For Survival

On any given weekday, the 16-sky-scraper complex of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center is likely to contain 38,000 office workers and 160,000 assorted shoppers, sightseers, and moviegoers at the Radio City Music Hall. Could those crowds survive the hazards of radiation if a nuclear bomb fell on New York? Last week, deciding that the answer could be yes, Rockefeller Center, Inc. announced the start of a fallout shelter program that may well be the largest undertaking of its kind in the country.

In accordance with civil defense regulations, Rockefeller Center has had certain inside corridors and rooms marked off as shelter areas since 1950. Now, with the help of an outside engineering firm (Manhattan's Guy B. Panero, Inc.), the center's management is drastically revising its plans to prepare for both light fallout (3,000 roentgens or less), when 24-hour protection would suffice, and for heavy fallout (10,000 roentgens), which might require quarantine for two weeks or more. Preparing first for light fallout, the center is marking off shelter space on each floor of its buildings, has asked tenants (including the Associated Press, TIME Inc. and the National Broadcasting Co.) to help provide food, medical supplies and emergency lights for the shelters.

The center can easily be made safe from light fallout: a survey has already proved that the center's water tanks--all located underground--are safe from radiation; windows in the central control board room in the yo-story RCA building are being bricked up to preserve the center's communications with its buildings. Next year the center will start on a far harder project--safeguarding underground shelters where workers and sightseers could wait out heavy fallout. Says Center President G. S. Eyssell: "We hope and pray that the thing we're preparing for will never happen, but we must still prepare for it."

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