Harry Truman was reluctant to accept the news. In the West, intelligence analysts dubbed the bomb Joe-1. That all changed in 1949, when Russian scientists led by nuclear physics genius Igor Kurchatov detonated a 22-kiloton atomic bomb code-named First Lightning at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. State of Oregon photoīut the Soviets didn't have atomic weapons-at first. Illustration to a report describing Portland's Cold War evacuation plan. "This is one of the Portland stories I know that I cannot remember any older people speaking of participating in." "I seldom hear anyone speak of it," Brian Johnson, a coordinator for the City of Portland Archives & Records Center, told War Is Boring. And Portland forgot its one-time embrace of Cold War survival skills. What happened was the result of Cold War politics, the arms race, bureaucratic foul-ups during an actual city emergency and the growing belief that no one could survive a nuclear war. Both a majority of voters and key city lawmakers refused to support continued funding of the program. The city was the first in the United States to reject the national civil defense program, and the city shut down its civil defense program.
The majority of the people and cars in downtown Portland cleared out-and civil defense officials across the nation hailed Operation Greenlight as proof that similar programs could save lives during a nuclear war.īut by 1963, Portland changed its tune. 27, 1955 at 3:05 in the afternoon, air raid sirens wailed in downtown Portland, signaling the beginning of a drill.īy 3:59, 29,423 vehicles and 101,074 people in the urban core were… gone. What's more, Portland officials even proved that their plan might work. Portland had a plan to evacuate the city if Soviet bombers were on their way to nuke the metropolis.
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