The classic CBS TV series The Twilight Zone explored the issue of civil defense and fallout shelters in the Septemepisode “ The Shelter,” when a man with his own shelter is ridiculed for building one before it’s announced that nuclear war is on its way. But it’s difficult to understand how seriously people took Duck and Cover strictly from popular culture. Or, in the case of the 1990s, movies set during that period like Matinee (1993) or Blast From the Past (1999). The American fallout shelter is pretty central to our ideas of what the Cold War was like, largely thanks to science fiction and TV shows of the 1960s and ‘70s. And the study that gave us that figure provides a fascinating look into the mindset of Americans during the Cold War.
If you had to guess the percentage of American households that had a fallout shelter in the 1960s, what would you say? Fifty percent? Twenty-five percent? As low as 10 percent? In reality, just 1.4 percent of Americans had a nuclear fallout shelter in 1962.
0 kommentar(er)
