The 1962 Fallout Shelter handbook...

Many of my friends had shelters growing up around Washington DC.
My Dad who worked on the original nuclear test-ban treaty
knew better so he never wasted money to build one for our family.
Many pictures at the site.





LINK:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wardomatic/sets/72157594417383496/

:hide:

The teacher pulling the draps shut over the glass windows with her free arm shading her eyes was really going to save our asses . We would have been instant ash and this is what we should have been told , duck and cover cartoons no less singing as if this was fun and some sort of reality .

I can't imagine who would want to climb out of some fallout shelter only to see what was left and then die a slow dead of radiation .

it is better to be in the epicenter and very quickly "gone." Survival in a nuclear winter would be horrendous, I'd think.

mushrooms, but you've got to haul a lot of stuff down there for mushroom growing, and I doubt you'd make a profit for a long time, and w/the crap, unlikely you'd use it for much else...it would stink...x(

I guess if you really wanted to get away from the neighbors it would come in handy...I'd make sure the neighbors knew it was there, and after a couple of month's, set off a siren and run into it screaming...:evilgrin:

I can recall the duck and cover exercises in school...we were in NY and I guess those wooden desks would have saved us from the glass showering in, but they would just add to the fuel as the place was incinerated just a few seconds later.

There were some common sense ideas in those books that are still used today, like making sure you have a battery powered radio, extra batteries, food, water and other items one will need in a disaster...:)

Not making this up. The nearest shelter was the basement of the department store. Never understood that. What were we supposed to eat in an emergency, socks?

foosstuffs, and other personal items in them. They were OD Green and yellow stenciling and the traingular CD markings for Civil Defense, we had some at school in the basement. The crackers were like the ones issued to Union troops in the CW, might have been leftovers for all I know.

W/O much fanfare, they disappeared suddenly...just poof, no more.

hearing on the radio every night that the doomsday clock had been moved a minute closer to midnight.

the subways in NYC were considered fallout shelters becaue of what the Londoner's and Parisians went through in WWII...no one seemd to realize that those were conventional weapons, and w/a nuke, all of the oxygen would be sucked out of the tubes, if they survived the 30,000F fireball.

I think ground zero is a good place to be at that point if one is anywhere near the zone. If I had the choice, being atomized in a milisecond beats the hell out being burned to a crisp and surviving for a few days of agony, or dying months later from radiation.

:nuke:

and the entertainment center.

After that little preview of the abyss, denial and/or political action became the response to the arms race. Mostly denial.

"Duck and Cover!" with sadistic nuns describing in detail what would happen if we didn't.

I had a nuclear physicist uncle, so my pop didn't fall for any of that Civil Defense crap, either.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C0K_LZDXp0I

My favorite moment is around the 1:37 mark. When the narrorator says "just like we are ready for other dangers that are around us all the time" and they show a black kid in an otherwise 95% white classroom. Hillarious.

I was eight in 1962. We had neighbors who wanted bomb shelters. My folks never did want this. I don't know why.
Lee

It's a wonder that any of us are sane! Of course, this is the world that the bushkevites thrived in and want to bring back:mad:

It details with much satire how uninformed we were about the genie that had been released from the bottle.

In So. Cal. in the sixties we called them "Drop Drills". Out of the blue, our teachers would yell "DROP!!" and we'd take position under our desks on our knees with our hands covering the backs of our necks. We'd have to stay there until the teacher verified that we were all in the same position.

Heady days...

May the concrete incase you to protect you from
the terror that might come.

May the duck-tape, that they talked about now to keep us safe,
keep us from talking
to each other.