One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture

Abstract

In this book Kenneth D. Rose delineates the culture encompassing the atomic shelter issue in the 1950s and 1960s. He delves into a variety of topics: the general political discourse; discussions in popular magazines; treatments of nuclear holocaust in movies, conventional novels, and science fiction; and “what-if ” coverage in local newspaper articles that depicted, often with graphics, the devastation to be anticipated from a nuclear attack. The book thus visits such novels as Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold (1964), Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959), and later, more questioning works such as Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's Fail-Safe (1962). It links the shelter debate with broader arguments over the nation's nuclear doctrine and with the works of such nuclear apocalypticians as Herman Kahn. It also touches on the debate over the danger of fallout. This roomy perspective is wise, for bomb shelters were embedded more firmly in the nation's culture—public debate, fiction, advertisements, cartoons—than in its backyards. A 1960 survey by a committee chaired by Rep. Chet Holifield, a shelter enthusiast, could verify that only 1,565 had actually been built. Even in the early 1960s, when shelter building accelerated under the spur of John F. Kennedy's rhetoric and global tensions, the bulls went broke: business for the fallout shelter industry proved generally disappointing.