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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Looked through the index of my early German (English translated, published around the 1960's, I believe) "The Way Things Work" volumes I and II and didn't see fallout shelters.

It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters?

I'm guessing (after having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb") that this would be about when the hydrogen bomb came along.

It was sobering to read how dramatically more powerful the fusion bomb was compared to the first fission bombs. Suddenly the idea of going into a basement shelter to "survive" the blast became laughable. If you were far enough from the blast though your only comfort could come from a shelter from the fallout.

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It's not laughable.

The building code in Switzerland specifies that residential construction must contain a shelter that withstands a 12 megaton blast at 700 meters. The country has more shelter than people.

Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.

>Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.

I think it was due to the opposite, actually. The development of Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) made many small nuclear warheads more valuable than fewer large nuclear warheads.

If an ICBM is a shotgun, then kiloton-level MIRVs are like birdshot, which is seen as more valuable than megaton-level buckshot.

Completely right. The major military uses of nuclear weapons are as sources of powerful shockwaves which are devastating to drag-sensitive targets, and as firestarters. In both cases, you can optimize for these effects over a given area by using 100kt-1mt warheads, and airbursts with overlapping blast radii.

The problem is that as yield rises, the losses to the upper atmosphere are proportionally greater, as is fallout. Multiple targeting with smaller warheads solves that as well, which critically allows for more efficient burning of nuclear fuel.

Finally, the larger the fireball, the more likely you’ll have it touching the the ground leading to losses, and kicking up more debris which will mix with fission products and unburned fuel. Of course that’s also one way to use a standard nuclear weapon in a manner more consistent with an enhanced radiation weapon, real “salting the earth” stuff. That is generally comsidered to be bad form, even among nuclear powers.

It was this book: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_wo...

Had pretty cool drawings of a wooly mammoth around a bunch of inventions

> It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters?

Sometime after the nuclear bomb was developed and first used to end the second world war. The "fallout" in "fallout shelter" refers to "nuclear fallout" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout) which would not have been a term that would have existed prior to the creation and first use of a nuclear bomb.

So sometime circa early 1940's to mid 1950's timeframe would be a good guess.

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