“I'm really struck at the enormous fraud that was perpetrated on the public,” says Dr. In truth, it didn't matter if the shelters worked or not if a nuclear bomb went off, most people would be dead from the initial blast.įallout shelter signs are the last remnants of an ill-conceived program that was designed to quell the fears and anxieties of Americans who had little faith in the shelters to begin with. Thousands of these black-and-yellow signs still remain on structures throughout the city’s five boroughs, marking locations where New Yorkers could take refuge from the deadly radioactivity of a nuke - more than 50 years ago.īack then, these shelters were mostly concrete windowless rooms packed with canned goods and water supplies to sustain people for days - but they were never all they were cracked up to be in terms of protection. But if an atomic bomb does explode in the city, experts advise against taking cover in a building with a fallout shelter sign. Or they come from preparedness efforts - such as backyard bomb shelters and yellow-and-black Fallout Shelter signs.This summer, New York City officials released a public service announcement about what people should do in case of nuclear Armageddon. Or they come from fictional accounts - such as the 1957 novel On the Beach by Nevil Shute or the 1983 made-for-TV movie The Day After. Sometimes our Nuclear Moments come from actual events - such as Hiroshima or Chernobyl.
Nearly everyone who replied carries a nuclear image. We wanted to examine certain Nuclear Moments in recent world history that shocked our consciousness. We received more than 3,700 replies, including some who chastised us for fear mongering and emphasizing disaster. Knowing that we have lived with these potential consequences for more than 60 years, we posed this query to NPR followers on Facebook: We want to know the image that first forced you - as a child - to think about the possibility of nuclear annihilation. It's great as long as it works right, but you can't engineer away every possible calamity." "But the trouble with nuclear power is that the potential consequences are so terrible. The Fukushima disaster "seems like a fairly random accident," says Reid Detchon of Energy Future Coalition, a nonpartisan public policy group. Officials check the level of radiation on a woman in Fukushima prefecture.
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