Conveniently enough, the only official public shelter directory in the library is for St. Students preparing for nuclear war in the fallout shelter atĪccording to the papers, by 1962 Minnesota had ostensibly identified enough public fallout shelter space to house about 39 percent of its 3.4 million population, though the quality of these spaces was hardly uniform. Digging through the archives at the Historical Society archives, the trail of paperwork - Civil Defense Shelter Management Manuals, Shelter Construction blueprints, procurement schedules, and even a map of a fictional “Gopher County” Minnesota depicting an imaginary post-fallout planning scenario - traces a bureaucratic trail of dystopia. Kennedy, through a freshly funded World War II-era Civil Defense Program, began accelerating the public fallout shelter program, efforts to identify, mark, and supply spaces for people to bury themselves in the event of all-out nuclear war. Government-sponsored doomsday preppingĪs far as I can tell, the American public fallout shelter program hit its stride in 1961, as the U.S.-Soviet standoffs over Berlin and Cuba brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Paul’s 3M factory, might have an important story to tell. Considering President-elect Trump’s open discussion during the campaign of “never, ever” ruling out using nuclear weapons, these grim signs, invented and manufactured in St. The sign, now 50 years old, is a horrifically wonderful remnant of a dark time in American history, when eschatological preparation so imbued the public mind that it had entered the basements of our buildings. Rounding the corner toward the Xcel Energy Center, I spotted a sign perched above the old entrance to Roy Wilkins Auditorium: the yellow-and-black sign declaring FALLOUT SHELTER, distraught with age but still clinging to the brick remnants of the old doorway.
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