Mrs. GRIFFITHS. How much do you estimate it would cost?

Dr. HARRIS. Mr. Vortman has made estimates that for a minimumtype-not the worst conceivable-it would be $22 billion.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. We spend $40 billion every year on arms. What do we care about $22 billion if we are going to save a few people?

Dr. HARRIS. My general feeling along this line is that I believe if a simple system for design of fallout shelters was made available to the people in this country pointing out how these simple systems could be used for other things-this is what one might call the rootcellar concept. A root cellar makes a fine fallout shelter. A wine cellar makes a fine fallout shelter. An underground den makes a fine fallout shelter. Something simple and easy to design could be presented to the American people, pointing out the advantages of this as a shelter for fallout, pointing out what the limits would be.

I would certainly believe that the people themselves might incorporate into their own building some of these ideas which would decrease the cost enormously.

The $22 billion, by the way, was only the shell. It did not include cost of getting land, the cost of superior materials. It is what is necessary for a shell.

If one could start with this sort of a simple system, presenting it to the American people, this would give them a chance to go ahead and do as they felt. If the idea caught hold and people did go ahead and build into their own homes, shelters, then it might be feasible, after more information is available, to go to the high level protection for vital services, but insofar as sheltering for everybody to maximum level is concerned at the present time, I personally cannot see it.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. You mean from the expense standpoint?
Dr. HARRIS. From the expense standpoint, yes, primarily.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. If we were attacked today, say with 20-megaton bombs, would you say that everything we have ever spent on defense would be literally worthless?

Dr. HARRIS. No, ma'am.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. I believe the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told me a year or so ago he would consider it worthless. Pretty close to it. Every cent of money we have ever spent would be money down the drain.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. In other words, the effect on the Nation would be so catastrophic.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. It would be so devastating, there will be nothing left anyhow.

Dr. HARRIS. I do not believe that; 20-megaton weapons certainly are going to cause chaos, but I cannot see complete destruction due to that type of situation.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. If we spent $10 billion on shelters where you depended upon a wooden door and the wind being in the right direction or a certain type of weapon, and all at once the wind changed or they used a heavier weapon, wouldn't you consider the $10 billion wasted? Dr. HARRIS. Yes, ma'am.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. I would, too, and I will not vote for one dime.

Dr. HARRIS. If one wishes to protect maximally, then costs skyrocket tremendously. This is for maximal protection.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. Would you not say, really, if one wishes to protect, costs skyrocket?

Dr. HARRIS. Not if one classifies the degree of protection.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. If you can determine the type of attack and the wind direction and a few other things, and where the bombs are going to fall, if you could just determine that, then you could build exactly. Dr. HARRIS. Yes, ma'am, but we cannot.

For a fallout shelter itself, if that system was put into effect-first, only building fallout shelters or asking people to build them themselves, to give out simple design parameters, or assisting them in the building of such fallout shelters, there would be a percentage of those fallout shelters which would fall within the regions of high-intensity blast, thermal and nuclear radiation, which would be destroyed; but, actually, the total volume of maximal damage, or damage that would really affect shelters of this type in the case of, let us say, a 20-megaton bomb-if we did 150 of them, 150 20-megaton bombs across the country, we would encompass maximally a total of perhaps 100,000 square miles. Where these shelters were ineffective, in other words, and 100,000 square miles is a small percentage of the total land area of the United States.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. Thank you very much.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Could I have the slide put on the screen for a moment?

(The slide referred to follows:)

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Could I have a figure on what the pounds per square inch urban figure means, in the second section which deals with 37 billion?

Mr. VORTMAN. Twenty-five pounds per square inch would be something around 500 feet from a 1-kiloton or a mile from 1 megaton.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. A mile from a megaton. In other words, if you were a mile from zero point of a megaton bomb, it would give you fallout protection for both rural and urban and it would give you protection from blast pressure and fire, theoretically within the 25 pounds per square inch limit, is that right?

