Chicago Alert!: The City Plans For Atomic Attack

Civil Defense in the City

Large cities like Chicago with their high populations and concentration of industry would be the primary targets of nuclear attack. But most people living in urban areas did not have the space or money to build their own shelters. Chicago and other cities focused their civil defense programs on mass evacuation. State and local planners mapped roadways and public transit routes for city dwellers to get to collection areas outside of predicted blast zones. They estimated the amounts of housing and food that would be available to urban evacuees in areas across Illinois.


Plans to survive in the city changed with national and international contexts. Early civil defense publications were optimistic about survival. Protecting yourself from an atomic blast was as simple as following ten easy steps. After the invention of hydrogen bombs that were 1,000 times more powerful than early atom bombs, the idea of surviving a blast became even less realistic. The main threat then became fallout – the spread of radioactive particles that could reach people far from the blast site. When tensions with the Soviet Union escalated during the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, there was renewed focus on civil defense planning, especially shelters.

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