However, within about a year, the vogue for shelters was already on its way out. So, never expose yourself unnecessarily to radiation.” Your freedom of action would depend on your radiation exposure during the critical period after the fallout descends. “Fallout would be most dangerous in the first two days after an attack, and even if you were inside a shelter you probably would have absorbed some radiation. “In the event of a nuclear attack, be prepared to live in a shelter for as long as two weeks, coming out for short trips only if necessary,” the pamphlet continued. Though the pamphlet emphasized community and public shelters as the most efficient tactics, it also included tips for at-home shelters that could be built for $150 or less and would cut the danger from fallout, the Department asserted, by 100 times. In 1961, the Department of Defense published a handy pamphlet instructing Americans about what to do to protect themselves from fallout. Meanwhile, individuals, encouraged by President Kennedy’s call for preparedness, started building their own, with sales of shelter-building necessities skyrocketing. The government requested $207.6 million (the equivalent of about $1.7 billion today) to spend on a fallout shelter program, which would designate and mark the community shelters that already existed, stock up on supplies and help citizens prepare to go underground. It was in the early 1960s - as the Cold War entered one of its tensest phases - that people began to take the idea of building their own fallout shelters more seriously, as TIME reported in 1961. (Of course, individual bunker-builders’ concerns are different from those of the federal government, as one’s own home is always the right place for one’s own personal shelter.)

They were prohibitively expensive, it was impossible to know whether they’d be located in the right places until it was too late, and even if they were well placed there wouldn’t be enough time for a substantial number of people to get inside in time.

In 1957, the group known as the Gaither Committee issued a report to President Eisenhower enumerating the many problems with a safety program that focused on such shelters. Though the backyard bunker lives on in the American imagination, in reality its heyday was brief.Īs TIME has previously reported, it was already clear in the 1950s that people who found themselves near ground zero in a nuclear attack could probably not be much helped by the kinds of structures that might be designed to protect large groups of people in cities.

But one of the most stereotypical such symbols of the nuclear age has largely been abandoned as a safety tactic.

Build a fallout shelter