Civil Defense and American Federalism: A Pre-Primer.

摘要

Although responsibility for American civil defense preparedness is lodged with the Department of Defense, the separate states are not absolved from a large role in the implmentation of current civil defense plans. As a result, civil defense against a nuclear attack involves the realisties of American federalism in a way that other defense related programs, such as the creation of a strategic weapons force, ordinarily do not. The purpose of this study is to analyse the impact of federalism on the American civil defense effort with a view toward an improved understanding of the political and organization constraints that policy-makers face in this realm. Its main thesis is that the politics of American federalism have allowed the current civil defense program to be captured by state and local natural disaster interests. Correction of this problem requires that the separate issues now included within the rubric and organizational framework of civil defense be sorted out and addressed individually. Once this is done, it can be seen that there is little reason to include each of them within the same agency. (Author)