During and after war or natural catastrophe, civil defence involves the passive protection of civilian lives, the maintenance of communications and government, and the reconstruction of social and economic infrastructure and industry. A fully developed civil defence system would involve a programme of training, education, and preparation; a system of warning and reporting; and appropriate responses by national, regional, and local agencies (police, emergency, and medical services). Civil defence is recognized in international law, with civil defence officials having protected status. The first of the two 1977 protocols additional to the 1949 Geneva Convention (see Geneva and Hague Conventions) sets out the scope of that protection and provides a definition of civil defence: ‘humanitarian tasks intended to protect the civilian population against the dangers, and to help it to recover from the immediate effects, of hostilities or disasters and also to provide the conditions necessary for its survival’.
The technological advances of the 20th century have resulted in the deliberate blurring of the distinction between soldier and civilian during war. This process began with the advent of manned, powered flight at the beginning of the century. The potential of military air power was confirmed during WW I, and the development of the theory of strategic bombing followed during the inter-war years. Civilian populations and whole cities had now become vulnerable to systematic attack. WW II saw devastating bomb and rocket attacks on cities and towns in Britain, Germany, and Japan. Although the ability of the civilian population to endure these onslaughts undermined the more extravagant claims of the strategic bombing advocates, there was nevertheless a growing acceptance of the role of an effective civil defence system. If there was any complacency it evaporated quickly after the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The vulnerability of cities could hardly have been demonstrated more starkly, ensuring that civil defence would feature prominently in the developing Cold War.
As the Cold War took its course during the late 1940s and 1950s, so governments on both sides of the conflict saw that civil defence could provide some means, however meagre, to warn and protect their civilian populations from the worst excesses of war. Particularly in the democratic West, public demands for such protection could not go unacknowledged. But civil defence was also attractive for other, less passive and innocent reasons. By one view, a mature civil defence system could signal to the Cold War adversary that an attack could be survived and that there would still be a society and government (however primitive) which could retaliate, thereby improving the stability of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Some critics claimed, on the other hand, that a civil defence programme could be the precursor to nuclear aggression, or might at least convey that message to the adversary and thereby undermine the delicate mutual deterrence relationship.
Interest in civil defence peaked during the Cold War's most tense episodes, such as the disagreement over Berlin and the Cuban missile crisis in the early 1960s. Municipal shelters were constructed and secondary communications systems established in order to ensure that government and organization would be possible after an attack. In the West, the public was deluged with advice on building and equipping family-size air raid and fallout shelters, and on the immediate action to be taken in the event of a nuclear or chemical attack. Much of this advice—paint windows white, soak curtains in borax, wear natural fibres, curl up on the ground during an attack—now seems darkly comical when set against the likely horrors and devastation of a nuclear strike on a city. Some ideas were seen as comically naïve even at the time. In the late 1950s British government officials considered that when a nuclear attack on London became likely, mothers and children should be evacuated while their able-bodied husbands and unmarried women would remain, no doubt ‘just friends’ to the end. There have been plenty who have refused to see the joke; critics of civil defence have argued that such advice amounted to an attempt by government to lull the public into a false sense of security and condition them into accepting the irrationality and immorality of a nuclear strategy.
The ending of the Cold War has resulted in diminished interest in, and budgeting for, civil defence in the traditional sense as a response to military attack. Civil defence (or ‘disaster relief’) now covers a much broader range of contingencies, including earthquakes, eruptions, floods, forest fires, terrorist attacks, major transport disasters, crises in energy supply, and the meltdown of nuclear reactors. Some analysts argued that the inability of computers to cope with the new millennium would produce a civil defence crisis of unprecedented scope and magnitude: happily they were wrong.
— John P. Campbell
