Nuclear Fallout Shelters Were Never Going to Work
http://www.history.com/news/nuclear-fallout-shelters-were-never-going-to-work
Americans got their first look at that protection in January of 1962, when fallout-shelter signs began appearing in 14 cities across the country. Designed by Robert W. Blakeley of the Army Corp of Engineers, the signs featured three yellow triangles inscribed in a black circle—an arresting image approved by government psychologists. As a test, Blakely had envisioned the signs put up in downtown Manhattan “when all the lights are out and people are on the street and don’t know where to go.” And since half of Americans at the time were smokers, Blakeley specified the use of yellow reflective paint to make the signs visible in the glow of a cigarette lighter. The 3M corporation (best known today as the maker of Scotch tape and Post-It notes) manufactured 400,000 shelter signs, for which Uncle Sam paid less than a penny apiece.
The signs popped up everywhere. In New York alone, the Army Corps of Engineers contracted with 38 architectural firms to inspect 105,244 large buildings. Eventually, some 19,000 of them would become shelters.
And what sorts of quarters awaited those who staggered down the stairs? Only a handful were relatively posh; Chase Manhattan Bank, for one, dropped $49,000 on “compressed” wheat biscuits in banana and chocolate flavors to stock its five-story shelter. But most citizens would find only dank, low-ceilinged basements equipped with the barest necessities: bedding, drums of potable water, medical kits and government-issue wheat crackers. And while Uncle Sam thoughtfully provided toilet paper, the toilets themselves were harder to come by. A handy tip from a government booklet advised: “Make a commode by cutting the seat out of a chair and placing the pail under it.” It’s little wonder that the medical kits also included phenobarbital to chill everybody out.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the trouble with such crude accommodations became obvious almost immediately. Mere months into the program, reports emerged of leaking water drums and shelters that had never received any supplies. In a New York Times story in June of 1963, a Harlem woman asked, “Who’d want to go down there?” referring to the fetid tenement cellar meant to serve as her shelter space. The “rats are as big as dogs,” she said. “If fallout came, I’d just run.” In fact, the untenability of the shelters was public knowledge before they had even opened. A November 1961 story on the front page of The Washington Post bemoaned that most of the designated shelters would be little more than “cold, unpleasant cellar space, with bad ventilation and even worse sanitation.”
Conditions were a serious problem, but location was a bigger one. Two-thirds of the fallout shelters in the U.S. were in “risk areas”—neighborhoods so close to strike targets that they’d likely never survive an attack in the first place. In New York, for example, most of the government shelters could be found in Manhattan and Brooklyn—despite the fact that a 20-megaton hydrogen bomb detonated over Midtown would leave a crater 20 stories deep and drive a firestorm all the way to the center of Long Island. Even out there, Life magazine said, occupants of a fallout shelter “might be barbequed.”
What were the feds thinking? According to Kenneth D. Rose, author of the book
One Nation Underground, defense officials placed their faith in the counterforce doctrine, a game theory that held that atomic war would be waged with only military installations as targets. But that was wishful thinking. “It wouldn’t take much for the whole theory to totally go south,” Rose said. “If a bomber missed its target and hit a city by mistake, then of course the gloves would come off and both sides would concentrate on cities as well.”