The Weirdness of 50s Bomb Shelters
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A nuke isn't some magical death-and-destruction device: it's just a really powerful bomb, which releases some really nasty pollutants. It's a difference of degree, not of kind: other bombs are weaker and still releases less nasty pollutants.
Sure, no home bomb shelter could survive a direct hit; but home shelters weren't made to resist direct hits: they were made to resist blast waves from hits on nearby cities; they were made to resist nearby conventional hits.
What made them less useful investments was a factor of several things. Precision targeting made area bombing less likely. Improved air defenses made large-scale WWII-style bombing raids less likely. It might also be the case that larger bombs made the risk-reward ratio different.
While cleaning out my grandparents' home a few months ago I came across a government civil defense pamphlet my grandfathers' firm had republished. It was full of good, scientifically-accurate, well-founded advice. It wasn't alarmist; it was up-to-date for the time when it was published.
It certainly wasn't weird to be prepared for something which at the time was likely to happen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_and_Cover_(film)#Accuracy_...
I didn't read it that way. At least it wasn't more skeptical than my Dad, who thought the idea was a little impractical, perhaps irrational.
The irrational reason is that it's been 60+ years since atomic weapons were deployed, and we are confident the danger has passed. But really, there's plenty of weapons out there: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/map-nuclear-bomb...
Also, I think most shelters would be far enough from blast areas to provide some protection.
Eizo Nomura (who, amazingly, doesn't have a Wikipedia page) was 170 meter from ground zero in Hiroshima, and survived (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_...)
Akiko Takakura was above ground at less than 300m and lived for 60 years.
Even though later bombs were much more powerful that makes it likely that shelters at the edge of the blast radius can save lives.
Not all of them, but any program to protect civilians is a statistics game.
All the construction in SF isn't 100% effective against earthquakes, either.
What you need is plenty of mass between sources of radiation, i.e. fallout particles where they settle, and from "skyshine". In a sufficiently bad situation, which would be pretty common, a simple ditch where you made sure the fallout kept out and didn't accumulate on, say, the tarp you were using for that, you'd still get zapped by gamma rays that bounce off atoms in the air and come down into the ditch.
So the most basic expedient fallout shelter is a ditch with hollow core interior doors over it or the like, and foot of dirt on top, which through arching holds most of its weight.
An above-ground building is iffy, because you want, say, 3 feet of dirt all around you, and either a foot on top or if the roof is high enough that's not as much of an issue. Middle stories of a tall building could suffice.
The lower 48 states are only 3,119,884.69 square miles if you inclde waterways. With just land it's only 2,959,064.44 square miles.
So, 10k nukes let's you carpet bomb the lower 48 and have one within 10 miles of just about every point. Focus on population centers and I suspect you could easily get 95+% of the population within 5 miles of a detonation.
Mostly, I was just pointing out that fairly soon they could branch out and target just about any population center. I don't think they ever actually targeted death valley for example.
Anyway, the important thing to remember is by the mid 1970's many of these bomb shelters had been unused for 20+ years. It's very natural to look at something like that and say spending more on this is probably pointless.
A well built bomb shelter would be very effective at reducing the lethal range of nuclear weapons.
Most of the stockpiles during the peak of the cold war were tactical nuclear weapons with low yields designed for the battle field.
And most warheads are less powerful (see my other comments); using my handy "RAND" nuclear effects calculator from the back of my copy of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 15 PSI for the following weapon air bursts (targeting cities, not ground bursts against ICBMs etc.):
500 Kt: 1.8 miles
300 Kt: 1.5 miles
100 Kt: a bit over 1 mile
50 Kt: 0.85 miles
A serious, concrete underground "hideout" will save you from anything but a really close hit; I can look up numbers if you want, but I maybe remember a good metric is 1MT and one mile of separation, requiring a less intense shelter. And a large fraction of the population can get by with much less, carpet bombing suburbia and exurbia was never going to happen, especially due to counterforce requirements and the Soviets believing that MAD was profoundly immoral and never buying into it.
Because both leaderships of US and USSR knew starting WW3 would mean end of civilization on the planet, they controlled themselves.
