gun battalions and all of them have been put into the Continental Air Defenses as the inner ring armaments which encircle our major vulnerable target areas.

The Navy is putting more and more picket ships to sea which stand offshore constantly and join the ceaseless search of the skyways into our homeland, thereby putting far off shoulders on the electronic warning arc which is going in among the Arctic wastes.

The Marine air wings stand ready to pitch into the fight.

Gentlemen, your Continental Air Defense Command is an outfit which never sleeps—it works 24 hours a day.

Your Continental Air Defense Command is without holidays-no week ends, no Christmas vacations. It works all the time.

Considerably more than 100,000 servicemen and women are involved in this sentry patrols of the skies and are on readiness to do something about the first sign of attack.

Your Continental Air Defense Command is the youngest of all the major establishments, and is the first all-service, joint command to be set up inside the United States. Its introduction and growth is evidence of the very real concern that any future war would be unlikely to leave us alone as the safe arsenal of men and weapons, but would put us dead center and first priority in target selection by the Soviet Union, high up on the Kremlin hit parade. It does not take much imagination to translate into the short or long term future what would be consequences of any conflagration today if the Russians decided to give the world a hydrogen hot-foot.

The Air Defenses of our country have to be ready for such an eventuality even that of a war fought over, and among the citizens of all your States, a fight in which all your fellow citizens would be inevitably involved either as fighters themselves or as part of the aiming point on which the atomic attacker would zero in.

What we have been considering up to now in this merger are the immediate assets of Air Defense, those we can see around us; those we, in this room, can influence, command, or build up further. If we were to talk about this only, we would be overlooking our extremely valuable subsidiaries. To talk about these things only would leave you with a false conception of true Air Defense and all its power.

True Air Defense-in my opinion-is the whole bag of left hooks and round house haymaker rights, which is represented in the flexibility of air power the full array of strategic and tactical strength, in addition to the lightning quality of our defensive fighter-interceptors and guided missiles. Our aim our national policy-our prayers-as well as those of our allies are that we prevent war.

Prevention of war is the only way we can ever truly win in this present world struggle. The best we can expect from fighting and atomic war is that we come away, if lucky perhaps, a one-crutch casualty as a country. The loser of an atomic war-well I leave that for you to contemplate. In my opinion-no wiser decision-with prevention of war as our goal-

could have been made than that we put so much into our strategic air power, whose heart and control system is resident in the bailiwick of Governor Anderson of Nebraska. From that nerve center in Nebraska can go immediate instructions to carefully positioned elements all over the globe which can go smashing into the enemy with the latter's first warlike act.

Because of its knowledge of this capability-the Soviet Union initially froze its main air production effort on fighters, or short range type planes at the expense of longer range bomber production which represented danger to us. Thus, we had a respite of several post-World War II years, a security this country might not otherwise have known.

In my opinion-no wiser decision-with prevention of war as our goalcould have been made than that we follow up this respite by helping weld into an effective partnership the North Atlantic Treaty Organization— and put into it hard-hitting tactical air and ground strength which could be billeted on invitation of Sovereign nations other than our own-in peacetime and aboard our Navy's 6th fleet carriers who need no invitation or permission in war or peace-units positioned right on the Iron Curtain whose breaching would be part of the signal for all-out war-and close-in retaliation could be immediate.

In the northwest and northeast-we have other Air Defense Commands, and on our immediate north, our good Canadian neighbors-glued with us in common purpose-work closely, intimately, continually, with us on Air Defense matters.

Think, Gentlemen, of this formidable and swift-flowing river current against which the enemy would have to swim to get at us. First rocks in that stream would be the immediate surge of close-up tactical or seaborne air power response. Second would come the rapids of the outlying defenses, giving him an uphill fight, and applying a fatiguing and exhausting pull against his progress. Third would be the whirlpool of his contact with the weapons system of the Continental Air Defenses. And coincident with all these, the full weight of our strategic air power would be on him like a bursting dam.

Do we have all this as good as we want it yet? No, not by quite a bit. Are we still building? The answer to that is Yes.

Are we at the peak of the threat against us? No, not by a considerable

amount.

Let me lift the curtain a little bit on the next decade on things we are asking our engineers and scientists to develop; things we must have because we assume them to be possible or probable in the hands of our enemy.

