In November of 1958, Lichtman writes, Good Housekeeping published an editorial titled “A Frightening Message for a Thanksgiving Issue,” telling readers that, in case of attack, “your only hope of salvation is a place to go.” It urged them to contact the government for free plans to make a shelter at home. A plan for an underground air raid shelter via Getty Instead, the Eisenhower administration called for citizens to take responsibility for protecting themselves in case of nuclear attack. But that would have been incredibly expensive. One option the government considered was building shelters all over the country. Truman created the Federal Civil Defense Administration to provide protection for citizens in case of nuclear war.

In 1951, with the Cold War emerging in the aftermath of World War II, President Harry S. superiority in offensive nuclear weapons.“Your only hope of salvation is a place to go.”

The supposedly secret document, which leaked to the press a week after being presented to President Eisenhower, led to an upsurge in public concern about fallout shelters, even though Eisenhower himself believed that true national security lay in U.S. The report concluded that the Soviets would soon surpass America in all categories of nuclear weaponry and that civil defense preparations in the USSR were already far ahead of American efforts. The latter was the work of a blue-ribbon panel selected by Eisenhower to assess the relative nuclear capability and civil defense preparedness of the United States and the Soviet Union. There was relatively little interest in shelters during much of the Eisenhower administration until 1957-the year that saw both the launch of the first orbiting satellite (the Soviet Sputnik) and the release of the Gaither Report in the United States. After President Truman left office in 1952, Americans’ interest in shelters blew hot or cold in keeping with the temperature changes of the Cold War.

Federal building fallout shelter 1960s