I think it would be useful here to point out that there are two different structures being considered as one by most of those participating. Bomb shelters, and fallout shelters are not the same things.
The bomb shelter was developed during world war II, and plans were made to make them a part of military defense installations even as late as the early 1960s. With respect to nuclear strikes in the near vicinity such plans are useless. Hardened structures built of steel reinforced, and sheathed concrete, with double wall construction incorporating shock reducing separation materials, and blast doors were built to withstand the expected “near miss” of nuclear strikes on more strategic targets. The original plans for those structures were to reserve a second strike capability after the first exchange. The engineering was overly optimistic in most cases, given the realities of MAD strategy.
Fallout shelters were never intended to be blast proof. The expected importance of these facilities was to protect more distant survivors of first strikes at military targets from wide spread radioactive fallout, and its harmful effects. In the many scenarios envisioned by doomsday military strategists there were variable numbers of survivors of first and second strikes who could become part of the recovery effort, if they could be protected from radiation damage for seven to ten weeks. The fallout shelter was intended to provide that protection.
Radiation from fallout peaks about an hour after blast, for a minimal ground touch air burst weapon. (the most destructive placement for blast considerations) At that time it is sufficiently deadly to kill unshielded victims who are exposed for only a few minutes to an hour, although some of the deaths will take months. In cases where the enemy took no specific enhancements of fallout severity, on can expect each seven-fold increase in time to provide a tenfold decrease in radioactivity. Five thousand rads at one hour, five hundred at seven hours, fifty in two days, five in two weeks, one half in four months.
The plan was made with those parameters in mind. It ignored the very likely scenarios of delayed second strikes, cobalt salting, wide spread targeting, and strike counts in the thousands. The secondary effects of ten thousand nuclear blasts were not even imagined. It was assumed that hostilities would not continue with any but conventional forces. Blast shelters would protect military forces, civilian forces would survive in inverse proportion to their proximity to military targets. US strategic planning did not consider civilian mass causalities to be militarily useful in most cases. Russian military thinking included most transportation and industrial centers to be prime military targets along with nuclear forces.
Idiocy is not a negative consideration, in the planning of Nuclear War. The situation begins with the unimaginable, and assumes the unthinkable. Fallout shelters were Civil Defense Teddy Bears. It made people think that the Government was doing something. It was not particularly rational, but then neither is any other aspect of nuclear warfare.
The United States is the only nation that can militarily assume the absence of use of nuclear weapons without loss of strategic advantage. We don’t need them. We would have to assume a hard line on the use of nukes by anyone else. If your government drops a nuke on anyone, we destroy your government, no negotiations. We get rid of our nukes, and stop supporting the industry that makes the technology work. We enlist our allies in our position. It can work.
Tris (who happens to be a qualified fall out shelter manager.)
“People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.” ~ Lao Tzu ~
