Nuclear warT. K. Jones, Pentagon official who argued U.S. could survive an all-out nuclear war, dies
Thomas K. Jones (he preferred to be called “T. K.”), the deputy under-secretary of defense for research and engineering, strategic and theater nuclear forces, died at 82. He became famous in 1982, when, in an interview with the LA Times, he argued that if the United States had a more robust civil defense, most Americans would survive an all-out Soviet nuclear attack. “You can make very good sheltering by taking the doors off your house, digging a trench, stacking the doors about two deep over that, covering it with plastic so that rainwater or something doesn’t screw up the glue in the door, then pile dirt over it.” He added: “It’s the dirt that does it.” He concluded the interview by saying: “Turns out with the Russian approach, if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.”
When the Reagan administration came into office in 1981, a former Boeing official named Thomas K. Jones (he preferred to be called “T. K.”) was appointed deputy under-secretary of defense for research and engineering, strategic and theater nuclear forces.
Jones was a believer in the effectiveness of civil defense – shelters, secure rooms, evacuation plans, food reserves, etc. – as a means for mitigating the effects of a nuclear war, and a critic of Robert McNamara’s strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). McNamara came to the conclusion that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could survive an all-out nuclear war, and that the best way to avoid a nuclear exchange was to leave each side completely exposed to a devastating retaliatory attack by the other side. In McNamara’s view, which he formulated in 1963, it was precisely this utter vulnerability to a devastating retaliation which would serve as a powerful deterrence against launching a nuclear attack.
Winston Churchill reached the same conclusion eight years before McNamara did, telling the House of Common in 1955 that in the nuclear age, “… safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”
Jones rejected this view. He argued that while the Soviet Union was paying lip-service to MAD, it was busy building a formidable civil defense which would allow it to withstand and survive an American nuclear attack.
When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he accused the Eisenhower administration of allowing a dangerous “missile gap,” which favored the Soviets, to open between the United States and the Soviet Union. Jones, in effect – but not in so many words — argued that since the days of McNamara as secretary of defense, successive administrations had allowed a “civil defense gap” to open between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Jones’s views about the efficacy of civil defense, and about the Soviet superiority in civil defense, came to public attention in 1982, when he was interviewed by Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times.
Without adequate protection, Jones warned, “half the people in the country” would die in a nuclear attack, and it would take “a couple of generations” to recover — but, he added, “if we used the Russian methods for protecting both the people and the industrial means of production, recovery times could be two to four years.”
