Selects: Fallout Shelters: Probably Useless (Let’s Never Find Out)

Stuff You Should Know

This episode revisits the history and practicality of fallout shelters during the Cold War era, examining their design, government involveme

Key takeaways

• Fallout shelters were largely ineffective due to poor construction and unrealistic assumptions about survival conditions.
• The U.S. government's national shelter program was underfunded and poorly implemented despite public fear during the Cold War.

Main topics

• Cold War nuclear anxiety
• Government-sponsored fallout shelter programs

Notable quotes

"We wanted to address our own foibles in the billabongs terminology that we were talking about in the wetlands episode."

Conclusion

While fallout shelters symbolized a nation's fear during the Cold War,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey Speaker 2 (0:05) guys, it's me, Josh. And Fallout shelters have been on my mind a lot lately. We've been doing some episodes about the Cold War, and they played a big role in that. And that second season of Fallout, the TV show based on the game, it's really good. And on Wednesday, I got trapped in the Fallout shelter in the basement of an abandoned school for 18 hours. And someone finally found me. And the fire department had to come cut a hole in the steel door with a huge saw. So I thought that maybe releasing our episode on fallout shelters again as this week's select would be a good idea. It came out in 2020, and it's pretty good, and I hope you enjoy it. Speaker 1 (0:51) Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 2 (1:01) Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kablooey-Clark. There's Charles W. Bam Bam Bryant and Jerry Radioactive Rowland. Oh, boy. And this is Stuff You Should Know. You still got it. After all these years. Speaker 3 (1:20) You still got it. Speaker 2 (1:22) Yep. Speaker 3 (1:22) Hey, I think before we get going, we should talk very briefly about our audio book. Speaker 2 (1:27) Oh, yeah. Speaker 3 (1:28) Because this week in real time, we are each recording our respective parts for the audio book. And first of all, we just want to tell everyone there's going to be an audio book version. Yeah, spoiler. Of Stuff You Should Know, colon, and mostly incomplete guide to very interesting things. Speaker 2 (1:47) Man, Speaker 3 (1:48) still. Speaker 2 (1:49) An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. Speaker 3 (1:54) Yeah, so we're trying to push that out as a, you know, get both is what I say. But if you're into audiobooks, we're doing one. But also, I just want to make sure people know what they're getting. And I put this on the Stuff You Should Know Army page. They're not getting 27 new podcast episodes. Speaker 2 (2:12) No. And Speaker 3 (2:13) they should know that because our podcast is unscripted conversation. Speaker 2 (2:17) An Speaker 3 (2:18) audio book is us reading an audio book. And rather than just weirdly trading lines reading from a script, which would – I think that would dash a lot of people's image of what we do. Speaker 2 (2:30) Yeah. Speaker 3 (2:31) We are each reading chapters. And I think they're going to mix in some stuff here and there. But, yeah. I mean it's going to be great and fun, but it's not. podcast episodes. We don't get to just fart around and make jokes. Like, we got to read our book. Speaker 2 (2:45) No, we have, oh man, we will be kept in line. If we tried to fart around and make jokes, it would not be good. There's this whole time is money ethos and yelling, sometimes crying. It's a real stressful situation, everybody. Speaker 3 (2:58) How did you, how'd that go for you yesterday? Did you enjoy yourself? I just told you there's a lot of yelling and crying. It was very stressful. Speaker 2 (3:03) Yeah, it was fun. It reminded me a lot of recording The End of the World. Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, I wrote those and then I read them. Right. So it was very similar to that except a lot less heavy. Speaker 3 (3:15) Yeah, I was slightly nervous at first for some reason after talking for 12 years, probably just because you weren't there. But then it was like, you know, it was fine. Speaker 2 (3:24) Did Fleet, the director, calm you, make you feel better? Speaker 3 (3:28) Yeah, I mean, you know, I got in my groove. I felt pretty comfy by the end of it. Speaker 2 (3:32) Yeah, so, I mean, it is fun. It's definitely a lot of extra work this week, but it's kind of cool, you know. At the end, we're going to have a bona fide audio book. Speaker 3 (3:40) That's right, and a bona fide book that you can preorder now. And we're also working on getting that preorder gift available to the U.K. and Australia and other parts of the world because we have different publishers there. It's not like we were trying to exclude everyone. Speaker 2 (3:55) No, no, no, but we are. Moving heaven and earth to get it done. And yeah, if you're in the U.S. and Canada and you preorder, if you haven't gotten your poster yet, worry not. You're going to get your preorder gift eventually. Speaker 3 (4:06) That's right. Speaker 2 (4:07) Wow. So for the 15, 17 people who stuck around, prepare to learn about fallout shelters because that's ultimately what we're here to talk about today. Speaker 3 (4:18) That's right. Actually, before that, I have to say Speaker 2 (4:21) one more thing. Oh, God. Speaker 3 (4:23) I posted that squirrel attack video on my Instagram, you know, that we talked about on the episode. Speaker 2 (4:28) Yeah. Because Speaker 3 (4:29) people kept asking, so I put it up. I'm at Chuck the Podcaster. If you want to see a squirrel go berserk and literally fly through the air and hit me in the leg, then you can see that. It's been viewed like 15,000 times now. Speaker 2 (4:44) One of these days, I hope you'll fess up to what you did to provoke that squirrel. I mean, Speaker 3 (4:49) the whole thing's there. You see me exit my house. Speaker 2 (4:52) Yeah, but I mean, we didn't know what happened a half hour before. You know, that had been ongoing for the last week or so. Yeah, that's true. Speaker 3 (4:59) That's true. No backstory. Speaker 2 (5:01) So now I think we're going to talk about fallout shelters because, Chuck, your house has a basement. But it's exposed on one side to the outdoors. It's not an in-ground basement as far as I know. And hopefully I'm not divulging too much information about your house so weird fans will be able to find it and show up. Speaker 3 (5:21) Well, actually, you know, one side of it is exposed to the