Nuclear shelters are one of those things we hope to only see in the movies and never have to use in life. But things like the recent war between Russia and Ukraine, in addition to concerns about the climate or the global economy, can make a lot of people start thinking about the possibility of having one.
However, do you know how they started to be built? And would they really do the job in the event of a nuclear war?
Shelters for all
The idea of building bomb shelters began in the 1940s, shortly after the fateful US atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Over the years, each country turned around as best they could and reacted culturally differently to the prospect of a nuclear bomb being dropped on its territory. In the US in the 1950s, the Federal Civil Defense Administration thought it best to convince the population that they could survive a possible nuclear attack.
1950s diagram of a shelter for four to six people. (Source: Digital Public Library of America/ Reproduction)
Obviously, the plan was to try to calm the people against the fear of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
In this scenario of tension in the post-Second World War and during the Cold War, the US government decided to creating thousands of bomb shelters spread from large centers, such as New York, to inner cities.
In addition, it tried to “educate the population” with campaigns and exercises in schools. The bomb never arrived and many of these shelters resist until today, some disappear, others have become other things or serve for tourists.
But what if the Soviets had dropped an atomic bomb on some city in the USA, would the population be safe?
Pure deception
We still don’t know much about shelters built by the Soviet Union. , nor like the majority of existing ones in several of the “first world” nations. But, in the USA, nuclear shelters became a fever that knowing about them is quite easy, even from publications of the time.
Governor Robert Stafford of Vermont cuts a ribbon in front of a prototype bomb shelter built in a house in Montpelier. (Source: Digital Public Library of America/ Reproduction)
At the height During the Cold War, the US population saw such protection for the first time in January 1962. It was from that year onwards that warnings about shelters began to spread across the country.
But , the problems with the buildings were so blatant that a few months after the start of the program, several reports began to emerge about facilities with leaking water reservoirs, while others were never supplied with food. .
In a report from June 11, 1963 in the New York Times a resident of Harlem, a neighborhood in Manhattan, New York City, asked who wanted to go to such a shelter.
The woman was referring to the dirty and fetid basement destined for the people of the tenement where she lived . According to her, in that shelter, the rats were as big as dogs. And if an attack did occur, she would simply run.
Before they were even opened, the unsustainability of US shelters was public knowledge. In November 1961, the The Washington Post ), printed on its front page an article lamenting that most shelters were a “cold and unpleasant space, with bad ventilation and even worse sanitation”.
(Source: Underwood Archives / Getty Images/ Smithsonianmag/Reproduction)
An even more serious problem was the location of the nuclear shelters: two-thirds of them were built by the government in inappropriate areas. That is, in neighborhoods so close to possible targets that anyone hiding in them would probably die grilled. Here comes the question: “how did they not think of that?”
At least people didn’t take long to consider that, despite the beautiful images and the apparent security passed by the US government’s publicity at the time , most of the constructions were just an illusion.
