After 44 years, the Cold War was over.

But for people in the U.S., the Cold War has long ceased to be a concern—even though Russia still had nuclear warheads aimed at our cities. Even as far back as 1962, they refused to fully engage in Civil Defense programs. Government authorities told the country that shelters would greatly increase the chances for surviving a nuclear attack. Some Americans, like Post author Hanson Baldwin, simply didn’t believe that a shelter would protect them.

It is utter hokum to claim, as some have done, that more than 90 percent of the population could be saved by a national shelter program designed to protect against radioactivity alone.

The survivor may emerge into an area uninhabitable for days, weeks, months, years, or a lifetime. His immediate need is to know where to go to reach an area relatively uncontaminated by radioactivity. If he has to walk, he may receive a lethal dose of radioactivity before he reaches safety. ["The Case Against Fallout Shelters" March 31, 1962]

Baldwin quoted a director at Consumer Reports who had examined the commercially available models of fallout shelters.

“…fallout shelters of the type widely proposed to date are … costly and complex in their requirements [oxygen supply, water, power, heat, food, sanitary arrangements, and so forth] … limited and unreliable in usefulness, and … generally dependent on variables and unknowns….”

After all the debate and arguments about shelters between 1961 and 1962, few were built. The idea languished, then faded from consideration.

The government was baffled by Americans’ resistance to the shelters, as was James J. Byrne. In 1961, this Detroit plywood dealer purchased a truckload of build-it-yourself shelters, which he planned to sell to eager homeowners. As he expressed it:

“I didn’t see how I could miss.”

He liked the shelter’s design—three hollow walls and a hollow ceiling (to be filled later with a mixture of sand and gravel)… When placed against a basement wall, it provided shelter space about six feet high and eight feet square… It was so sturdy that, the [manufacturer] assured Byrne, it would withstand even the collapse of a house on top of it.

Furthermore, it could be bought in kit form—73 major steel components, none weighing more than 150 pounds—for about $430 wholesale and sold for a retail price of $725.

The first hint of trouble came when [Byrne] detailed four employees to assemble the display shelter on a company truck. According to the salesman, two men could do the job in from two to four hours. Byrne’s workmen took ten.

Had they been installing the shelter permanently, they would also have had to dump a small mountain of sand—four to five cubic yards—into the eight-inch hollow between the walls and between the ceiling panels. This task, Byrne had been told, would require another ten hours. But upon thinking it over, Byrne was not so sure.

“You are filling a space nearly seven feet high, and there are only a few inches’ clearance between the shelter and the basement ceiling,” he says. “How are you going to get the sand in there? With a spoon? And how can you pack the ceiling panels without having the sand run right back in your face?” ["Anyone For Survival?" May 27, 1965]

Despite his misgivings, Byrne hired a sales director and drove the shelter on a flatbed truck around the region. According to the sales director,

“Thousands of people streamed through the display but nobody bought… People would listen to their pitch … take all the literature they could get, ask questions, then say something like, ‘We can’t afford it now,’ or ‘I guess we’ll see how things turn out.’”

“People were confused, frightened, angry,” [Byrne] says. “I was accused of profiteering, war-mongering—you name it. One woman shouted at me— shouted—’Don’t you know that the more shelters we have the more likely someone is to start a war? Why do you do this to us?’ People who believed in predestination called me sacrilegious. My minister was angry with me. Even my wife disapproved. ‘I don’t believe God ever intended for people to live like that,’ she told me.”

They didn’t make a single sale.

Eventually Byrne had to write off his investment as a loss. He announced he would give away the shelters, but still there were no takers.

Not everyone resisted the idea. According to an unofficial source, about 200,000 shelters were sold nationwide—a small number for a population of 180 million.

Where are they today? Are they still stocked with food, water, and video games, awaiting the ultimate terrorist attack? Or are they storing Christmas decorations in basements and wine collections under backyards?

Why didn’t the rest of America take up the idea? Perhaps they truly believed a fallout shelter wouldn’t protect them. Or, perhaps, they preferred to take their chances in the open instead of in 60 square feet of space with their family members.

Fallout Shelters: The Underground Movement That Failed The Saturday Evening Post

Americans—both soldiers and civilians—were expecting a long, bloody campaign. A Post editorial from August observed—

“If you ask the average American how long he thinks the war in the Pacific will last, he is likely to reply, “If you’re asking me, my opinion is that we’d better get ready for a long war out there. All of us pay lip service to the idea that the country faces at least a year, and maybe more, of fighting before Japan accepts unconditional surrender.”

