Source: Chapter IV: “Signposts,” United States Strategic Bombing Survey (Government Printing Office: Washington, D.C., 1946), p. We can see in it the germ of the civil defense efforts in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. The following excerpt is taken from the conclusion of the report. Besides assessing the damage to Japan, the report also suggested that the data collected would be useful in helping the United States defend its cities in the future from nuclear attack. The War Department created the United States Strategic Bombing Survey to evaluate the effectiveness of these various bombing campaigns in Europe and the Pacific, including the physical devastation caused by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the time the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, efforts to separate military from civilian targets had ceased. These distinctions gradually broke down during the war, especially when the US began bombing Japanese cities with conventional weapons. The initial goal was strategic bombing – destroying industrial, manufacturing, and transportation facilities while sparing civilian areas. In World War II, the United States and Britain executed massive aerial bombing attacks on European cities.
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