MAD was insanity cooked up by Robert Strange McNamara and company of Vietnam infamy in the early-mid-60s. The Soviets never bought into it, and thought, correctly, that a plan to burn alive children in their homes was irredeemably evil, and a sign the US was very evil. And at this level it was and still is.
Although emphasize could, it was hardly certain. (And if this strikes you as crazy, well, remember that since a little before 1920 they explicitly were planning on taking over the world, and got uncomfortably close to achieving that goal.)
This was one of the reasons SDI, even on paper/in the lab, was so terribly effective. Against an even partly effective ABM system a counterforce first strike becomes impossible, since you can't choose which warheads or boosters get intercepted.
Counterforce is an attack on your opponent's strategic forces, aimed at preventing them from retaliating. That's one of the reasons we had to build the expensive "Triad" of ICBMs, SLBMs, and manned bombers. Reliably taking all three out is very difficult.
The rational reason we don't build nuclear shelters anymore (which is not actually true by the way, Switzerland still builds them although they're not required anymore for private residences) is because there's very little chance of a massive nuclear war which is what they were for.
> As weapon yields increased, it's become apparent that a concrete, underground hideout is not going to save you.
Weapon yield has decreased, not increased. In the 50s, delivery was through bombers, you wanted big bombs because many bombers were going to be shot down so each nuke delivered had to pack as much punch as it could. Early ICBM had similar-ish issue, you had few inaccurate rockets and they had a warhead each so each warhead had to count, you built a big rocket and a big warhead on top of it, and the ones that didn't fail and weren't shot down razed a city even when they missed it by tens of miles. That's where you had multi-megaton designs
With the 60s and MIRV multi-megaton went online (they'd been designed in the 50s) but systems designed in the 60s and deployed in the 70s for the exact same role all went sub-megaton, half a megaton at most, usually less, for smaller and more precise delivery platforms and MIRV systems.
The most numerous warhead in the US nuclear arsenal is the 100kT W76.
Experience: I grew up in Kharkiv, a city with roughly a 1m population, and the second largest city in Ukraine. Most people lived in large apartment complexes that were organized into planned neighborhoods. Imagine four buildings surrounding a common area that was laid out as a small park. Inside this common area that my building was surrounding were three bomb shelters. We called them "old", "weird", and "new" based on their outside appearance. The entrances were fairly small: just a triangle structure with a door and a staircase going down. We never went too deep into them when they were open (the authorities would periodically close them up), but at one point I remember using an iron bar to break the chain on one of them and leading a few of my friends down into it. I really wish we had good flashlights, rope, etc. (we were all around 11 or 12). We went down two levels and looked at these huge rooms. Some of them looked to be set up for bunk beds and it looked like the beds were at some point taken out. I did wander into a random room without a flashlight and almost took a step into a darker area before realizing that it was an opening with a step ladder down to the lower level. I would have been badly hurt had I taken the step before checking. This naturally scared me enough to get out of there in a hurry. The next week this particular shelter was closed up with a better chain so we didn't get to go in again.
Edit: I tried to find some pictures of what it looked like. Surely someone has taken some photos at one point, but sadly I cannot find anything that resembled the bomb shelters I explored as a child. I do have a strange fascination with the Cold War, so now I really wish I could go back and take some pictures/explore things as an adult.
Even some of our subway stations are (rather large) bomb shelters. In my home village, both some of the schools and sport facilities all had their own bomb shelters which also had facilities for keeping gas out.
I do believe that is no longer required to build new bomb shelters but all existing ones has to be maintained and be ready to be used within a specified timeframe.
However, almost everyone had a storm shelter -- typically a cellar dug in the side of a hill (they get a lot of powerful thunderstorms and tornadoes). I could see them doubling as a bomb shelter back in the day, but I never heard them referred to as anything but a storm cellar.
I think this was something that peaked in the '50s. Certainly not at all popular afterward.
