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

It involved nearly every nation on earth, and used a bewildering array of weapons: economic warfare, diplomatic maneuvering, and endless propaganda. And though it was a “cold” war in the west, it frequently erupted into long, bloody conflicts in southeast Asia, Africa, and Central America.

Here in America, the Cold War became the real and daily threat of sudden nuclear annihilation for 42 years, which only ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union suddenly imploded.

There was no signing of a peace treaty because there had never really been a war. If the Cold War had a formal beginning, it was probably May 22, 1947. On this day, President Harry S. Truman signed into law what might be his most durable legacy: The Truman Doctrine.

At the time, the Soviet Union was actively fomenting revolution in the post-war world, and gambling that the United Nations were tired of fighting. Soviet forces had already seized control of much of eastern Europe, and begun walling off eastern Germany. It was also looking to expand into the Mediterranean, where governments were still staggering from the war.

Great Britain, financially drained from six years of war, was unable to continue its aid to democratic governments in Greece and Turkey. The United States feared these countries would fall to Russian domination without British help.

The Truman Doctrine launched America’s counter-offensive to the Soviets with a grant of $400 million in aid to stabilize the Turkish and Greek governments.

The Truman Doctrine committed America to containing communism. It was the opening of a broader initiative that eventually granted $17 billion to help war-torn Europe rebuild its economies and peoples.

The Post provided extensive coverage of these events and Americans’ attitudes about what their government’s initiatives. A short editorial article from the June 7, 1947 issue was titled “Most Americans Think the U.N. Worth Saving.”  Addressing Americans’ attitude toward the appropriation of monies to Turkey and Greece, it says:

“They accept the necessity of sending food and extending military aid to Greece and Turkey, but they have a feeling that the scheme is too much like the establishment of a military bridgehead and too little like economic reconstruction.”

The American people were also extremely concerned that the money and aid were not going to fix the “root” of the problem.  The problem at the time was perceived as:

“We have done too little to prevent Europe from rotting at the core – i.e., Germany – and, as a consequence, find ourselves trying desperately to patch her up around the edges.”

This latter statement was clearly referring to the Marshall Plan’s $17 billion in aid.

In “Why The Truman Doctrine Makes Sense,” appearing just a few weeks later, the editors state that the US had averted a disaster in the Mediterranean.

“State Department officials are certain that, if the United States had not acted promptly upon the announcement of British withdrawal, Greece would have been the victim of a coup d’etat within a few weeks.”

Later that month, the editors wondered about the proper recipients of aid under the Truman Doctrine in “Must We Lend Britain More Billions?”

“Our Truman Doctrine makes no sense at all if the United States is to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into puny countries like Greece and Turkey and Korea without simultaneously guaranteeing Britain against economic collapse.”

History has shown the wisdom of Truman’s plan. The United States pumped a fortune into Western  Europe, but it stabilized global politics enough to ensure a 44 year stalemate.

It could be argued on a much larger scale that Truman’s foreign policy have led to America’s present-day involvement around the world.

It must have been unsettling to many Americans in 1947 to hear their governments was getting ready to commit billions upon billions of dollars in aid to ensure global peace, but it proved, ultimately, to be a good investment. And it might give us reason to be hopeful for peace beyond today’s terrorism.

May 22, 1947: The Cold War Begins The Saturday Evening Post

The woman is Lucia Simion, an Italian who has, to use her term, “over-wintered” at the Concordia Station in Antactica. She told us,

“I am not the only one, since many other people, women and men, researchers and technicians, are under the spell of this lonely place at the end of the world. The air sparkles with millions of tiny snow crystals and – except for the snow that cracks under your thick Sorel boots—there is a huge, fantastic silence.”

I Lived With the Russians in Antarctica
by Gordon D. Cartwright
October 18, 1958

This Concordia station consists of a few buildings surmounted by two white towers. Even by Antarctica standards it’s near nothing: “far from the Ross sea and the Dumont d’Urville sea…and even far from the South Pole, 1,800 kilometers away…”

One might well ask why a person would want to spend the winter in an isolated spot in the middle of the most remote continent on the planet. “Dome C is considered to be one of the best places on earth for astronomy and astrophysics,” Simion’s article states. “More and more experiments and telescopes are coming to the station. Lots of big projects are programmed for the future, including the search for extra-solar planets, observations in the infrared spectrum, and the study of cosmic microwave background radiation.” .

Between 1997 and 2004, “Dome C hosted the successful EPICA project (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica), during which the most ancient ice to date in Antarctica was retrieved—a climatic archive spanning over 800,000 years.”

The Concordia station is European, being owned and operated by two countries – France and Italy. As an Italian who lives in France, Ms. Simion fits right in. “Most of the time people go along very well,” she writes. But there can be conflict, “especially about…FOOD. Yes, it’s hardly believable, but Italians and French have different tastes. So the chef must prepare French and Italian food!!! One day snails…the other day risotto!” Saturdays are special: “Pizza party for everybody”.

The article Ms. Simion requested concerned an American meteorologist who spent a year with Soviet scientists at the South Pole. It must have been an unusually warm spot for people in the middle of a Cold War.

Ms. Simion writes that the article, “is very interesting, even if it was published 52 years ago! The Saturday Evening Post was ahead of its time.”

To read the 1958 article (also with excellent photos), “I Lived With the Russians in Antarctica,” click below:

Article: “I Lived With the Russians in Antarctica” from October 18, 1958.[PDF]

And, oh, yes, the next time you feel like complaining about winter, remember the scientists at the South Pole, and think about what “40 degrees below Zero” would feel like.

Reading The Post at the South Pole The Saturday Evening Post