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Wither Civil Defense?

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  • Wither Civil Defense?

    I have a question regarding the US civil defense program, which after the mid 1970s seemed to cease to exist. I am wondering if such a program's demise, which corrisponded with the increase of "counterforce" capability in the Soviet Union, along with essential equivelance in nuclear forces, was in fact intentional. Around that same time the US abandoned it's Nike Herculese SAM networks around every major city.
    My theory is that this was done intentionally with the progression of "counterforce" capability in the SU, which threatened the US in it's ability to withstand and ride out a Soviet first strike and have any survivable nuclear forces to counter Soviet intentions and objectives.
    Combined with a "launch on warning" capability, which came along about that exact same time, such capability along with civilian vulnerability would in fact break the firewall between "counterforce" and "countervalue" since any first strike would be negated by the Launch on warning, and then any difference between the two would be nullified by the fact that by "digging out" US command bunkers and ICBM silos would cause so much fallout, and resulting casualties that the difference between "counterforce" and "countervalue" would be gone, thus opening up countervalue targets in Russia as a very high risk to the Soviets in such an attack. In effect, our civil defenses would just make a "counterforce" strike more likely, and eliminating them would raise the stakes much higher for the Soviets that we would go quickly to countervalue targets. As a result, any sense of Civil Defense begins to look quaint, and even antique to the early days of the Cold War.
    So if this evaluation is even close to accurate, was it intentional, or did we just luck out?
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