If the research agenda I’ve laid out looks really focused and specific, it’s because I have cribbed it primarily from a study that was published in 1961 under the unwieldy title of “The Occasion Instant: The Structure of Social Responses to Unanticipated Air Raid Warnings.” Published as part of the “Disaster Study” series of the “Disaster Research Group” of the National Research Council, “The Occasion Instant” is, in brief, a study of what people did in the late 1950s during three nuclear false alarms. The unintuitive title comes from a quote from Hippocrates: “Life is short and the art long; the occasion instant, decision difficult, experiment perilous.” As the Foreword more evocatively explains:
The Occasion Instant of the title of this publication refers to a crucial moment of urgent decision which requires action here and now, if only to decide not to act. The decision must be made quickly, and its consequences may be enormous. To meet the Instant we have to interpret signs of safety and signs of danger. Fortunate is the occasion in which we really know what we are doing.
The study’s three false alarms had quite different circumstances, and took place in different cities and under different conditions:
WARNING YELLOW, Oakland, California: “On the morning of 5 May 1955, the United States Air Force was unable to identify a squadron of bombers flying over the Pacific Ocean. The bombers were headed in the general -direction of the central west coast of the United States. An order was given to sound the alert warning sirens for a probable attack. … Sirens sounded Berkeley and in Oakland, California. Radio stations went off the air in San Francisco. Local warnings in schools and business offices (which had internal warning systems) were sounded almost immediately… It took the Air Force only a few minutes to identify the bomb squadron as an American one. All was back to normal in approximately ten minutes. In the same length of time, if the squadron had been enemy-manned and undeterred, it could have delivered a lethal blow.”
WRONG NUMBER, Washington, DC: “At four-thirty in the afternoon of 25 November 1958, telephone workers in Washington, D.C. accidentally tied in the downtown Washington circuit with the Montgomery County Civil Defense System. Air raid warnings sounded immediately in several parts of Washington, in the downtown area, and inside several establishments which had internal air raid systems connected with the central warning siren. Several thousand Federal government employees, among many others, were thus suddenly exposed to an unannounced and unexpected warning siren, a signal which means literally to prepare for an imminent air attack. The warning signal that sounded was the same one that had been used up to that time only for previously announced practice alerts. However, it should be kept in mind that this was an accidental sounding of the system. Consequently, there were no informed civil defense leaders on hand who knew for sure that this was not a real attack.”
