Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com delivers a history lesson on the United States interstate system – and what Trump’s comment on nuclear arms may portend for our future:
It is important to remember why cities were building highways like this through the fifties and sixties; why the federal government was promoting low density suburban development and why companies were moving their corporate head offices to campuses in the country: Civil defence. One of the best defences against nuclear bombs is sprawl; the devastation of a bomb can only cover so much area. Shawn Lawrence Otto wrote in Fool Me Twice:
In 1945, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began advocating for “dispersal,” or “defense through decentralization” as the only realistic defense against nuclear weapons, and the federal government realized this was an important strategic move. Most city planners agreed, and America adopted a completely new way of life, one that was different from anything that had come before, by directing all new construction “away from congested central areas to their outer fringes and suburbs in low-density continuous development,” and “the prevention of the metropolitan core’s further spread by directing new construction into small, widely spaced satellite towns.”
But the strategy had to change after the development of the more powerful hydrogen bomb, and with it the realization that having people living in the suburbs but working downtown was a problem. “President Dwight D. Eisenhower instead promoted a program of rapid evacuation to rural regions. As a civil defense official who served from 1953 to 1957 explained, the focus changed “from ‘Duck and Cover’ to ‘Run Like Hell.’”
In other words, suburbs are not a natural development, but a result of concerns over enemy nuclear attacks. As were the little office parks that dot the landscape.
I’d hate to try to actually use the interstates to get out in the event of a nuclear attack, though. Maybe those in the outer rings would succeed …
