Lecture: Civil Defense: New Channels for Putting Dianetics Into Society (2) (1951)

For every person killed in the immediate impact of a disaster, 2.8 people die after the disaster from starvation, lack of water, disease and injury not caused by the impact of disaster. No provision has been made in civil defense for the United States for the 2.8; all the provision is being made really for those injured in the first impact.

So I glanced around and talked to a few friends of mine in civil affairs, and I went around and talked to civil defense people, and all of a sudden I saw how we in Dianetics fit in rather well with all this.

The manual actually has to be nothing more than a boil-down of the Princeton University curriculum of how to handle disaster. That is about all it is, and it is aligned with and adapted to the statements which have been put out by the Civil Defense Planning Bureau in Washington. It is just a resynthesis of known techniques; it really does not have a thing to do with Dianetics.

But the back page carries an absolute must in terms of a bibliography—the library which a civil-defense officer should have: a good home formulary, of course, and a good First-aid manual for handling the aches and pains of people, and naturally Dianetics in order to handle their mass hysteria and so forth.

That is the first book of the series. The next one is concerned with something everybody is worried about—bacteriological warfare. Bacteriological warfare isn’t very tough; that was in civil affairs too. So we just take the old civil-affairs textbooks and shuffle them like a deck of cards, put them back together again and issue a second little book that has to do with bacteriological warfare. Mind you, none of these books are being issued by the federal government; it is time somebody did something about it, so the Foundation had better do it.
Now, on bacteriological warfare, we come to the conclusion that the necessary step to take in order to combat a bacteriological war is to clean up all the bacteria and disease out of the
country first—get the country all set and ready to go and in perfect physical condition. Then you have a good chance of fighting bacteriological warfare.

Actually, bacteriological warfare following in the wake of a battle consists of typhus, tetanus, smallpox, measles—all of these various things, really, are what are going to take the toll. It does not matter what kind of bug gets sent into America. If the sewer systems and the medical lines and transport lines get disrupted, that alone is going to be a very bad thing just from the standpoint of diseases with which we are very familiar. So, you just spark up the idea that the best thing to do is to clean up the country. ¹

Notes