Tracing the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism, what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy―"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time―forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. There are also plenty of people in the comments sharing their memories of growing up during the Cold War.Why some Americans built fallout shelters―an exploration America's Cold War experienceįor the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Read more findings from the study at Paleofuture. (79 percent agreed, 14 percent disagreed) It would take a little while after an attack, but law and order would be restored. Parents have a duty to protect their children by building a fallout shelter (52 percent agreed, 37 percent disagreed) Just 7 percent of Americans thought that building a shelter was cowardly.īuilding a shelter is like hiding in a hole-only a coward would do it. But the results of the survey may surprise you. There’s nothing quite like the collision of midcentury toxic masculinity and the threat of total destruction from nuclear war. Is it cowardly to build a nuclear fallout shelter? What did the general population of adults of the time think about the nuclear threat? Michigan State University surveyed 3,514 adults in the early '60s about their feelings regarding preparedness for a nuclear war. As a child of that era, I recall assuming that nuclear armageddon could come at any time, and there was nothing we could do about it. The truth is that, in 1962, only 1.4% of Americans actually did. From the literature we see on the internet from the Cold War era, you'd think that everyone had a backyard fallout shelter ready to go in case the Soviets attacked.
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