And the practical problems are colossal. E.g. take New York City. A few buildings had fallout shelters. But, realistically, how do you provide food, water, and sanitation for 8 million people? It's laughable to think that a handful of shelters can accomplish that. And the population of the NYC metropolitan area is much greater, 20 million people, and it would probably be targeted by multiple nuclear warheads. How many could survive, and for how long?
Overall, shelters might be a feasible idea for rural "flyover country". They are absurd for the big cities where the majority of the US population lives.
The Las Vegas shelter is awesome, almost like an art installation.
If you check out their site, you can find out how you too can own an old underground missile silo. :-)
Somebody spent five minutes googling "bomb shelter" and then posted a few photos with some asinine remarks.
A little later, the county was dotted with the Minuteman missle sites and control centers. One silo was on a friends farm. He said it was sobering to think that the several-foot thick concrete lid would blow the better part of a hundred yards away just before launch.
NB The novel "Arc Light" includes one thread where the crew from a a Minuteman control center surviving an attack and spending weeks underground then having to make an escape through the devastated landscape:
What I find weird is the attitude that it's better to die than survive with most all of your loved ones and friends, albeit at a reduced quality of life for a long time. A rather ultimate materialistic attitude, or perhaps it's as Dean Ing put it in Systemic Shock:
The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its cassandras: city planners, ecologists, demographers, socialists, immigrants, who had all warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. Social stress, failure of essential services, and warfare were only a few of the spectres we had granted only a passing glance. We had always found some solution to our problems, though: often at the last moment. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.
The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it.
Its a manifestation of binary thinking. Well, either we "must" have no nuclear attack, or it "must" be post apocalyptic. Not allowed to be just one shipping container in LA or one maintenance accident at a missile field.
A good analogy is often heard for bicycle helmets. I'll either be squashed underneath the wheels of a bus or I won't get into an accident, either way the helmet doesn't matter so I won't wear one. Even if slipping on gravel and hitting your head on the curb is about 100x more likely than either of the binary options.
Studies seem to suggest that helmets reduce the risk of a head injury by as much as 85%. In 2012 for nearly 2/3 of bicycle accident fatalities the rider was not wearing a helmet. This used to be an even higher percentage but fortunately the # of fatalities has decliend signficantly in the last 20 years.
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/pedestrians-and-bicyclists...
> In 2012 for nearly 2/3 of bicycle accident fatalities the rider was not wearing a helmet.
That's irrelevant, since it indicates nothing about what fraction of those 2/3 would have survived if they'd been wearing helmets (as an example, if someone is hit my a truck at 50 mph, it really doesn't matter if he's wearing a helmet or not). Also, what fraction of cyclists wear helmets? I'd be surprised were it so much as 1/3; if it's less, then that would indicate that helmet-wearers are more likely to die than non-helmet-wearers (due to risk-tolerance on the part of both cyclists and drivers, c.f. http://www.cnet.com/news/brain-surgeon-theres-no-point-weari...).
There are three types of head strike injury: those with so little force that no death or severe injury would occur, with or without a helmet; those with sufficient force to inflict death or serious injury without a helmet, but which a helmet would prevent; and those with so much force that a lightweight foam-and-plastic helmet wouldn't help.
> This used to be an even higher percentage but fortunately the # of fatalities has decliend signficantly in the last 20 years.
It looks to me from that IIHS graph that it merely reflects the fact that more people are wearing helmets now than previously.
The effect of helmets on skier injuries is also ambiguous--presumably because the widespread use of helmets has at least correlated with more risky behaviors.
Ah! I read that '95, and recently got to wondering what the title was. Could not think of it for the life of me.
The thing I realized as I got older, though, was the psychological impact that the threat of nuclear war had on that generation. My grandmother was not wealthy -- she worked most of her life at the cafeteria of the local high school -- and her husband died when he was in his 30's, leaving her to raise 5 children. At some point they decided to spend not-insignificant amounts of money on building a bomb shelter. As I grew up, I realized that this had a subtle but profound impact upon the attitudes of my grandmother and her children: they were all just a little paranoid, careful to the point of it almost seeming neurotic at times. My cousins and I did not share the same fear about the world at large that we witnessed in our parents, and came to believe that this was due to the fact that we grew up in a world where nuclear threats were not so pervasive.
