The message flashes across the computer screen like a panicked cry: "3 mo OB hemorrhaging in parking lot, 14008 Smoketown Road."
"It's a woman who's three months pregnant," translates Tim Melton, a fire and rescue technician who is manipulating the keyboard to scout current emergencies in Prince William County, a largely bedroom community about 30 miles south of Washington, D.C. "The ambulance is already on the way."Such calls are routine for the police, fire and rescue dispatchers at the George T. Owens Operations Center, a low brick building just a short walk from the county's administrative, political and judicial headquarters.
But the day could come when the messages would be anything but routine.
Like some 3,800 other designated emergency operating centers throughout the United States, the one here is designed to become its county's brain and central nervous system in case of disaster: hurricane, flood, earthquake, chemical spill - even the extreme disaster of nuclear attack.
"If all hell has broken loose, this system brings together the key decisionmakers in the local government, so they can keep in touch with what's going on out there," says Selby C. Jacobs, director of the county Fire and Rescue Service.
In recent years, Americans haven't spent much time worrying about civil defense. Arms-control talks and easing superpower tensions have helped move such concerns to the back burners of the public mind.
However, some experts are saying that the rise of Soviet nationalism, and the potential development by some Third World countries of chemical and nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles, is moving the world into a new, more dangerous era in which the chance of nuclear attack could be greater than it has been since two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan 44 years ago.
"Civil defense against a rational, calculated, deliberate Soviet attack was always a debatable proposition," says one widely quoted authority on military strategy, Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.
"Reasonable arguments could be made on both sides. But civil defense makes much more sense against some accidental or unauthorized or spasmodic attack coming out of a Soviet Union in disorder and turmoil, or an attack from some Third World country with an extremist government."
With the United States facing such virulent potential enemies as Iran, Syria and Libya, "one of the problems you have to deal with is not people trying to win wars, but people just trying to inflict casualties, more or less for the heck of it, because, basically, of cultural conflict," Luttwak tells National Geographic. "When you have cultural conflict, you get satisfaction just by killing people."
Luttwak and others believe that once a radical Third World country developed a warhead and a means to deliver it to U.S. territory, the public would demand - and get - a much stronger civil-defense program.
But anti-nuclear-arms activists, who long have opposed any substantial civil-defense efforts, maintain that nuclear proliferation does not weaken their arguments.
"The fact that Libya or any other country might develop nuclear weapons only points to the utter insanity of the nuclear arms race itself," says Nick Carter of SANEFREEZE: Campaign for Global Security, a grass-roots peace organization that claims 170,000 members. Instead, the group urges adoption of treaties promoting global nuclear non-proliferation and banning nuclear testing.
Now, under the current "dual use" civil-defense policy, emergency operating centers such as the one in Prince William County are set up to handle natural disasters.
Theoretically, a period of growing international tensions would provide enough warning time to speed up preparations for a nuclear attack - for example, by beefing up such facilities, publicizing the location of buildings suitable for public fallout shelters and suggesting evacuation routes out of major cities and other likely target areas.
"During the beginning of such a period, the word might be passed along to local authorities that they should start thinking about providing such things as fallout protection for their emergency operating centers," says John W. McKay, the Federal Emergency Management Agency official who is in charge of civil defense operations.
Luttwak says it is impossible to predict when international events might become alarming enough for the United States to increase civil-defense preparations: "These things are contingencies. They can happen at any time."