The Oil Drum

161 comments on DrumBeat: June 19, 2006

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step back on June 19, 2006 - 7:02pm

Motive and opportunity.

Don't you watch all those detective shows?

Actually, the move to suburbia was middle and upper America's response to crime of the 1960's. It removed the "opprotunity" part of the equation.

Pervasive public transport allowed roving gangs of young people to move easily from one neighborhood to another in the "inner cities" of the 1960's. Older people don't commit as many crimes because --well they are old & slow, and perhaps they have developed a set of morals (except for Enron execs). So the violent crimes problem is mostly one of gangs of unemployed males.

It is the expansive highway system and the need for expensive cars that keeps large gangs from forming in Suburbia (outside of school grounds). Recently, we have advanced to "gated" communities. Why?

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Magnus Redin on June 19, 2006 - 8:31pm

Did the scare for nuclear war play a role during the early cold war?

I know there were plans to evacuate large cities in Sweden and disperse the population on the countryside in case of total mobilization during the early cold war.
Building suburbia is more or less a volotary preemptive evacuation.

These plans were later replaced with a shelter building program. Maintaining the shelter stock is more or less what is left of our civil defence, hardly any are built nowdays. :-(

They are not especially fancy, the minimum spec on later generations were detonation of a bomb with 125 kg of TNT in 125 kg of steel casing with no further containment 5 m from a wall or roof, 50 kPa long lasting overpreassure or 8 kPa long lasting underpreassure, 97.5% fallout reduction, basic NBC filtering with 60 Pa overpreassure, 72h livability with one person per 0.75 m2 and 50 year design life lenght of the construction. Finnish and Swiss designs seems to have better minumum radiation specs and the Finns have added roof concrete spalling reinforcments as a minimum requirement.

But the Finns and probably the Swiss continue with complete shelter building, I envy those that are wiser.

Most of the hardened civil defence structures being built nowdays in Sweden are overground or partly buried control centers for municipiality fire brigades and county disaster control centers. Almost every municipiality had an N hardened small civil defence control center built in bedrock, most of them are now abandoned or used as server halls, backup storage and so on. But they had the drawback that they took longer to mobilize then having a control center next to city hall. What is slowly being built today is the ability to react on for instance a traffic accident with nasty chemicals in an urban area.

We also had civil defence battalions and brigades that had mobiliziation depots distributed around cities and towns with massive ammounts of pneunmatic jackhammers, diamond saws and so on to get people out of shelters below fallen buildings. All gone now since we in the future wont have anythings as old time as a war in Europe. I realy hope that is a good prediction of the future.