Chicago Alert!: The City Plans For Atomic Attack

UIC Prepares

University officials, faculty, and students participated in citywide efforts to prepare for atomic war. The Chicago Undergraduate Division, the Medical Center, and later the Chicago Circle campus, each took part in drills like Operation Alert. Professors considered how to apply their teaching and research to the problem of defense against a nuclear attack. They proposed revisions to the curriculum, especially to train more students to assist in caring for casualties. One Medical Center doctor proposed a program to tattoo the blood-types of all Chicagoans on their torsos in case their limbs were blown off in an atomic blast.

In 1967, the Circle Campus collaborated with defense contractors to study confinement in a fallout shelter. 400 faculty, students, and neighborhood recruits – including an eight-month old baby – were confined in a converted campus building along with psychology department observers. The test of the habitability of shelter life was judged a success even though several dozen people left early because of “mental or physical exhaustion.”

The university community also planned for the use of campus buildings as shelters by stockpiling emergency supplies like sanitary kits and biscuits. Civil Defense supplies that were produced months before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 were still waiting to be utilized in the library basement in the summer of 2018.


 

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