All the concerns about North Korea now having missiles that could reach the U.S. West Coast have prompted questions about just how prepared cities and states on the West Coast are for a possible nuclear attack. During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, in the early days of the Cold War, the state of Washington had plans and shelters in place in case of a nuclear attack on the U.S. mainland.
All that changed in 1983 when a new Washington state law was passed entitled Comprehensive Emergency Management Act. The official designation of the bill is RCW 38.52.030. The text of the bill says, “The comprehensive, all-hazard emergency plan authorized under this subsection may not include preparation for emergency evacuation or relocation of residents in anticipation of nuclear attack.”
The rationale for leaving nuclear attack planning out of the Comprehensive Emergency Management Act was that if an enemy saw people in Washington State evacuating major cities in a time of heightened nuclear tensions, they might interpret that as our preparation for a preemptive nuclear strike. Washington State Senator Dick Nelson was the author of the bill to ban nuclear emergency planning. He says that Washington State was inundated with nuclear threats, and the idea was to create an example of peace.
Nelson also believes that if Seattle were the target of a nuclear attack, even with some advanced warning, the possibility of survival would be so low that it would be a waste of time to draw up an evacuation plan. The state law does allow for individual cities to draw up an evacuation plan but the state itself does not have one.
Around the time that the bill was being debated, I was asked by the Physicians for Social Responsibility to review a draft plan for the evacuation of Seattle in case of warnings of a nuclear attack. The plan was to evacuate the citizens of Seattle to Eastern Washington over a three day period. Reviewing traffic flows and major highways, I concluded that every major road out of Seattle to the East would be completely blocked by accidents and stalled cars within twelve hours of the declaration of an evacuation. I reported that it would take more like three weeks than three days to evacuate Seattle and would be an exercise in futility. In addition, the casualty figures might be even higher with all those people trapped in cars without food and water.
State lawmakers from both parties are interested in changing the law to allow for evacuation planning. Washington State Senator Mark Miloscia was a B-52 bomber pilot during the Cold War. He recently said “I couldn’t believe how this thing could go on the books. If we ever have to evacuate or relocate citizens due to a nuclear attack or an impending nuclear attack, right now, we can’t plan for that. It puts like a big stop order on any sort of planning we have to do to prepare for the unthinkable. I think there is right now, a common sense support for repealing this. We’ve just got to educate people that let’s do that soon.”
Washington State Senator David Frockt has joined with Miloscia to sponsor a bipartisan bill to change to the law to allow for planning a nuclear evacuation. Frockt said "Since the state government committee was already planning to update our emergency planning for a large earthquake in the Puget Sound, it makes sense to update this statue at the same time. So, we can improve our planning for both earthquakes and for nuclear strikes."
