Let's dig a hole and live in it

While wracking my addled brains for something to post about today, for some mysterious reason I began to think about fallout shelters. Back in the 50's and 60's lots of people built these things in their backyards hoping to survive the inevitable nuclear halocaust. The Civil Defense actually sent out books showing how to build the things. When we were litle, my sister and I found one that my parents got in the mail in the early 60's. I wish I had a copy of it, but my sister is in possession of it now. (Although she'll probably deny it.) I have no idea if that particular volume is online, but at Project Gutenberg there's In Time of Emergency: A Citizen's Handbook on Nuclear Attack, Natural Disasters from 1968 that looks similar, but the illustrations aren't as good. Here's a commercially available fallout shelter handbook from 1962.



Goofy nostalgia, you say? Well, there's still people building fallout shelters. Here's some instructions. How about a Nuclear Blast and Fallout Shelters FAQ? And there's an online book called Nuclear War Survival Skills.

What if people tried to sell bomb shelters? There wouldn't be enough of a market for even one company to survive selling this kind of stuff, right? Wrong.

There's American Bomb Shelter, F-5 Storm Shelters (they also make bomb shelters), Radius Engineering Intl. Bomb Shelters (these are really cool), Alpine Survival Group (I'd like to live in one of these), and Utah Shelter Systems. Who knew there was so much money to made on paranoia?

Buying a bomb shelter too nutty? The American Civil Defense Association has a page loaded with stuff. Some of it's probably even useful, but I didn't check because I'm like that.

And last, but not least, The Civil Defense Museum is loaded with documents, photos, audio, video, and who knows what else.