“The Struggle to Sell Survival”: Family Fallout Shelters and the Limits of Consumer Citizenship

In 1961 families across the United States witnessed the sudden growth of one of the most remarkable consumer products of the Cold War: the home fallout shelter. This article charts the rise of domestic sales for home fallout shelters between 1961 and 1963, the growth in the number of shelter salesmen, the public backlash against their sales techniques, and the eventual decline of the home shelter market. The story of the family fallout shelter exposes the limitations of consumer capitalism in mobilizing and sustaining popular support for national security policy. Questioning the validity of the product being sold and the trustworthiness of the person pitching it, homeowners challenged the citizen-consumer ideal that supposedly went hand-in-hand with the state sanctioned vision of privatized survival.

The Real Mineshaft Gap

This chapter tracks the development of U.S. and Soviet civil defense from the beginning of the 1960s until the mid-1970s. The 1961 Berlin Crisis compelled both superpowers to reinvigorate their civil defense programs. Soviet civil defense was transferred into the Ministry of Defense and renamed “Grazhdanskaia oborona” (civil defense). Similarly, President Kennedy transferred civil defense to the Department of Defense and endorsed a program based on developing community fallout shelters in existing buildings. But from the mid-1960s, the superpowers’ civil defense programs increasingly diverged. Congressional opposition and the assassination of President Kennedy deprived the community shelter program of funding. The ascent of Leonid Brezhnev to the apex of the Soviet leadership, by contrast, empowered military interests who secured substantial resources for Soviet civil defense by the mid-1970s.

Limit Depth of Rock Mine Shafts for Underground Shelters

Today, especially after the several technical accidents, the last one in France Flamanville power station near Cherbour in January 2017 risks of the nuclear hazards due to technical, terrorist or military accidents continually rising. In this situation is of a great importance to start with a retrofit those of underground spaces that was decommissioned in last years and to start thinking about reuse of mining shafts as a fallout shelters for protection of civil population. And the first step is to start with selection of the identify spaces with a mathematical models for selection of the rocks massifs that can be useful for porpoise of the underground shelters. The need to utilise specific geological data, which project organisations usually do not have available. The physical-mathematical properties of rocks are not sufficiently portrayed in these methodologies, which complicates execution of calculations and reduces the credibility of these calculations. The methodology for calculating the stability of rocks around a mine works proposed in the article enables resolution of the task complexly for the conditions of individual deposits, utilising the generalised values of rock property indicators.

Attitudes about Reality and College Students' Opinions about Nuclear War

89 college students' scores on an Attitudes about Reality scale delineating attitudes on a social constructionist-logical positivist spectrum were correlated with those on a questionnaire concerning opinions about nuclear war. Correlations indicated students more oriented toward the logical positivist attitude more strongly endorsed the ideas that medical help would be available after a nuclear attack (– .32), fallout shelters would increase survivability (– .35), nuclear weapons effectively deter war (– .19) and space weapons could defend against a nuclear attack (– .20). Students more oriented toward the social constructionist position were more likely to endorse a nuclear weapons freeze (– .20).