So finding an actual shelter could be difficult. Most fallout shelters were repurposed basements and such spaces that are most likely to have gone back to what they were originally built for. "They probably turned them back into laundry rooms and things like that," she reportedly said. Nancy Silvestri of New York City's Emergency Management Department believes such shelters probably have been repurposed in the past few decades. "Because you would just be dead from the initial blast."īefore considering if the shelters still work today, one has to first find out if they actually even exist any more. "You wouldn't really have to deal with fallout," says Jeff Schlegelmilch, deputy director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. Illustration of a family building a bomb fallout shelter together, using sand-filled concrete blocks for roof shielding, from a US Department of Defense publication, 1961 Hulton Archive/Getty Images Even at the time of construction, they would have been obliterated by full-sized Russian megaton bombs, notes PM. Fallout shelters were, for the most part, simple concrete and steel structures that had air filtration systems and were only designed to protect against modest nuclear weapons. It also states that a modern day thermonuclear, high yield hydrogen bomb will render such structures moot. These shelters were never truly as good as people believed they were, adds the report, saying that they were normally under-equipped and under-funded. They harken back to a time, notes the report, when people actually believed that a simple bomb shelter could actually protect them from a thermonuclear bomb. The question, however, is if they are any good against modern nuclear weapons like hydrogen bombs? Also, were they any good at all, to begin with and where are they now?Ī recent report by Popular Mechanics (PM) attempts to answer these questions.įallout shelters were built in many major cities and were immediately identified by their black and yellow signs with triangles arranged within a circle. With the threat of nuclear war back on the table amid North Korea's accelerated nuclear and missile programme, fallout shelters are something that people might want to look back at. US Navy's flagship amphibious vessel to get latest laser weapon ahead of Rim of the Pacific war games
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