Back to the fifties...sort of;

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-07-28-doomsday28_ST_N.htm?csp=24

They should contrast those images with photos of how those 50's shelters look today. A dark, moldy, vandalized, money pit.

I'm sorry, I seem to have left that $10,000,000 in my other pants.

The design appears to be aimed at people with more money than brains. If I built a shelter, it would be a lot more space-effective than the example.

I guess I left that $10,000,000 in my other purse, too.

Sue

<-- Goes looking for pants.

<-- Knocks Ted down; runs over top of Todd, grabs Art's pants and Susan's purse and makes quick getaway to Switzerland...

"<-- Knocks Ted down; runs over top of Todd, grabs Art's pants and Susan's purse and makes quick getaway to Switzerland..."



Sorry, but I have ADD, and can't find that purse, myself...

Sue

Man, oh man, I wished I had a bomb shelter in my backyard!

My grandparents had a fallout shelter pretty similar to the 1955 one shown. I played in it as a kid. No way could I "live" in that thing for more than a few days without going insane, especially if packed in with five others. That's one disaster where I plan on just taking the direct hit....

Desolation,

I have little fear of a nuclear war, but I do know that it isn't the direct hit that you need to worry about, it's the NOT-direct hit and exposure to fallout.

They look pretty claustrophobic to me, too!

Sue

> I do know that it isn't the direct hit that you need to worry about

Well, that varies. :-> I was a Minuteman missile combat crewmember back in the 70s, and we did worry about direct hits. Nobody worried about fallout or other survival issues, because we figured no one would.

But that's a different situation.

Actually, what I meant was that if you were at/near the site of a direct hit, you wouldn't be worrying afterward.

However, I believe that most atomic bombs are detonated in the air for maximum destruction, so 'direct hit' is something of a misnomer. Land-delivered ones, I have no idea.

Sue

Ah! Gotcha. :->

The air detonations are for maximum destruction of non-hardened targets like cities. For launch facilities and missile silos, the detonation is on or in the ground to dig us out.

I think my biggest concern is dirty nukes, a shelter will become a coffin unless you have a way out that doesn't get you covered and filled with the dust. There's really no avoiding it unless you can run faster than the wind.

Good hide out for conventional attacks and whatnot, but like I said, if your backyard is Chernobyl it's just a coffin.

Good point. Not all of us would have this ability, but prevailing winds and potential evac routes would be something to consider when siting a house, or choosing an apartment. There are several nuclear power plants in this state. I'm no expert here, but almost all winter, the wind blows from N or NW, so if there was a radioactive steam release, the plume would travel S or SE. The reverse is true in the summer.

Fortunately, our power plants are not like Chernobyl, and dirty nukes are a car-bomb type localized threat right now as those who would use them against us do not have a mechanized system capable of delivering a high-yield weapon to this continent.

Russia and the former Soviet satellite countries still have some aging ICBMs, but what is the tactical reason to launch at us? To disrupt our economy? To destroy our industrial base?....Very tempting to wax political here, but hopefully you see my point.

I think the nuclear threat is very small here, compared to multi-source air and ground water pollution. I think those take a slow, silent, deadly toll. Just my personal opinion.

The shelters that have remained in good shape are almost all those with walk-in entrances and secondary uses. The ones with same-level entrances from basements or into the side of a hill, and particularly those with wide and easy to use doors are far more likely to get maintenance and remain in serviceable condition. Those that you have to open a bulky hatchway, climb down steep and narrow stair, worse still climbing down a ladder, tend to get ignored and neglected.

The divide is between those where you can open the entry door with one hand and get into while carrying a box in your arms, and those you can't. If a shelter meets that standard you can use it for many other uses like storage, playroom, wine room, or pantry. If it gets used; it gets maintained.

many shelters were built 60s, there was a big uptick in shelter building around the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

As close as it was we actually got closer to a nuclear exchange than people at the time realized. Recently it has come to light that a Russian sub captain had nuclear weapons and both the authorization and mission defined reasons. Thankfully he declined.

His account is that even though he had reason to use them, and depending on how you interpret his orders, the duty to, he didn't want to be the man who started WW3. Like so many other events in history it was down to the conscience of a single fairly unremarkable man that made the difference. It was the conscience of a captain in the navy of serving the organization we would later brand as "The evil empire" that saved us all. Point being we need to be careful about discounting the humanity of, and vilifying, our present-day enemies.

Interesting link on the shelter, thanks.

Here's a riveting read on the Cuban Missile Crisis that came out a couple years ago. I plowed through it on a camping trip, could hardly put it down.


http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnigh...7151&sr=1-1

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is probably the single most analyzed episode of the cold war. In the past decade, declassified American and Russian documents have proved that a nuclear exchange was even closer than most scholars had previously realized. Dobbs, a reporter for the Washington Post, has used those sources as well as numerous new ones gleaned from two years of research in the U.S., Cuba, and Russia. Although nothing presented here will change the overall view of the crisis, Dobbs presents new and often startling information that again confirms that the thirteen days in October brought the world to the edge of an unprecedented cataclysm. Dobbs spends little time describing the characters of the key players, but he does convey a sense of men under immense stress as events threaten to outstrip their ability to cope with them. This is a well-written effort to explain and understand our closest brush with nuclear war.