Mr. VORTMAN. Beyond the distance. For anything beyond the 1 mile. It would not protect the people within the 1 mile.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. We do not know where the bombs will fall and we cannot anticipate that they will all fall in the maximum destruction center-in the target center of the maximum destruction potential.

We could assume that, if we would give that type of shelter, that you could probably protect 80 percent of the people in the United

States from both the blast and the fire and the immediate fallout. Is that not true?

Mr. VORTMAN. It would be difficult to estimate the exact figure because if one assumed something of the order of 150 bombs, one probably would assume that these would be detonated at or near the highest concentrations of population, so even though this represented a relatively small land area, it might represent a rather large percentage of the population.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Providing they hit in the center of that population

mass.

Mr. VORTMAN. That is right.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Your next bracket there of 100 pounds per square inch pressure would give much greater protection, would it not, if you had structures of that type?

Mr. VORTMAN. That would give protection to people perhaps out beyond a half mile from 1 megaton.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. In war, you do not contemplate complete protection of all your troops. You contemplate a system that will give you maximum protection commensurate with your military mission, and in the case of an attack upon the Nation, it would be better to have any one of those estimates there, starting in with your $22 billion and your $37 billion and your $53 billion, rather than not to have any protection at all, because you could not give maximum protection to everyone. Is that not true in terms of saving human life?

Mr. VORTMAN. That statement is certainly true. With each one of these you would be saving an increasingly larger percentage of the population.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Now, assuming we even wanted to go to the $53 billion figure, or the $115 billion figure, the comparison of that expenditure in relation to the accumulative expenditure for defense since World War II in the past 12 years would be very, very small, would it not?

Mr. VORTMAN. Perhaps this is true.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Roughly, we have spent close to $500 billion since World War II in defense installations $500 billion. So, even if you took the $115 billion figure and spread it out over a term of years as you have your defense expenditures, you would be only increasing your defense expenditures about 20 percent.

Mr. VORTMAN. This is certainly true but I would like to emphasize again that there is, also, the problem of time required in terms of materials and construction manpower available.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. That is why I said you spread it out over the years. We even spread our defense expenditures each year we spread it over a period of time as high as 4 or 5 years in the case of carriers, bombers and new military devices. Probably our expenditure on missiles will be spread out over a period of several years. So we are not talking about a program that has to be done the next Saturday night. We are talking about a program of preparation for the Nation and it would necessarily envisage the same period of time in which it could be fitted into the economy, both expensewise and construction timewise.

Mr. LIPSCOMB. Mr. Chairman, inasmuch as we are using those total cost estimates, I wonder whether we could have the formula on which those are based.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Do you have additional backup material on that which you have not presented to the committee? Undoubtdly you must base its unit cost of the actual shelters tested. Do you have any further backup material to give us?

Mr. VORTMAN. Only to explain how this was done, and certainly it was quite crude.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Let me stop you there. All the information we have been given is on the 1955 shelters?

Mr. VORTMAN. No.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Why have we not been given any information on the 1957 shelters?

Mr. VORTMAN. I did present one data point on 1957.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. We called this hearing to find out what happened in Nevada on a series of some 20 shelters out there and we hoped that we would get some specific information.

Do you intend, Mr. Corsbie, to bring us up to date on the actual statistics of those specific shelter tests in Nevada last fall? And, if so, who is going to present it?

Mr. CORSBIE. Dr. White will cover the biomedical aspects of blasts on the shelters in which he participated and Dr. Tompkins will talk about the results of the radiological shelter. The shelters under other programs will be covered by Federal Civil Defense witnesses.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. The point at issue here is, why should we concern ourselves with this type of statistics on the 1955 tests if we are going to have different figures given us and different test materials given us on the 1957 tests?

We are more interested in current history than we are in past history.

Mr. VORTMAN. I can shed a little light on that.

