Shelters fail

And what sorts of quarters awaited those who staggered down the stairs? Only a handful were relatively posh; Chase Manhattan Bank, for one, dropped $49,000 on “compressed” wheat biscuits in banana and chocolate flavors to stock its five-story shelter. But most citizens would find only dank, low-ceilinged basements equipped with the barest necessities: bedding, drums of potable water, medical kits and government-issue wheat crackers. And while Uncle Sam thoughtfully provided toilet paper, the toilets themselves were harder to come by. A handy tip from a government booklet advised: “Make a commode by cutting the seat out of a chair and placing the pail under it.” It’s little wonder that the medical kits also included phenobarbital to chill everybody out.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the trouble with such crude accommodations became obvious almost immediately. Mere months into the program, reports emerged of leaking water drums and shelters that had never received any supplies. In a New York Times story in June of 1963, a Harlem woman asked, “Who’d want to go down there?” referring to the fetid tenement cellar meant to serve as her shelter space. The “rats are as big as dogs,” she said. “If fallout came, I’d just run.” In fact, the untenability of the shelters was public knowledge before they had even opened. A November 1961 story on the front page of The Washington Post bemoaned that most of the designated shelters would be little more than “cold, unpleasant cellar space, with bad ventilation and even worse sanitation.”

A Long Island family sits in a ‘Kidde Kokoon,’ an underground bomb shelter manufactured by Walter Kidde Nuclear Laboratories, in Garden City, New York, c. 1955. (Credit: Underwood Archives/Getty Images)

Conditions were a serious problem, but location was a bigger one. Two-thirds of the fallout shelters in the U.S. were in “risk areas”—neighborhoods so close to strike targets that they’d likely never survive an attack in the first place. In New York, for example, most of the government shelters could be found in Manhattan and Brooklyn—despite the fact that a 20-megaton hydrogen bomb detonated over Midtown would leave a crater 20 stories deep and drive a firestorm all the way to the center of Long Island. Even out there, Life magazine said, occupants of a fallout shelter “might be barbequed.”

What were the feds thinking? According to Kenneth D. Rose, author of the book One Nation Underground, defense officials placed their faith in the counterforce doctrine, a game theory that held that atomic war would be waged with only military installations as targets. But that was wishful thinking. “It wouldn’t take much for the whole theory to totally go south,” Rose said. “If a bomber missed its target and hit a city by mistake, then of course the gloves would come off and both sides would concentrate on cities as well.”

The shelters’ dubious utility also hinged on the shaky bet that the Soviets would drop only one bomb on a city like New York, an assumption that Khrushchev himself later ridiculed in his memoirs. If he’d managed to get “one or two big ones” into Gotham, wrote the Soviet Premier, “there wouldn’t be much of New York left.”