In 1961, this Detroit plywood dealer purchased a truckload of build-it-yourself shelters, which he planned to sell to eager homeowners. As another Post article described in 1965, the failure of the shelters to catch on ruptured the entrepreneurial dreams of one James J. “Fallout shelters of the type widely proposed to date are … costly and complex in their requirements … limited and unreliable in usefulness, and … generally dependent on variables and unknowns.”Īfter all the debate and arguments about shelters between 19, only about 200,000 shelters were sold nationwide - a small number for a population of 180 million. īaldwin quoted a director at Consumer Reports who had examined the commercially available models of fallout shelters. If he has to walk, he may receive a lethal dose of radioactivity before he reaches safety.

His immediate need is to know where to go to reach an area relatively uncontaminated by radioactivity. The survivor may emerge into an area uninhabitable for days, weeks, months, years, or a lifetime. It is utter hokum to claim, as some have done, that more than 90 percent of the population could be saved by a national shelter program designed to protect against radioactivity alone. Even if we survived the explosion, what were we supposed to do next? Sure we are all scared to death, but, he pointed out, living in a shelter wouldn’t protect us. But Post author Hanson Baldwin, in 1962, was on hand with a little reality check. According to authorities, building a fallout shelter - this is assuming you had a back yard to build one in - would greatly increase the chances for surviving a nuclear attack. “Just dig a hole!” the government told us. What was the average American supposed to do if our worst nightmare, nuclear war, actually came to pass? and the Soviet Union bristled with nukes. At the height of the Cold War, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, both the U.S.

Nuclear fallout shelters in detroit