, but our pilot surveys in Michigan have proved that this is completely feasible, utilization of existing lines.

Mr. ROBACK. Your testimony is that from an experimental or pilot point of view, the study is finished?

Mr. ELLIS. Yes, sir.

Mr. ROBACK. All right.

Now, Mr. McNamara says that the receivers will be sold to the general public; Federal funds will be used to cover the cost of the signal generators.

Now, these generators, as I understand it, and I do not know much about the technical part, are installed in substations around the country, and on the basis of a certain kind of signal they would set in motion these particular home signals, which the householder gets in the form of a buzz from a black box, which may be painted white, but anyway, it is a small black box which he plugs in.

Mr. ELLIS. Yes, sir.

COSTS OF NEAR SYSTEM COMPONENTS

Mr. ROBACK. What is the dimension of the costs of installing these generators in substations throughout the country, for which Mr. McNamara says the Federal Government will pick up the tab? Mr. ELLIS. We have estimated that the cost of completing the NEAR system in Michigan would be about $2 million. Throughout the Nation it would be in the area of $50 million.

Mr. ROBACK. Area of $50 million?

Mr. ELLIS. Yes; upon the hypothesis, however, that they would be sold to the public for a cost of $5 or under, depending upon mass production prices.