> I think my biggest concern is dirty nukes

Dirty nukes aren't that dirty, and it doesn't spread that far, as I understand it. They're more properly called radiological bombs or radiological dispersal devices (if you have a degree, I guess :->), and they don't have that big a range even downwind because they rely on high explosives to spread the radioactive component.

Even if you were in a town where an RDD was exploded, the increase in radiation would not be generally fatal to the populace, and the increase in risk of, say, cancer would be small enough to make connecting any one cancer to exposure impossible. The major problem is hysteria, although that would be delayed till someone noticed the increased radiation - it would look like a regular bomb with some casualties from the debris.

An article here
http://csis.org/files/publication/091109_Terrorism_WMD.pdf
says the increase in cancer in a couple of blocks downwind of an RDD would be 1 death per hundred due to radiation in midtown Manhattan, with some deaths farther out but at decreasing rates (1 in ten thousand). See pages 64 and 65.

It would have to be cleaned up, and the disruption would be enormous because of the hysteria, but the actual death rate would not be great.

I'm from Texas, and I would want a shelter for tornadoes if I still lived there. Those suckers are totally devastating. Nukes? Not so much. I never lived near any terror targets, and I had no concern about fallout from the West Coast after living through all the fall out from our own atmospheric testing in Nevada. :->

Now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I still have no concern over dirty bombs, and I live far enough from San Francisco that a small nuke there might not even attract my attention, assuming it's not an air burst.

I doubt the Cuban missle crisis was the closest we've ever come to catastrophe. I'm sure there are many more incidents that were more dangerous yet less publicised. For example, Nixon's Operation Giant Lance was extremely risky, stupid, and could easily have led to a nuclear exchange. And it did nothing to hasten the end of the Vietnam war, which was its intended purpose. What a sad period in history.

I was a kid in grade school then. I remember the fear in my parents eyes, as we sat riveted to the radio listening to the reports. They knew World War II firsthand, and they were afraid.

"Like so many other events in history it was down to the conscience of a single fairly unremarkable man that made the difference. It was the conscience of a captain in the navy of serving the organization we would later brand as "The evil empire" that saved us all. Point being we need to be careful about discounting the humanity of, and vilifying, our present-day enemies."

Very, very true! Governments usually have to 'install' hatred of a group to get a war going, having to vilify the 'enemy'.

I had a neighbor from WWII Germany when I was about 16. She was s nurse during the war. She and a few others in the hospital had a 'sideline' of helping enemies of the Third Reich. They had a man they had hidden in the hospital. One night, they were moving him out. One nurse checked the alley, all clear. They got him propped up on his feet and out the door, when a German officer walked into the alley. They froze. He stopped and looked at them. Then he turned around and ambled back down the alley and stood at the end, facing outward, just quietly smoking his cigarette. They rushed the man into the waiting car and then they went back into the hospital. No shouts, no alarms, no arrests.

For good or bad, it's usually the individuals that make the difference. The others are just sheep.

Sue

I'm not sure I would go so far to condemn people who don't actively resist. The penalties for subversion of the state in WW2 Germany and occupied territories were lavish in their cruelty. Being detained, interrogated and shot was as good as it got. Torture was routine.

The methods of execution were often slow and diabolically cruel. One man suspected of helping allied airmen was scrubbed using brushes and lye soap every day and kept in a damp basement. After a few days he had no skin left and mold was growing on him. It took a month to die and his entire exterior was covered in blue and green molds. His fate was witnessed by many people who could hear him scream as they scrubbed him each day. His method of demise was calculated to chill the blood of anyone thinking of subversion.

But it wasn't just that any resistance was risking your life. They often went after your family and friends. Anyone that could be used for leverage.

years ago I was reading an account of the resistance German occupied Europe and the question was; why did you risk your life, and your families lives to help the downed airmen? The single most common answer was: They asked. Often the difference between heroic resistance and keeping their head down so they would live to see the end of the war was someone asking for help.

This is, IMHO, a valuable lesson for disaster situations. Few people will help unbidden. A few more will help if a general request is made. But if you can look them in the eye and ask them to help most people will do what they can.

This is why taking charge and selecting people for jobs at a disaster works. Imagine a scene where people are hurt and you need someone to maintain pressure on a wound, and someone to direct traffic around the site, and someone to call for help. You can't do it all yourself.

Most people, if they aren't trained emergency responders, aren't going to jump in to help. Not without someone telling them what needs to be done and asking/volunteering/drafting them. Look them in the eyes and tell them to get on their cell phone and call foe help and they will. Do the same with a couple more and they are willing to direct traffic. You have to put yourself on the line asking and bring them into it.

I was really thinking of the everyday people who see what is happening, and let it happen because it isn't currently affecting them. This point tends to be quite a long time before the torture and execution point.

From freedom to slavery always seems to happen in rather small increments, practically unnoticeable if you're not paying attention. If Thomas Jefferson woke up and looked at America today, and what has happened to his carefully crafted Constitution, what do you think he would say?

Sue

"I don't think I will move to Arizona just yet..." ??

Susan... and concerning the sheep.... there is an old adage in political science... put a frog in hot water and he will immediately jump out, but place the frog in cool water and increase the temperature a little each day... the frog will cook... as he only realizes the slight additional discomfort and has no standard of comparison to the first day... regards Les