fallout shelter sign duck and cover sign

By 1961, blast protection claims disappeared as multi-megaton nuclear bombs grew in number as did the knowledge of their effects. The Office of Civil Defense (OCD), which spearheaded the fallout shelter program, made early distinctions between the notion of “fallout” and “blast” protection, but soon abandoned the latter aim as virtually impossible. They seemed to be saying that if the school building couldn’t protect you from Soviet warheads, a desk surely would. As David Monteyne’s fascinating volume, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), makes clear, the most important thing to remember is that these structures were not meant to advertise blast protection. The Cold War generation of Americans first encountered them in elementary school, where the civil defense programs, as we later found out, seemed to symbolize only conjoined paranoia and feckless optimism, made all the more ridiculous when we learned about the palliative nature of duck and cover drills.

Fallout shelter sign duck and cover sign