View Full Version : Cold War Backyard Bomb Shelters
So, a couple of days ago was the anniversary of President JFK urging/advising Americans to construct Bomb Shelters , that was 1961.
Just wondering if some members might have grown up with one. I remember it being a big thing, lots of 1800's homes had root or storm cellars that were converted.
Weird times! Like the "Blast from the Past" movie with Christopher Walken.
eddiememphis
10-08-2021, 17:21
I did an inspection on a home in Yoder that had one.
That is the only one I have seen in about 400 inspections.
.455_Hunter
10-08-2021, 17:29
I did an inspection on a home in Yoder that had one.
Probably a bit optimistic given proximity to Cheyenne Mountain.
Aloha_Shooter
10-08-2021, 17:49
No bomb shelter but at one point my father had the keys for the WW2-era shelters inside Diamond Head crater. Would have required advance notice but he always had a plan to put us inside those shelters if needed.
eddiememphis
10-08-2021, 18:05
Probably a bit optimistic given proximity to Cheyenne Mountain.
It may have been a tornado shelter as well. I didn't see any air handlers or anything so who knows?
My grandfather was an electrician that wired the missile silos along the front range.
They lived in the Springs and he said it was the best place to live if the Russians bombed us. With an Army base, two Air Force bases, the academy and NORAD, it was sure to be a high priority target. One big flash and that's it. Left a lasting impression on a 6 year old.
My dad used to fly around to various titan II missle silos, fixing various electronics systems. He was a specialist in the launch control module. Always ranted about the teletypes. They had a few alarms go off from time to time when signal noise would invariably match passwords. Lol.
He also found it ironic his work required only a secret clearance. Later he had a TS in interception work which was, tbh, a lot less risk to national security. But alas...
Around the Cuban missile crisis in1962, I was one of the millions of American children herded into the school gymnasium and other classrooms to practice cowering under desks in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike. At the time in 3rd grade I thought it was pretty absurd but I did think that a fallout shelter was prudent. I lobbied my father to build one but doing it was expensive and very few people ever built one. While mostly worthless in the long run an underground shelter would have made a good, cool wine cellar to store at the magical 58 degrees.
In 2007, a friend invited us to help make wine with free white wine grapes he had finagled from various Palisade growers. It started me to build a professional home winery. His wine cellar was one of those early 1960's dugout concrete fallout shelters in the back yard, unconnected to the house. Pretty nifty for making and storing wine but not very spacious for post nuclear habitation. I've made plans to build a similar but much larger shelter/wine cellar connected to our Palisade home but it will probably never happen. Practical priorities, you know.
Bailey Guns
10-08-2021, 22:11
Oh, yeah... I remember those duck and cover drills. I was very grateful to have a nuclear blast-proof desk in grade school. :)
OtterbatHellcat
10-08-2021, 23:29
If I had the money, I'd build one yesterday.
Tunnels to different structures and multiple escape options. Nukes aren't the only reason for having unique safety, storage, and mobility available to you.
I grew up in NW OK, not exactly near any "targets of interest", but we had tornadoes - so "fraidy holes" - storm shelters - were very common. But I remember seeing the Civil Defense signs around, and those silly desk drills in school.
We'd seen the Hiroshima films, this was the 60's and it was still fresh. And we were old enough to know that the bombs everybody had then were FAR more powerful than the two used on Japan. We knew we'd just be smoking ashes and the desks would be gone - as would the school and everything else. But the desk drills were useful for tornado training.
HoneyBadger
10-09-2021, 08:33
Nuclear detonations are a lot more survivable than most people think. Having even a small hill in between you and the detonation can make a huge difference (although most modern nukes are designed/programed to detonate 1km or many km in the air, so distance and a hill are your two friends, according to Pythagoras).
That being said.... living in a post-nuke world would be difficult and terrible. If you can't be really really far away from the detonation, then maybe being really really close is the next best thing.
HoneyBadger
10-09-2021, 08:38
FWIW, this is a conversation I've had many times with coworkers and family.... If I got notice of incoming ICBMs and my location was a target (4/5 places I've lived as an adult are very probable targets)... I would complete my job to the best of my ability, then step outside the building and call Mrs. HB if she was more than a few minutes away and we would watch the show together. I know a lot of cold war era military vets on both sides wrote about their plans to just walk away from their consoles if they saw missiles incoming. what a crazy concept.
Since it is sort of on topic...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=310-GYiitpM <--- map of all nukes to date, eye opening if people have not seen that already.
If people were not aware, nuclear winter is not a real thing, it was a psy-op by the KGP to plant the idea in U.S. periodicals to undercut the U.S. public's taste for the use of nuclear weapons. It is easily one of their most wildly effective missions. You still don't want to be near a blast site, but say, if India and Pakistan launched a ton of nukes at each other, outside of the spillover effects of a humanitarian crisis, it wouldn't affect us too much.
BushMasterBoy
10-09-2021, 11:00
Nuclear weapons accident killed my father. He died of multiple myeloma. I remember the radiation burns on his skin. He called them "beta burns". Johnston Island in the Pacific had to be abandoned. Did you know they detonated a nuclear weapon in Colorado to find natural gas ? All the natural gas released was radioactive after that. Don't even get me started about Rocky Flats...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_437
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_Atoll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rulison
I have been told by a old home builder that older homes in Security Widefield area have many shelters from the Cold War. My home was built in 1961.
KevDen2005
10-09-2021, 13:12
The Russians made a radioactive lake
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/03/lake-chagan-atomic-lake-filled-with.html
BushMasterBoy
10-09-2021, 14:19
Web cam chat girls are making fun of me on the internet.
87868
wctriumph
10-09-2021, 17:18
There were two families that I saw bomb shelters at when I lived in Westchester in LA, CA. When our neighborhood was condemned for the LAX expansion in the mid 1970’s there were many vacant houses as people moved away. Upon exploring these vacant homes we found many things and two of the homes had underground shelters in their backyards. After the people moved out the city came in and cleared and removed the entrance doors. Both were the same with two rooms. The first room was for living with the second room for storage and shower and toilet. If I remember correctly, they were about the size of a one car garage, maybe a little smaller. They were underground and you had a pair of doors just above ground level that opened up and out like a cellar door and then you went down about 10 feet to a man door. These were removed when the people moved. All of the plumbing and electric were removed as well.
A few blocks away there had been a Nike missile battery. I remember seeing the missiles on their racks once. The place went inactive when I was about 10 years old.
Duck and cover drills were a regular part of school and air raid siren testing on the first Friday of every month at 10:00 AM sharp.
Nike missile battery.
Coolest looking missile ever.
O2
https://cdn.britannica.com/37/125037-050-9AA74F69/Nike-missile-display-Hercules-Taiwan.jpg
eddiememphis
10-10-2021, 09:52
...Nike missile battery.
Were Uighurs forced to build them?
I remember hearing about a Civil Defense shelter under the stage at Red Rocks. It was full of CD equipment in the early 1970’s. Those shelters were everywhere
If you get a chance, visit the Atlas Missile Silo park in Weld county. They do tours a few times a month. It became a CD shelter after the Atlas was obsolete and is used as document storage for the county today.
Interesting tour and it’s full of old CD artifacts and Cold War history.
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