It all tied back to the bomb shelter. The mere existence of this cinder block-lined hole in the ground was a daily reminder of what could happen, and what they believed would very likely happen. Many of my aunts and uncles were also prone to believe in the apocalyptic scenario de jure, from upcoming depressions[1] to stockpiling food and water in preparation for Y2K, to more extreme beliefs about race wars and the second coming of Christ.
Anyway, this shelter had an impact on me at a young age, but in the opposite direction. It taught me that living in fear like that is no way to live.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Depression_of_1990
My uncle told of a dinner invite he and my aunt got from a neighbor after a snowstorm that closed their particular road. Having been cooped up for the better part of a week, they decided to go. To travel, they hopped in the diesel tractor (think of a very small caterpillar) and, to the surprise of their hosts, showed up on time. I imagine they left early, as top speed of the tractor was maybe 5mph.
http://www.ustornadoes.com/2013/03/19/monthly-tornado-averag...
I now live in a state with only 20 or so tornados per year and I sometimes feel weird not having a safe room in my basement like my grandparents.
To some extent a crude fallout shelter is just a tornado shelter with canned goods and camp gear. A "real" fallout shelter is somewhat more complicated.
"grew up in a world where nuclear threats were not so pervasive."
The people making a lot of money off the "war on terror" would not be happy to hear stuff like that.
A lot of the buildings there are typical USSR-style 5-9 stories concrete block apartment buildings with basements made out of concrete blocks of between 0.3-0.5m thickness.
The modern, high precision weaponry, isn't available in Ukrainian army, instead it is mostly "classic" low precision "area attack" USSR stuff, like artillery guns and multiple unguided rocket launchers. When the city is shelled from a system like this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BM-27_Uragan) using cluster munition, such basement shelters work great.
(http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/photo-gallery/2014/7... - starting 2nd photo - the buildings itself ok if no direct hit with basements having very good chance to be ok even in case of direct hit into the building)
Even if it were, it's expensive and it requires point & aim so it's not drop & forget and you're bombing a very small surface.
You're not going to use it against random civilians when shelling a city center, that's a waste of money, time, airspace, efficiency, everything anyone can care about.
In image 7 some of the glass jars are so precariously placed that they are actually hanging over the edge of the shelf.
Overall, I agree with someone else's assessment here. They said:
Somebody spent five minutes googling
"bomb shelter" and then posted a few
photos with some asinine remarks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811872Also today's nuclear weapons are in general, weaker than those of 1950s, especially late 1950s. Weirdly, this means that shelters give somewhat LESS protection because fallout is less of a factor than blast and prompt radiation (you probably can't get in a shelter in time to avoid prompt radiation).
Hmmm, in general, very much not a "Maker" attitude. Think about how much fun it would be to recast it into that sort of upbeat "survival in style" ethos. Low power micro-controllers and ARM devices would be even more popular! One form of bragging rights would go to the teens who fashion the lowest power dissipation 1080p shelter media system ^_^.
I see from Dick's Wikipedia personal life section that he is almost certainly a city boy through and through, which would explain a lot of this story.
As for particulars, ignoring the arms-race part of it, really good basic fallout shelters are ridiculously low tech, the sort of thing people in flyover country are supremely competent to make without any fuss---and most of us don't get caught up in the next year model craziness (E.g. my parents bought a very high end Mercedes in ~1990 ... and sold it this year; they are, of course, members of the Silent Generation).
If you need blast protection, then the doors and vents require more serious stuff that's best produced in a factory to standard designs.
As for the new sophisticated threat from the Soviets in that story, no, I think not. Very much not in their style.
At the bottom of the page is a link labeled "Go to Next Page", which leads to Pay for the Printer, written by Philip K. Dick the year after, 1956. Read that and see if you change your mind about PKD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Greek_Island
Wanna bet they built another secret one with taxpayer money?
Basically if there is nuclear war, congress should die first because it was their job to prevent that from happening in the first place. We certainly should not want them to survive their failures.