By 1965, an estimated 200,000 shelters were built - but that's just an estimate. In the course of her research, she uncovered a startling trove of information on how shelter designers, architects and the wealthy strove to create safe havens fully loaded with luxuries and comforts.īy 1960, nearly 70 percent of American adults believed that nuclear war was imminent. Roy focuses mainly on the government's misguided but well-intentioned effort during the Cold War to reassure people that nuclear disaster was survivable if you only had an underground refuge. Surrealistically optimistic, fallout shelters went from being temporary, rough-hewn bunkers to subterranean versions of Shangri-La in just a few years. Government Misled Itself and Its People Into Believing They Could Survive a Nuclear Attack (Pointed Leaf Press), seem to have been designed for: forever. What was the game plan, anyway? Hunker down for a couple of weeks, then emerge to life as we knew it? More likely, the better decision might have been to stay underground forever.Īnd that's what many of the shelters in Susan Roy's new book, Bomboozled: How the U.S. Likewise, those fallout shelters that some families built during the Cold War seem about as useful as the desk.
We've seen enough movies to know that an atomic conflagration wouldn't be something we'd just dust ourselves off from, in time for recess.
If you're of an age to remember diving under your classroom desk during nuclear attack drills, you probably look back on that as ludicrous.
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