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alterations to the White House. To accommodate added wartime staff, the East Wing was constructed and a bomb shelter was installed beneath it. Composed of several rooms fortified with concrete as thick as nine feet in places, the shelter had its own power generator and blast doors designed to withstand 500-pound high explosives. Because the shelter lacked an elevator and a ramp, Roosevelt had to be carried down the stairs for his only visit to the space. 18 Meanwhile, the Secret Service set up machine gun nests on the roofs of the East and West Terraces of the White House and issued gas masks to staff. At Fort Belvoir, 18 miles south of Washington, 250 enlisted men and 4 officers were designated as rescue crews for the White House; their equipment included a steam shovel and wrecking tools. Mike Reilly, the White House’s supervising Secret Service agent, wasn’t too worried about air attacks, though he observed, the “possibility of a flyer deliberately crashing his aircraft loaded with explosives into an object also has to be considered.” 19
    Overcrowding, shortages, and the pell-mell pace of work quickly pushed aside civil defense concerns in Washington. By January 1943, the OCD was struggling to find volunteers. At the same time, the diminishing possibility of attack prompted those who did volunteer to fritter away their time on non-civil defense activities. 20 To revive dwindling interest, the OCD held a recruitment parade in July. A crowd gathered at Scott Circle to watch, but no parade, however festive, could save civil defense in Washington. The OCD was increasingly becoming a publicity agency, churning out pamphlets and posters that most Americans ignored. As Allied victories mounted, even OCD staff searched for things to do: a history of the agency was written before the war ended. 21 On May 2, 1945, new president Harry S. Truman— Roosevelt had died on April 12—announced that the OCD would cease operations effective June 30. A few days later, the commissioners ordered the removal of shelter signs and the cessation of air raid signals. 22 Like other Americans, Washingtonians looked forward to winning the war against Japan and the onset of peace and prosperity; civil defense, it seemed, belonged to the past. Little did they know that victory over Japan would make civil defense a durable part of the postwar future.
    On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber took off from the Pacific island of Tinian and flew toward Hiroshima, a southern Japanese city with more than 300,000 residents. Mounted in the Enola Gay’s bomb bay was an atomic bomb weighing almost 5 tons; it exploded approximately 2,000 feet above Hiroshima with a force equal to 15,000 tons of TNT. But comparison to conventional explosives is misleading. The blast and resulting fires engulfed a 4.4 square mile area, with temperatures at ground zero surpassing 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Together, the blast and heat instantaneously trans formed thousands of humans into charred, shrunken torsos; across the city, shadows of people, fence poles, and even tree leaves burned onto pavement and walls. Miles from the detonation, wood structures erupted into flames, rails twisted off track beds. As many as 80,000 people died; by December 1945, the death toll reached 140,000 as survivors succumbed to burns, blast injuries, and radiation sickness. Survivors recalled scenes of stupefying horror: “People came fleeing from the nearby streets. One after another they were almost unrecognizable. The skin was burned off some of them and was hang ing from their hands and from their chins; their faces were red and so swollen that you could hardly tell where their eyes and mouths were.” 23 High above, the Enola Gay flew over its target, now sheathed beneath a gigantic mush-room-shaped cloud. The crew felt the heat and struggled to comprehend the maelstrom they saw. Said Commander Paul Tibbets, “Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.”