They Have Shelters, Too

Whether or not the Soviet Union has nuclear bomb shelters is a subject of some sharp controversy in the U.S. When Rand Corp. Expert Leon Goure reported last year that the Russians are quietly engaged in a massive civil defense effort (TIME, Nov. 10), many Westerners in Moscow scoffed. Soviet officials ridiculed the fitful U.S. shelter program as a waste of time and money. Shelters, said Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Y. Malinovsky, are "nothing but previously prepared tombs."

Last week came new evidence suggesting that Goure had been right all along. Pictures at an antiaircraft defense exhibition in Moscow showed what many observers had previously missed: air vents, escape tunnels and blastproof steel doors in the basements of apartment houses and public buildings (although reporters have not actually seen such protective devices on the newest buildings going up in Moscow). A film revealed how stations on the Moscow subway can be quickly converted into bomb shelters by closing them off from the tunnel by means of massive steel doors lifted into place with hydraulic jacks. Another movie demonstrated how to combat the effects of atomic radiation.

At the same time. Soviet criticism of the U.S. shelter program was challenged last week by Communist Poland's leading civil defense expert. Said Colonel Aleksander Cesarski. chief of the Polish army's antiaircraft command, in an interview with a Warsaw military journal: Poland not only has organized nearly 500,000 workers into paramilitary cadres for the protection of "life and property in the event of atomic war," but it has been busily building bomb shelters. Cesarski echoed the Communist line that shelter construction in the U.S. was a capitalist plot engineered by money-hungry bankers.

Then he added: "That does not mean, however, that building shelters makes no sense. On the contrary, we understand their importance in Poland, and--if I may say so--we have a great number of them."

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