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Urban warfare tends to be intimate. If soldiers do not see the faces of those they kill—and they frequently will—those men and women will hear the screams or muffled groans of the wounded. US forces waging the battle to recapture Manila in 1945 experienced these horrors. Yet it was the noncombatants who suffered far more; 100,000—approximately one of every ten Manileños at the time—died during the fighting. Thousands more suffered wounds, disease, or struggled with hunger and malnutrition. Recent fighting in Syria, Ukraine, Khartoum, and elsewhere tells us too little has changed three-quarters of a century later.
Though urban warfare is a special case of disaster, its lessons are relevant when floods, earthquakes, typhoons, or other forms of crisis strike a city. This article goes beyond confrontations between enemies and the resultant civilian suffering to identify the challenges inherent in preserving noncombatant life during and in the aftermath of these clashes.
Whatis targeted will impact both immediate and longer-term recovery just as will decisions regarding
howa force inflicts destruction. The lessons of 1945 have much to tell today's and future leaders preparing for, responding to, and guiding recovery from combat and other forms of urban catastrophe.

This study analyzes the effectiveness of a mass‐media radon information and testing campaign conducted in the Washington, D.C. area in the winter of 1988. Although an impressive number of test kits (approximately 100,000) were sold, the ultimate mitigation rates resulting from the campaign were extremely low. Analyses show that low mitigation rates cannot be explained by postulating that people's responses to radon are insensitive to the level of objective risk. They may instead be due to characteristics of the protective response required to reduce radon risk. Radon may be thought of as one of a family of household risks which have risk response profiles that make them particularly difficult for people to manage and remediate. Traditional information campaigns for such risks are likely to be ineffective; instead, they may require regulatory strategies or programs which provide active guidance and assistance.