world. But the other side is, you know, 10 feet of earth and red clay. Like it could have been a great fallout shelter had it not been for that one side. Speaker 2 (5:35) Sure. But there are things you could do. Or could have done. I think we should use past tense here. Because the need for a fallout shelter as far as a nuclear war goes is vanishingly remote these days. Speaker 3 (5:48) Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:48) I like to think. Speaker 3 (5:50) I Speaker 2 (5:50) don't Speaker 3 (5:50) think Speaker 2 (5:50) we should get into any fear mongering here. No, I agree. But there are a few things you could have done or could do to build a fallout shelter with that good side, I guess. And we're going to talk about that today. But mainly what we're talking about with fallout shelters is almost kind of like this examination of the world psyche during the Cold War to where as the nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States started to build up in step with one another and we were suddenly in a nuclear arms race where just 10 years before there were no such thing as nuclear weapons, people started to realize like, oh, man, if one of these goes off near me, I'm in big trouble. And they started looking around to the government to say, hey, what should I do? And at first the government was like, you know, figure it out yourself. And then eventually the government kind of got a little more involved. And before you know it, we had a national fallout shelter program. As feeble and terrible as it was, at least we had one. Yeah, Speaker 3 (6:58) what's really funny is when you read up on this stuff, And you learn that President Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, that is, asked Congress for $100 million to build public fallout shelters. Speaker 2 (7:08) Right. That Speaker 3 (7:09) is such an adorable number now. It Speaker 2 (7:11) is. Speaker 3 (7:11) That would build like 10 fallout shelters these days. Yeah. Speaker 2 (7:14) Maybe. That's like the amount of money that would take to get like a motorcade to the Capitol. From the White House basically, you know? Speaker 3 (7:24) Yeah, but it was a real threat back then. And I can't remember what episode. It may have been nuclear radiation. We did one on the disaster in Japan. We've done a couple on this. But I know that I told the story of my father like having us sort of do 20 percent of a fallout shelter when I was 10 or 12 years old after the movie the day after. aired on television. Speaker 2 (7:50) Yeah, I remember that. Speaker 3 (7:52) Yeah, I mean, you know, it was my brother and I taking out, digging out buckets of dirt and carrying them out in the woods and dumping them for probably three or four weekends, Speaker 2 (8:00) and then we'd stop. So you guys were 20 % covered if something happened. Yeah, I mean, we could have, yeah, it was pretty gross. So was it akin to this shelter that we were going to go over at the end? Was it like that? Well, Speaker 3 (8:15) I mean, it... Eventually could have been, which is to say, you know, kind of a concrete room underground, surrounded by earth. Speaker 2 (8:24) Oh, yeah. No, I'm saying like the kind where it's like you dig a trench and put some wood poles and earth over it. No, this is Speaker 3 (8:30) part of my basement. Like my dad had a workshop, and on the interior wall of the workshop, he knocked down the cinder block wall, and we just started digging. Speaker 2 (8:40) Oh, wow. Which I'm sure was super safe to the foundation of the house. Right. He's like, it's probably not load-bearing. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, there was definitely a point in time, especially during the height of the Cold War, where it was like, this is, we're really in danger here. The world was just kind of walking around, just twitching and shaking at the idea of this. And part of the problem was not just the idea that a bomb was going to go off and just blow cities apart. Because apparently there was this one of the nuclear deterrent theories, the game theories that people kind of operated under said, no, you know what? If we ever engage in nuclear war, we're just going to be attacking military installations side to side. And so we don't really have to worry about that for people in New York or D.C. or, you know, Atlanta, wherever, any of the major metropolitan cities. We don't have to worry about those cities getting leveled. But there's going to be a huge problem for the people living there because there's such a thing as radioactive fallout. It's not just the bomb that gets you. It's the fallout afterward. Speaker 3 (9:45) Yeah. I mean, if you're talking about a nuclear bomb, a nuclear warhead, it depends on what kind. You know, back then it was different than it is now. But Speaker 2 (9:55) let's Speaker 3 (9:56) say a one megaton H-bomb back in the day would completely wipe out. everything within about two miles from where it hit. Speaker 2 (10:05) Yeah, and I know I said we weren't going to fearmonger Chuck, but I found out that there is a bomb in the U.S. arsenal called the B-83, which is 1.2 megatons, and it can be carried around very easily by the B-2 bomber. So those exist. Speaker 3 (10:19) So two miles, everything is gone, and this is from the blast. And a person, if you're like five miles away from that bomb site, you're going to get hit with third-degree burns. Yeah. Just from that blast. Speaker 2 (10:32) Yeah, you're Speaker 3 (10:32) going Speaker 2 (10:32) to be hating life. So the blast is going to be bad enough. And again, yeah, just for people miles away could be burned to death. incinerated, vaporized, just all sorts of terrible stuff. But if you're living outside of that blast zone, you got problems in the radioactivity that's going to be generated by it. Because when those bombs explode, they release a lot of radioactive particles of different varieties. And those things go up in the air and they get kind of carried around and stirred up in the atmosphere. But a lot of them are heavy enough that they come back down. And basically around the area, in a larger area around the bomb's epicenter. Speaker 3 (11:12) Yeah, and we should probably just go over some of these different types of radiation. Some of it you might recognize from various Incredible Hulk comic books. Speaker 2 (11:23) Right. Speaker 3 (11:23) But you've got your alpha particles, your beta particles. You've got gamma rays. You've got neutrons. The gamma rays is what got Hulk, right? I think so, right? Speaker 2 (11:32) Yeah. Speaker 3 (11:33)