Nuclear terrorismTerrorism fallout shelters: Is it time to resurrect nuclear civil defense?
Fifty-five years ago, on 6 October 1961, President John F. Kennedy advised Americans to build an underground protective room, commonly known as a “fallout shelter,” in their homes. The American people heeded his advice and began an enormous grassroots effort to construct fallout shelters in every private residence and public building. Today, smaller nations and terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda, are seeking nuclear weapons. Some nations, like North Korea, already have them. Others may be a decade away. It is not unreasonable to believe that the use of a single nuclear weapon by a rogue nation or a terrorist group now poses a more likely scenario for a nuclear confrontation than a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. We need a strategy to protect ourselves against these adversaries, and right now we don’t have one, except screening cargo. If we don’t find a more effective strategy to thwart nuclear terrorism soon, we may be forced to go back to fallout shelters as our only protective option, whether we like it or not.
Fifty-five years ago, on 6 October 1961, President John F. Kennedy advised Americans to build an underground protective room, commonly known as a “fallout shelter,” in their homes.
At that time – the middle of the Cold War – the United States feared that a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union was imminent. Kennedy said, “in the event of an attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available.”
He proposed spending $207.6 million for a civil defense plan “to identify and mark space in existing structures – public and private – that could be used for fallout shelters.”
The American people heeded his advice and began an enormous grassroots effort to construct fallout shelters in every private residence and public building. Today, those shelters in the basements of 1960s-era homes are largely used for storage. The only reminder of the public shelters is the occasional yellow fallout shelter sign that still remains affixed to the outside wall of some buildings. Now, no one builds fallout shelters.
But, why not? The nuclear weapons are still around.
As a radiation protection expert and a professor of radiation medicine, I am sometimes asked this question. The answer is an interesting story that should give us all pause, especially as we now face new nuclear weapon threats.
The Cold War
The main reason we no longer build fallout shelters is that as nuclear bombs have grown in size and number, the prospects of surviving a nuclear war – even in a shelter – have decreased. A study by the RAND Corporation in 1966 determined that as many as 62 percent of all Americans would die in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, and painted a pretty grim picture of the lives of the survivors.
As a result, fallout shelters became seen as an ineffective way to protect the lives of the vast majority of the population. Gradually, civil defense efforts moved away from nuclear bombs and concentrated on everyday threats that could be more easily defended against, such as tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes.
How, then, could Americans protect themselves from the threat of nuclear holocaust if a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union was not survivable?
