Companies even sold kits including everything needed for the project. A typical basement shelter only required common materials, things that could be found at any hardware store: concrete blocks, ready-mix mortar, wooden posts, board sheathing, and six pounds of nails. Lichtman’s thesis is that the idea of a D-I-Y shelter fit with postwar enthusiasm for home improvement projects, particularly in the growing suburbs. “The desire to protect the imperiled home, long a bulwark of American frontierism and self-defense, now translated to staving off the physical and psychological devastation of nuclear attack,” Lichtman writes. Fifty thousand people did so.Īs Cold War tensions grew in the early days of the Kennedy administration, the government distributed 22 million copies of The Family Fallout Shelter, a 1959 booklet offering step-by-step instructions for building a shelter in a family basement or in a hole dug in the backyard. In November of 1958, Lichtman writes, Good Housekeeping published an editorial titled “A Frightening Message for a Thanksgiving Issue,” telling readers that, in case of attack, “your only hope of salvation is a place to go.” It urged them to contact the government for free plans to make a shelter at home. A plan for an underground air raid shelter via Getty Instead, the Eisenhower administration called for citizens to take responsibility for protecting themselves in case of nuclear attack. But that would have been incredibly expensive. One option the government considered was building shelters all over the country. Truman created the Federal Civil Defense Administration to provide protection for citizens in case of nuclear war. In 1951, with the Cold War emerging in the aftermath of World War II, President Harry S. “Your only hope of salvation is a place to go.”
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