Fallout Shelter - History

History

During the Cold War, many countries built fallout shelters for high-ranking government officials and crucial military facilities. Plans were made, however, to use existing buildings with sturdy below-ground-level basements as makeshift fallout shelters. These buildings were usually placarded with the yellow and black trefoil sign.

The National Emergency Alarm Repeater (N.E.A.R.) program was developed in 1956 during the Cold War to supplement the existing siren warning systems and radio broadcasts in the event of a nuclear attack. The N.E.A.R. civilian alarm device was engineered and tested but the program was not viable and went defunct about 1966. In the U.S. in September 1961, the federal government started the Community Fallout Shelter Program. (A letter from President Kennedy advising the use of fallout shelters appeared in the September 1961 issue of Life magazine.)

In November 1961 in Fortune magazine, an article by Gilbert Burck appeared that outlined the plans of Nelson Rockefeller, Edward Teller, Herman Kahn, and Chet Holifield for an enormous network of concrete lined underground fallout shelters throughout the United States sufficient to shelter millions of people to serve as a refuge in case of nuclear war.

American fallout shelters in the early 1960s were sometimes funded in conjunction with funding for other federal programs, such as urban renewal projects of the Federal Housing Authority, examples being Barrington Plaza, and other development projects of Los Angeles County Civil Defense and Disaster Commissioner, Louis Lesser, and were designed for large numbers of citizens.

Switzerland built an extensive network of fallout shelters, not only through extra hardening of government buildings such as schools, but also through a building regulation that ensured that all residential building built after 1968 contained a nuclear shelter able to withstand a blast from a 50 megaton explosion at a distance of 700 metres. Coupled with this, there was the legal requirement for all supermarkets to store at least one year's supply of canned goods, etc., in blast-proof bunkers in the mountains, along with the requirement of one year's supply of oil; civilians were required to store at least three weeks of food stuffs in their own shelter. Switzerland has the highest ratio of shelter space to national population of any country. All these shelters are capable of withstanding nuclear fallout and biological or chemical (NBC) attacks. The largest buildings usually have dedicated shelters tunneled into solid rock.

Similar projects have been undertaken in Finland, which requires all buildings with area over 600 m² to have an NBC shelter, and Norway, which requires all buildings with an area over 1000 m² to have a shelter.

The former Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries often designed their underground mass-transit and subway tunnels to serve as bomb and fallout shelters in the event of an attack.

Interest in fallout shelters has largely dropped, as the perceived threat of global nuclear war reduced after the end of the Cold War. In Switzerland, most residential shelters are no longer stocked with the food and water required for prolonged habitation and a large number have been converted by the owners to other uses (e.g., wine cellars, ski rooms, gyms). These shelters also provide a haven from natural disasters such as tornadoes and hurricanes, although Switzerland is rarely subject to such natural phenomena.