In Washington soon after, Douglas MacArthur's ex-wife said she was furnishing the former slave quarters beneath her Georgetown mansion as a bomb shelter.

Aided by secrets stolen by spies in the American nuclear establishment, the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test on August 29, 1949. arsenal seemed to assure the safety of our children and our allies. The mere presence of the bomb in the U.S. It symbolized our nation's military, political and scientific dominance in the postwar world. Yet even then, most Americans thought of the nuclear bomb not as an external threat but as exclusively our weapon, our defense. The first news reports could not adequately describe the devastation that American B-29s had released onto Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.įull disclosure came a year later in John Hersey's magazine account, based mainly on interviews with survivors that detailed the scale and gruesomeness of what had happened in Hiroshima and filled an entire issue of the New Yorker. In this country, Boy Scouts learned the silhouettes of enemy bombers, to identify them and rush people to shelters in case of raids that never came.īut not until Augdid America and the world realize there was a weapon so horrible that one bomb could destroy a whole city at once, and poison it for years afterward.

In World War II, the citizens of London crowded into subway tunnels as Nazi aircraft and missiles attacked night after night. In World War I, troops on the muddy, stationary Western front existed beneath such shelters for months, at all times of the year. In America's Civil War, particularly in the last months when Petersburg was under siege, dug-in soldiers on both sides built 'bomb-proofs' with ceilings of heavy logs and earth to shield against plunging mortar fire. Ever since war makers invented weapons that go up in the air, then come down and go boom, defenders have been trying to protect themselves against death from the sky.

US army fallout shelter plans