I Was A Teenaged Troglodyte: Visions of Life After Armageddon

As the wind hisses mournfully though the rubble of Everytown, U.S.A. you climb out of your trusty Acme bomb shelter, battered but alive, and now face a brave new world. The last few feet were the most difficult, as the now rusting corpse of Mr. Smith's station wagon from up the street had somehow blocked the escape tunnel hatch -- probably the blast from the Ruskie's bombs did it!

But all is well. You breath the irradiated air deeply as you look with sadness upon the remains of Mr. and Mrs. Brown's ranch home. It was a nice house, and improved the value of your own home dramatically -- now gone, alas, along with your own mock Tudor. But as for the Browns -- if only they had invested in a bomb shelter, too!

Well, you did, and that's why you're maybe the only survivor for hundreds of miles. You are basically king of the Midwest now, and that should be fun. Down below, the women folk wait anxiously for you to return. You smile and nod -- it's up to you and you alone to repopulate this world, and boy, will you avoid the same dumb mistakes as the President and the Kremlin did.

Now, where are those women?.

Bad fiction aside, I have always suspected that one of the Eisenhower Administration's unspoken platforms was once something like "A chicken in every pot and a fallout shelter in every suburban backyard."

One of the prime movers behind the Cold War was the proliferation of nuclear weapons. They got bigger and better as the scientists and defense contractors (on both sides) labored hand-in-hand to get the edge over the "enemy." Ground launched, carried in the bellies of bombers, fired from submarines and from towed artillery pieces -- there were, after all, more than enough nuclear weapons not only to "protect" our shores and our way of life, but to obliterate every man, woman and child many times over.

And if the unthinkable had happened, and the Cold War had gotten suddenly very hot, those who didn't die from the initial fire of a direct blast would fall pray to the inevitable fallout that would surely follow the rain of bombs.

This was a potential war you couldn't survive.

Unless, of course, you had a bomb shelter!

Do you suppose people really believed that their backyard fallout shelters would not only protect them, but keep them alive long enough to climb out and begin to rebuild the world? Someone had to have believe that, in any case, or so many public buildings would not have been designated nuclear fallout shelters -- with those creepy yellow and black signs bolted over basement doors and stairwells. And the trade in home-style shelters wouldn't have existed.

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