I know you've heard a lot about this push-button business but I believe we can almost see ahead the last transition state from the piloted to the unpiloted firing platform aloft. Our fighter-interceptor planes are already much faster than a pistol bullet and even now we have to complement our men- -our pilots-with mechanical or electronic brains since they are incapable of reaction fast enough. We are certainly in the early missile era and moving toward the doorstep of bombardment by button.

In this next decade, the inter-continental ballistics missile is almost a certainty a weapon which can be launched and attain 8,000 to 16,000 miles an hour, putting us within less than 30 minutes of enemy targets, and considering the vast pool of talents the Communists have dragooned, kidnaped, bribed, and imprisoned, they have a similar opportunity to lay such quickly delivered destruction on our own threshold.

That's what we have to match-or better, be prepared to lick, in our future.

We have been fortunate to keep ourselves out of a major war thus far by the policies and decisions which have been made. Maybe we have not attained all the objectives we set out to get, but when catastrophe seems the only synonym for all-out war today and in the future, it is not inconsiderable that we have come off this well.

In speaking with some confidence about the future the best way to array the facts is to take a look back. Only by doing this are we able to see how far we've come in Air Defense.

In 1948, we were-by and large-only a Congressional appropriation of

money.

As late as 1950, we were just beginning to receive and place what this money bought.

In 1951, we began to have allocated forces and a mission, and the painful building process began-not only building an organization, but building a military philosophy of Air Defense and to win understanding for it as a strong complement to strategic and tactical forces rather than being a competitor for the resources available for the military mission.

In 1953, questions began to be asked of us which made us believe that we had reached the turning point, that greater recognition and understanding was coming at last, and that it appeared not only reasonable to be prepared to retaliate but that we be sure this retaliation force was protectedinsured.

In the summer of 1954, the first joint Continental Air Defense Command-including the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps Air Defense Forces-was organized.

In other words, Gentlemen, we have gone from a paper to a power in five years.

I can report that the men and women in our Air Defenses are in a fine state of training and their morale is high. Our civilian populace is becoming more aware of the danger and is giving support in many ways. Metropolitan and State heads of government have recognized the heavy weight on the Federal branches of government and have interested and extended themselves in giving helpful lifts within their capacities to do so. All this has been improving our capability.

I realize, Gentlemen, that I may have been a little homespun and somewhat sentimental about this occasion-this subject of Air Defense-and our growing merger, and I hope you will forgive me the feeling.

It will always be one of my proudest memories that I was selected to be

the first Commander-in-Chief of our Continental Air Defenses, organizing our system, watching the Joint Air Defense efforts of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines expand and grow. So, in closing, if you will permit me an admonition, it is this:

Our country crippled-its population pulverized-its will to resist broken-we must never see-we shall never see.

Let's work then to make our merger firm-complete-irrevocable—from now and for all time--for our countrymen today and all who come after them.

Thank you.

Remarks of Val Peterson,
Administrator, Federal Civil Defense
Administration

There are only two reasons why we must have civil defense in the United States and in the world. The first is that never in the history of mankind have diplomats been able to keep peace for very long, and it is questionable whether the diplomats of the world will be able to keep the peace in our time. And secondly, presently in the field of military warfare, the advantage lies with the offense in the air, and should an enemy see fit to attack the United States, he has the capability of hitting our cities successfully. He would not hit them without paying a tremendous price on his part, and his ability to hit them in no wise connotes any failure on the part of the American military to do everything that is humanly possible to protect the people of the United States. And as the Secretary of Defense knows, I have found myself in the last 2 years in a rather difficult position, because when I have stated the fact that this country could be attacked, some people have been inclined to believe that I was minimizing the efforts of the military, which in no wise followed at all on the part of those who understood the problem.

You have just heard General Chidlaw allude to a possible future era which will present us with an even more grim picture than the one that faces us today. As of today, tough as our situation is in civil defense, we can still lick the problem providing we are willing to acknowledge it and willing to do something about it. Those are two pretty big assumptions, and in large measure we have not indicated such willingness either in government or among the citizenry generally.

This afternoon I should like to explain to you a little something of the nature of the problem that we face, the effects of weapons if they are dropped upon our great cities, some of the things we're trying to do about it at the national level, some of the attempts we're making to organize ourselves better at the national level, and discuss with you finally the law that we're working under presently and the possibility that that law needs to be strengthened in order to permit us to do a better job in the United States. And then I assume you may want to question me a little as you question Secretary Wilson and General Chidlaw.

I'm certain that you appreciate that civil defense touches on almost every phase of American life and American Government. The question may