The Fallout Chronicles V - Fallout Shelters Are Pushed
The Fallout Chronicles V - Fallout Shelters Are Pushed
In January 1951, construction had begun on a big shelter for our president and military leaders inside a mountain at Raven Rock, Pennsylvania, eighty miles north of Washington D.C. Raven Rock was not far from a place that had been a used as a retreat by our Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt. Eisenhower would name the place Camp David after his father and grandson. “David” was Ike’s middle name. Camp David would have its own shelter.
Raven Rock was more than a “shelter.” It was an emergency operations center with communication facilities for the leaders of all of our armed forces and their staffs. As many as five thousand people would be able to stay there for a while. Months, maybe. We really didn’t know how long they’d have to stay there inside the mountain.
Raven Rock became operational in June 1953, the first year of Eisenhower’s administration.
At Mount Weather in Virginia, Ike was having another big “shelter” built for high level civilian and military leaders. This one would ready for occupancy in 1959, the year I graduated from high school.
We didn’t know anything about any of this, of course. I wonder if the Soviets knew. They were big construction projects. We’re an open society. I bet they did. We didn’t.
Both “shelters” were very expensive propositions, no doubt, and President Eisenhower had decided that paying for fallout shelters for all Americans would cost too much. Better, he thought, to spend the money on weapons development. Citizens could build their own shelters if they wanted to. Those who had the resources, anyway.
Scientists here and in the Soviet Union were using the data that was becoming available to calculate how dangerous the radiation in fallout would be long term. In the Soviet Union, in July 1958, the Russian physicist Andre Sakharov, who was said to be the father of their hydrogen bomb, which was first exploded in 1954, published an article in Atomnaya energiya. He had calculated that the Carbon-14 in the fallout from just one one-megaton weapon would kill 6600 people over 8000 years all over the planet. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5570 years. Testing should stop, said Sakharov. In our country, Edward Teller, one of the fathers of our hydrogen bomb, continued to say that residual radioactivity wasn’t a big deal. Testing could continue. It should continue, he believed.
In 1958, President Eisenhower’s Federal Civil Defense Administration launched a “Family Fallout Shelter” campaign. At end of the year, the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization that had replaced the FCDA distributed millions of copies of a pamphlet entitled The Family Fallout Shelter.
It begins:
Let us take a hard look at the facts.
In an atomic war, blast, heat, and initial radiation could kill millions close to ground zero of nuclear bursts.
Many more millions—everybody else—could be threatened by radioactive fallout. But most of these could be saved.
The purpose of this book is to show how to escape death by fallout.
Was it true that most of the many millions who could be threatened by radioactive fallout “could be saved”? Is that what “a hard look at the facts” told us?
“The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy” was the Congressional committee that had been set up by Atomic Energy Act to oversee the AEC. In June of 1959, JCAE’s Special Committee on Radiation held a secret hearing in which two physicists, Hugh Everett III and George E. Pugh, gave a presentation on “The Distribution and Effects of Fallout in Large Nuclear-Weapon Campaigns.” The goal of their work was to figure out how many nuclear weapons of what size in what distribution would kill everyone or almost everyone in the country with residual radiation alone. They concluded that this could be accomplished with a certain number of the megaton-range weapons we and they had or would soon have. The distribution around the country could be random. It wouldn’t matter in the longer run, they found—more than a week, less than a year—whether you had been sheltered or not.
None of us knew anything about this study. It was restricted data. The Commissioners of the AEC had to have known.
In January 1961, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as our new president. New shelters were being built for President Kennedy in Hyannis Port and in Palm Beach, where JFK would be spending time when he wasn’t in the White House or Hyannis Port. In Greenbrier, West Virginia, a new shelter was being built for members of Congress that would be ready for occupancy in 1962.
In May of 1961, the chair of the Civil Defense Committee of the Conference of Governors, Nelson Rockefeller, met with JFK to advocate for a national fallout shelter program. Two weeks later, JFK addressed a joint session of Congress, noting the “apathy, indifference, and skepticism” the public was showing toward civil defense policy. He asked Congress to appropriate money for “a much strengthened Federal-State civil defense program” that would include public and private shelter construction.
In September 1961, Life magazine published an issue with the headline “How You Can Survive Fallout.” On the cover was a very dramatic photo of a person in a full-body hazmat suit, illuminated in red light, with an arm held up as if warding off some awful threat. If any magazine cover could get rid of the “apathy, indifference, and skepticism” President Kennedy was concerned about, this one should have been able to. Inside, an article claimed that with shelters, 97 out of 100 of us would survive.
That wasn’t what Everett’s study had found, as you know.
In October 1961, ten months after he became President, Kennedy urged all Americans to build fallout shelters “as soon as possible.”
Over Thanksgiving, Kennedy met with his advisors and decided to shift the focus away from private family shelters. He’d become concerned about the inequities implicit in a civil defense program that promoted private shelters. He had found disturbing the talk about how the private shelters should be well provided with guns and ammo, not to fight the enemy but drive off neighbors.
Kennedy then initiated a National Fallout Shelter Survey and Marking Program to identify, label, and stock community shelters in already existing buildings. That’s how those signs got there that you can still see on some buildings. The ones with three yellow triangles on a black background in a yellow background. You can buy one of these signs online if you want.
A survey and evaluation methodology had been developed by the Eisenhower administration but not much used. Ike had instead encouraged private shelter construction. From late 1961 onward, the survey methodology was incorporated into the Kennedy administration’s National Fallout Shelter Survey and Marking Program as it turned the focus towards establishing communal shelters in existing buildings.
And then, in October 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty that had been signed by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom came into effect. It was partial because it banned testing in the air, water, and space only. Underground testing could and certainly would be expected to continue. But fallout, the residual radiation, would now be greatly reduced. It would not be eliminated right away. Some of the radiation from earlier detonations had yet to come down. Also, it turned out that underground tests would sometimes crack open the earth and “vent” radiation.
New fallout could come from a nuclear exchange. That was still entirely possible. The number of ICBMs and nuclear warheads we both had was still growing.
In April 1964, New York hosted a World’s Fair. Alongside the exhibits of sexy hardware from the space program was the Underground World Home exhibit. Private contractors had on display elaborate underground shelters with all the comforts of home. Fully equipped kitchens, rec rooms with exercise machines. Something for the whole family.
By the end of the 1960’s, the shelter movement, such as it was, seemed to be petering out. It’s not entirely clear why. Maybe the Partial Test Ban Treaty had taken the wind out of its sails. Maybe it had become just another 60’s “whatever.” Maybe we’d gotten tired of trying to make sense out of what we were being told. Maybe the war in Vietnam had begun to command more attention. Maybe all these things.
Were fallout shelters ever a good idea? Might they in fact have increased our danger? Consider that when our military received intelligence that Moscow was building shelters around the city our response was simply to target more nuclear weapons on the city.
What has happened to the shelters that did get built? They’ve become wine cellars, mushroom farms, storage areas, rec rooms, exhibition spaces. The big Strategic Air Command Alternate Command Center that was built inside the Holyoke Range next to my college, Amherst—we had no idea it was being built there—is now being used by the college library for storage.
I wonder if any of the shelters that got built has become a family home?
Next: Evidence Emerges