gswan@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Geo Swan) (10/11/89)
From: gswan@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Geo Swan) In a recent article Travis Lee Winfrey posed the question, "How vulnerable are our cities to terrorism?" A related question in my mind is how effective are our plans, and Soviet plans, for Civil Defence? During the summer, reasonably large percentages of the citizens of Toronto, the city in which I grew up, would leave the city to go to summer cottages or campgrounds. Invariably there was considerable traffic congestion. In the event of an imminenct atomic attack of course everyone would want to leave, not just those going to the cottage. And they would want to leave all at once, not spread over the eighteen hours following quitting time on Friday. Having been in a few of these traffic jams has made me doubt the effectiveness of Civil Defence plans that involve large scale evacuation. It seems to me that we have a good yardstick as to how quickly the Soviets at least can evacuate a city, by looking at how quickly they evacuated the cities that were dangerously near Chernobyl. Can anyone enlighten us? As they say, "inquiring minds want to know".