Our soldiers hadn’t been told that military planners were predicting the price of a successful invasion could be as high as a million casualties. However, they had all heard of what happened at Okinawa. There, between April and June, over 250,000 soldiers and civilians had died in a fierce, unrelenting firefight.

In his article, “What Japan Has Waiting For Us” [July 28, 1945], William McGaffin reported on the new tactics the Japanese army had developed.*

Because of its implications for the coming big show on the mainland of Japan, this duel of ours with disappearing cannon was closely watched by military strategists on our side and theirs too.

We did not ever have an easy time of it … It was a much tougher problem when the enemy opened up with several dozen [cannons] at once—mass firing. This is an American specialty. The Jap was not supposed to know how to do it. He never had done it before. He does not do it now as well as we, but too well, at that. The effect of two dozen shells exploding almost simultaneously in a single area—mass firing—is exceedingly more disastrous than two dozen shells arriving one by one over a period of time.

He kept his guns alive to harass us in spite of our overwhelming strength. He kept them alive by taking them into thousands of caves prepared against the day of invasion—caves like those presumably ready in the rugged regions of China und Japan.

The Japs are good at camouflage. Many a cave had a deceptively painted trap door. Sometimes it was impossible to detect such a gun position unless you had your glasses right on it when the trap door flopped open and the gun was rolled out.

Groupment Henderson, a mixed Marine and Army outfit specializing in counterbattery fire, made a rich haul one afternoon by accident. The air observer spotted a group of camouflaged light antiaircraft guns. Marine Lt. Col. F. P. Henderson, who commands the groupment, began giving the enemy pieces the treatment he had found most effective. Before going for “destruction,” with the 200-pound shells of his 8-inch howitzers, he ordered his Long Toms to ‘walk’ volleys of their 100-pounders around in the area.

This knocks off camouflage, opens up a target and gains a by-product of personnel casualties. The results, however, never were so astonishing as on this day. For when the camouflage was knocked off, seven more guns were laid bare—seven formidable 150-mms. The light anti-aircraft guns, insignificant game in comparison, were there to protect the precious 150′s. The colonel’s 8-inchers proceeded to knock off the seven big guns.

Each night new positions would be fixed. They were not always new guns. Often they were old ones moved to new places. Moving around was the only way the Jap could keep his guns alive.In the end, upward of an estimated 500 Japanese guns were knocked out on Okinawa. It took weeks to get them all.

The strain on troop morale was another new factor we had not encountered before. Our divisions on Okinawa never had been under shelling by heavy artillery. They stood up well, considering their greenness to this type of ordeal, but a percentage of battle neuroses—‘shell shocks’ we called them in the last war—inevitably developed. Many had to be evacuated.

On Okinawa, these now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t guns proved to be a definite new threat to an American invading force. It was defeated eventually. But thoughtful strategists are wondering: If he could do what he did on Okinawa, what must he have waiting for us in Japan or China?

He has tipped his hand now, showing us that he has large-caliber guns, that he knows how to mass-fire them and how to keep them alive indefinitely in caves.

And, though his air force and his fleet have been whittled down from their dangerous proportions, his big guns have hardly suffered at all. For he did not bring them out until Okinawa. It would seem a logical deduction that he has plenty waiting for us when we come into his homeland for the big show.

Military chroniclers of the future, perhaps, will see in Okinawa a sort of final testing ground of the Pacific, where new weapons and new ways of using them were tried and perfected for the great battles ahead. We shall need every bit of the experience we have gained here.

Okinawa proved to be a different sort of testing ground. We tested how well their defenses held up in the home islands and found them more deadly than we had expected.

Thankfully, we can only imagine how much more intense the fighting would have been had we invaded mainland Japan. On August 6 and 9 we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and the war, and the Japanese government surrendered. Because the invasion was cancelled, hundreds of thousands of GIs would return home. The cost to Japan was over 200,000 civilian deaths—a number that would probably have been small compared to the carnage of a lengthy invasion.

* Note: McGaffin uses the diminutive title “Japs” to indicate the soldiers of Imperial Japan. It was a term that was widely and thoughtlessly used in America before the war. It would have been hard, I suppose, for a reporter to write of the Pacific war without using a hateful term for the enemy. So I’ve decided to retain the term in historical context.

Read “What Japan Has Waiting for Us”, published July 28, 1945.

How The Future Looked Without The Bomb The Saturday Evening Post