nuclear war – The Infomercantile

Bombs have fallen. At least one has struck St Paul-Minneapolis. Another has exploded above the Great Lakes port of Duluth-Superior. Air force [sic] bases at Grand Forks, Rapid City and maybe Minot have been hit. So have other areas…Here, there is nothing to do now but wait. Radioactive fallout, if it isn’t already here, will be filtering down within the next hour or two. Heaviest concentration will be between the next 6 to 12 hours, with no one daring to leave the family fallout shelter. Tomorrow, it may be safe to run to the barn long enough to check on livestock. Not all animals could be gotten under cover, but the producing cows and most valuable breeding stock are inside.

Cold War advice on preparing your farm for the inevitable nuclear war. From a 1960 issue of The Farmer.

That swanky snack bar isn’t a weekend project from Handy Andy — it’s secret is that the instant the Emergency Broadcast System begins to pierce the air, the snack bar converts into a fallout shelter. The booklet “Fallout Protection for Homes with Basements” — available in online and hard-copy formats, was produced by Civil Defense and mailed out to homeowners who completed a questionnaire about their house’s construction. Based on those answers, using an ‘electronic computer‘, the CD calculated how much radiation protection your unshielded basement can provide…and offer a lot of advice on what to do if your basement comes up short. Unlike the traditional image of a fallout-shelter as an impenetrable fortress buried in the back yard, these fallout shelter suggestions are practical, cheap, simple…and aren’t a waste of space if nuclear war never happens (knock on wood). What surprised me is the fact that fallout doesn’t behave like a gas — it falls like snow, piles up on the ground, but it’s the radiation the fallout emits that is what will get you. The fallout shelters don’t have doors, and the booklet says several times that if you must go do important things (read: use the toilet), you can wander about for a few minutes at a time. If you’re hiding out under a converted snack bar, at least you won’t have to go far for a can of peanuts.