Shelter from the Past
June 7, 2010
PAST PRESENT FUTURE
Shelter from the Past
Back in the days of the Cold War, the understandable anxieties felt by Americans found many forms of expression. A common question was: How does one plan for a dangerous and uncertain future in which nuclear annihilation seemed a distinct possibility?
Building your own bomb shelter was one frequent answer to that question. The government gave advice about how best to accomplish this, and many people took advantage of it.
We tend to think those days are over. Let’s hope so. But in the globalized world, it’s hard to know if we can ever really stow away the doomsday fears that were once more out in the open.
Here’s one of the images distributed by the U.S. government in the late 1950s.
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Source: National Archives
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