DEFENCE OF THE RUHR

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27490, 26 October 1954, Page 9

DEFENCE OF THE RUHR

INDUSTRIALISTS PLAN PROTECTION

VULNERABILITY TO ATOM BOMB ATTACK (From a Reuter Correspondent) fiONN. Planning for the protection of West German heavy industry against a world hydrogen-bomb war is expected to begin soon. The Association of Industrialists and Government departments are considering the draft of a leaflet dealing in general terms with preliminary plans for protection. Plans are based on the experience of the Western Allies in their 1000-bomber raids, during World War 11, on German industrial targets. Those raids reduced much of the Ruhr and many cities elsewhere to heaps of twisted steel girders and rubble.

West Germany is particularly vulnerable because of its highly urbanised industrial centres. These cannot be dispersed within the present frontiers without still being within easy air range of East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The Ruhr itself, whose paralysis would cripple the country economically and militarily, is a closelybuilt area which it is almost, impossible to miss with bombs. Industrial leaders, however, believe that United States tests with atom and hydrogen bombs have shown that protection is possible—provided sufficient money is spent. They say that the atom bombs dropped in Japan struck cities composed largely of wooden houses, Many American towns, too, have a large proportion of these. The

effect of an atomic bomb in a German city, built of stone and brick, would be different. German experience, they said, has shown that stone offers a considerable degree of protection against radiation and some protection against blast. Air raid shelters and bunkers could be built of the materials which proved of most use in the last war—-ferro-concrete and steel-framed buildings.

The Association of Industrialists is thinking in terms of a four-year plan for industrial protection, based on the greatest possible measure of self-help by individual works. One question which has yet to be settled is who is to pay the high cost of the plan. No-one has so far even tried to estimate this in detail. The Government’s view is that, in principle, industrial air raid protection is a matter for industry itself; but the association believes that the State must provide, as it did during World War 11, the means for the protection of the workers and of the installations, since their safety is the concern of the whole population.