A house for Dr. Strangelove

Sometime in the earliest days of the Kennedy administration, a TV documentary on fallout shelters showed several Air Force non-coms demonstrating that it was not too difficult to live in such places for up to two weeks, supplied as they were with food, water, television, and constant communication with the outside world.

My wife, who had been hidden in an Amsterdam cellar for nearly three years during the dark days of World War II without any assurance that she or her sister or their protectors would survive, was not impressed. In fact, she found it all rather silly.

I was frightened. I had come to believe that such talk simply reinforced the credibility of our resolve to fight a nuclear war. More pragmatically, I doubted the American people would really buy the argument that survival from nuclear fallout was possible. But, figuring I could be wrong, I wondered who would actually build such concrete shelters. I decided to find out.

My students and I conducted a study of the citizens of Northampton, Mass., a community of 30,000, 25 miles from a "prime target area," the SAC (Strategic Air Command) base at Westover. Northampton was just over the imaginary rim of safety where, officials said, lives could be saved from a 10 megaton bomb blast on the base by going underground.

We learned that most Northamptonites were very anxious and confused about the nuclear threat and many were eager to protect themselves. Their interest in building a shelter proved inversely related to levels of education and social class. Religious folks were more concerned and more likely to want to build shelters than those lower on a scale of religiosity. The same relationship was found between combat veterans and those who had never served in the military. We also learned that only one person in the entire sample had actually built a shelter.

Now 40 years later, Kenneth Rose, whose own father was a SAC pilot, has revisited the issue. His far more comprehensive examination looks at "The Fallout Shelter in American Culture."

"One Nation Underground" is an interesting and amply illustrated commentary on cold war concerns: the "Better Dead than Red" political mantra that was voiced by hawkish leaders, the scary scenarios of the game theorists, and the anxiety spread by detailed instructions of how we might save ourselves in factories, schools, office buildings, and in fallout shelters.

In a mode of public/private cooperation (some called it "exploitation"), the government provided blueprints (available at all post offices and federal buildings), local contractors solicited clients, and food companies and hardware stores geared up to supply the necessities of life below ground.

As background for his own analysis, Rose (no relation to me) reprises the story of the atom bomb and the dawning of the Nuclear Age, focusing mainly on defense initiatives. He writes of those whose voices were at the very center of the controversy, especially such apocalyptic thinkers as Herman Kahn, author of "On Thermonuclear War" and "Thinking about the Unthinkable." The works of some of their nemeses are explored, too, including novels about the devastating effects of a nuclear holocaust such as Pat Frank's "Alas, Babylon" and some sardonic screenplays, the most famous of which was Peter George's "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

In a chapter called, "Morality and National Identity at the Shelter Door," Rose reminds us of something often forgotten in the liberal apotheosis of JFK: just how bellicose he and the members of his administration actually were and how involved they were in heating up the cold war while fostering the view that "cheap fallout shelters are a modest insurance for everyone."

Yet, even the president's powerful voice was not sufficient to persuade the people to put their faith in shelters. Northampton's story was to be America's story as Rose indicates in his final chapter, "The Shelters That Were Not Built."

Peter I. Rose is a Smith College sociology professor and author of 'The Public and the Threat of War,' first published in the journal Social Problems, in 1963.