No conspiracy, Tom. Just bureaucratic thinking, both good and bad.

Any kind of civil defense would save lives, even the most rudimentary program. But this is nuclear war, to make it worthwhile, to save lots of lives, enough to make it a useful part of war planning, you have to make a big investment. Remember, you need to keep them alive during the post-war period, not just the first few days after an attack.

WWII European CD efforts showed this, you needed lots of CD workers, which meant, recruiting, vetting, equipping and training a civil defense army, and coordinating them with emergency services and the military. You also needed facilities, shelters, depots, clinics, transport, communications, administrative staff, and you had to keep this operation sharp with frequent drills and practice. The maintenance required just to keep it all ready to go on a moment's notice was enormous and expensive. FEMA would have been nothing compared to the required pre-war effort to make it worthwhile.

Meanwhile, all this apparatus would provide no offensive capability and no deterrent value, and the strategic armed forces were competing with it for funding. At first, it was thought a few neighborhood shelters manned by volunteers could handle the load, and it did provide some false sense of security for the public, but even this minimum effort could not be kept up to its planned levels, run by local authorities and stocked with surplus government hardtack and Spam. Eventually it was dismantled as unworkable.

The other issue was that, as I mention in a post below, the better your CD effort is, the more it looks like a preparation for war. It looks like you plan to not just retaliate, but to strike first and prevail. A truly effective CD effort is provocative because it makes a first strike on your part an option. This is precisely why we were so alarmed by Soviet and Chinese preparations in this regard. Our cities would be prime targets for a retaliatory strike from an enemy, If they started it they would go after our silos and bases, not our cities.

This issue was not fully realized until plans were proposed for the ultimate Civil Defense program, the evacuation of cities to rural camps. This was sold as a means of demonstrating our resolve to our adversaries with a non-lethal act, to say, "we're getting ready for whatever you're going to throw at us, we're cocking our gun."

This plan was abandoned when it was realized that if both we and the Russians did this, we'd both have our cities empty and our populations living in miserable conditions in the bush, and that the first one to back down from this untenable situation would be vulnerable to a first strike. It would be very tempting to strike first while you were still even, or behind. It would make war inevitable. It's exactly the same situation that precipitated WWI, once the mobilization is started the first side to try and stand down becomes terribly vulnerable to the other. In the WWI case, demobbing meant throwing your train schedules into chaos and inviting your enemy to exploit it. It led to an extremely unstable scenario. Fortunately, we did not paint ourselves into the same corner in preparing for WWIII.

We chose to rely instead on a strictly deterrence policy, no back up plan, but a much simpler to manage and easier to predict strategy. And history showed it worked. I remember the political shenanigans when these decisions were being made, and indeed, the pro-strong civil defense side was dominated by conservatives, and the other side by liberals, but there was plenty of crossover. But the right choice was obvious from the start. I read Hermann Kahn's (the right-wing nuclear war theorist, supposedly the model for Dr. Strangelove) book about these issues, and I immediately realized he was wrong; not because he was a conservative, but because his concept was too flexible and too complex to be relied upon to funtion predictably under stress.

There's no way I can prove I'm right about all this, but I can assure you my decision, and the decision the nation eventually reached, was not simply due to an ideologial preconception. It made sense to me and to our leaders.