First, there should, within the assumptions made for this particular chart, be little difference between costs, 1955 and 1957.

My costs here were based on one 1955 data point, one 1957 data point. If one assumes that there is a logarithmic relationship between the overpressure and the cost and if one assumes that this is not a precise relationship but a very broad relationship which could be drafted with a very wide line, the costs shown here will agree with the costs of those two data points.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Will you present, then, an explanatory statement on that point for the record I mean later?

Mr. VORTMAN. We will be very happy to.

Mr. LIPSCOMB. Does this mean he will give us a formula for how the costs on this 1955 chart are arrived at?

Mr. HOLIFIELD. I would hope it would be.

Mr. VORTMAN. Yes.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. These are based on actual structures?

Mr. VORTMAN. These are based on two actual structures one 1957 and one 1955.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. What type of structure in 1957?

Mr. VORTMAN. In 1957 I was using the cost of the 7-foot diameter multiplate pipe, with 10 feet of cover that I described earlier.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Do you mean you folks do not have ready for us, or FCDA does not have ready for us any statistics on the costs of the different types of shelters out in Nevada that you used last fall, nor do they have any measurements on blast and radiation recorded in those shelters?

Mr. VORTMAN. Perhaps the people representing program 30, CETG, will have those figures. The shelters were included in program 30, on the 1957 tests. Mr. Corsbie can perhaps answer that.

Mr. CORSBIE. Mr. Chairman, the total costs of all of the shelters are a matter of record and could be provided to you. I am not familiar with just how much detail or how the Federal Civil Defense will present the costs. We have it, of course, that is, the total costs to do the building in Nevada, the construction.

(The information requested follows:)

Hon. CHET HOLIFIELD,

MAY 12, 1958.

Chairman, Military Operations Subcommittee, Committee on Government Operations, House Office Building, Washington, D. C.

DEAR CONGRESSMAN HOLIFIELD: Pursuant to Mr. Lipscomb's request for the formula used to obtain the cost estimates presented to the committee on April 30, 1958, I am furnishing the following information.

No mathematical formula as such was used, nor was it intended that the preciseness of a formula apply. The attached graph showing overpressure versus cost per person, excluding land and equipment, will assist in understanding the procedure used. Two data points were used, both from program 34 construction, the cost of which were readily available: One from a 1955 test shelter at 100 pounds per square inch costing $1,100 per person at the Nevada test site, and one from a 1957 test shelter at 265 pounds per square inch costing $1,900 per person after adding the estimated cost of entrance and escape hatch (line 6 on the graph). These costs were reduced by 21⁄2 to account for the added cost of Nevada test site construction (line 4). Any reduction between 2 and 3 would be reasonable and the spread thus created has been shown between lines 3 and 5. The costs represented by lines 3 and 5 can be further reduced by between 20 and 40 percent through the use of mass production economies and by lengthening the shelter. The spread in this unit is represented by the spread between lines 1 and 4. Line 2 is an approximate average. Costs I quoted April 30 are near the average values rounded off to the nearest $100. Note that the $100-per-person cost quoted by Dr. Paul Tompkins on May 1, 1958, for a 10-poundper-square-inch shelter falls within the spread.

We are all acquainted with the wide spread which frequently occurs between bids submitted by contractors bidding on the same job, say a house with 2,000 square feet floor area. The spread is even wider if one generalizes and examines the spread between all bids on all house designs having floor areas of 2,000 square feet. In this case too, we are generalizing-not looking at specific designs.

The important point is not the preciseness of the figures quoted April 30 but is this: Any cost which lies within the spread represented by lines 1 and 4 should be considered reasonable and valid. Any estimated cost which falls to the right of line 4 is probably too high, and any estimated cost which falls to the left of line 1 should be critically examined with a degree of skepticism proportional to the distance the estimate lies to the left of the line.

Very truly yours,

LUKE J. VORTMAN, Director, CETG Program 34.