Concrete, bricks, earth, and sand are some of the materials that are dense or heavy enough to provide fallout protection.Ĭoncrete was the favored building material of fallout shelters, with walls at least 12 inches thick. The fine dust both emits relatively little radiation and does not settle to the earth, where the fallout shelter exists. Since the most dangerous fallout has the consistency of sand or finely ground pumice, a successful fallout shelter need not filter fine dust from air. A basic fallout shelter consists of shielding that reduces gamma-ray exposure. It is designed to allow those inside it to avoid exposure to harmful fallout from a nuclear blast and its likely aftermath of radiation until radioactivity has dropped to a safer level. What is a fallout shelter and how were they built?Ī fallout shelter is a civil defense measure intended to reduce casualties in a nuclear war. Officials at the FCDA stated that if people were educated and prepared for a nuclear attack, they could survive an atomic bomb and avoid the wholesale death and destruction that had occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Survival literature was written primarily for a suburban audience, since it was assumed that cities would be targets and most urban dwellers would not survive. The Eisenhower administration distributed information to educate Americans about how they could protect themselves. The federal government responded to heightened public anxiety by creating the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), later called the Office of Civil Defense, to instruct the public about how to prepare for a nuclear assault. Soviets extending their political ideology into Europe and elsewhere.

Soviets flexing their newfound nuclear muscles,.The United States and the non-communist world faced extraordinary circumstances, which they saw as a threat to world peace, democracy, and security:

From the end of World War II until the early 1990s, the world faced a period of heightened international tension and competition called the Cold War.

Fallout shelter plans