That’s not what would happen, but that’s the strict Christian application.”Įnter L. In August 1961, Time magazine ran a story on the phenomenon of Americans stockpiling weapons in such shelters to protect themselves against less well-prepared neighbors who might seek entrance when the bombs began to fall: “ Gun Thy Neighbor?” The article concluded with reactions from clergy of different Christian denominations, almost all of whom expressed an uneasiness with the idea of barring others from one’s own family shelter, with one minister declaring that “if someone wanted to use the shelter, then you yourself should get out and let him use it. Kennedy in 1961: “There’s no problem here-we can just station Father McHugh with a machine gun at every shelter.” (And no, getting under your desk at school wasn’t going to work.) While politicians debated the cost and effectiveness of public fallout shelters, a huge industry emerged providing private shelters to American homeowners. Why? It’s a long story, with an America connection.Īs the Cold War seemed close to going hot in the early 1960s, the question of how to protect the civilian population from a Soviet nuclear attack was a commonly debated one. Once a national craze, the fallout shelter has all but disappeared from our consciousness. The grim anniversaries this week of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might bring to mind for older Americans a relic of another era: the fallout shelter.
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