A mention in another forum got me doing an image search for “cold war fallout shelter”. Of course I remember them from my youth but damn - what idiots we were! The official government recommendation was that a 7’ x 7’ room would suffice for 4 adults. Seven. By. Seven. Feet. Mark that on your floor and imagine living there for weeks.
A typical image shows Dad wearing a nice shirt and tie as he sits and cranks the hand operated blower. Mom in her crisp dress beams as she looks over the delicious canned food while Sis combs her hair. Again. Son waves his model airplane over his head. I wish they showed them a week later when no one has had a bath and the plastic lined barrel in the corner is reeking with shit and piss. Sis has only crapped two times all week and makes everyone hide under blankets and cover their ears and nose before she will even try.
That battery operated lantern? Doesn’t work after two days so you only turn it on as needed. Maybe they should have designed edible batteries. The board games? Shredded after the last Monopoly fight. One image showed Sis languishing on the phone. What phone? The model airplane? Dad stomped it to bits the third day.
Today we call them “tiny homes” but they are a bit larger and you can go outside.
One advantage of such a small and uncomfortable space is that it lessens the chance that your neighbors will try to break down the door to get inside, as was demonstrated in one of my favorite “Twilight Zone” episodes:
It starts with a quaint dinner party between friends and neighbors. They are giving some friendly ribbing to the host, who has recently built a bomb shelter in his basement. The dinner is interrupted by an air raid siren and radio address that says missiles are incoming. The host sends everyone home and takes his family down into the shelter. But the friends and neighbors didn’t build a bomb shelter and soon realize that the host’s shelter may be their only hope for survival.
When we bought our 1950’s era house it had a shelter in the basement, which made a nifty walk-in closet. It would have been a terrible fallout shelter, so I think it was built primarily as a tornado shelter.
FWIW, I don’t think we were supposed to stay down there for weeks. Remember, the whole nuclear exchange was only supposed to last, as Tom Lehrer sang, “an hour and a half,” followed by a couple of days of fallout.
Yup. You were supposed to emerge into the radioactive wasteland a few days later, grateful to still be alive. We lived right outside of DC, shelters were very popular there. There were also plenty of buildings marked as fallout shelters roads had emergency route signs.
Fallout shelters were big business during the month-long Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Those maps with concentric circles centered on Cuba, showing how long it would take the missiles to reach Miami, Charleston, DC, or New York. It didn’t seem likely that any would get all the way to California. Yet fallout shelters were in demand even in Los Angeles. Our neighbors down the block had one installed in their yard. I wonder if it’s still there to this day?
I was in fourth grade at the time. I remember my mother coming home from shopping and announcing: “The shelves are bare!”
Screw the 7’ x 7’ shelter, here’s how you wait out the apocalypse in style, complete with indoor and ‘outdoor’ areas with lighting that changes to simulate day and night:
We had those drills when I was in grade school. We would crouch under our desks and pray the rosary during a nuclear attack. This was about eight miles as the crow flies from SAC headquarters at Offutt AFB, Bellevue NE otherwise known as ground zero USA. We wouldn’t have even seen the flash
We had to crawl under the desks in case an atom bomb landed on us. That stuff desks were made of was incredibly strong. I’m not sure but I think it was called wood. That stuff is way stronger than black box material if it can stop a nuclear explosion. I still wonder why they didn’t make the fallout shelters out of the same stuff those desks were made of. Or just make giant desks over cities to protect them.
It was one of the monthly offerings of the Science Fiction Book Club. I read it soon after release. What can I say, I was 18 or so and seem to recall enjoying it.
To follow up: The official recommendation was to shelter for 2 weeks. I remember when we decommissioned one shelter at work. There were plastic lined drums of water that could be used as latrines after the water was gone. There were instructions on each drum. Most of the rations were some crackers which none of us tried to eat as I recall. But I can find no mention of the drum full of lemon drops. There were still fine and we slowly ate them over the months. Perhaps they were intended to prevent scurvy?
It was painfully obvious to us who lived on the North Coast that everything from Cleveland to Chicago was going to be blasted into a widening of the Great Lakes. Here are a few articles addressing the fallout shelters:
