By the late 1970s, Cold War tensions began to diminish, and fallout shelter culture slipped out of the commonplace. military preparedness against nuclear threat. Family, community, and government fallout shelters served as domestic vehicles of U.S. By 1965 an estimated 200,000 fallout shelters dotted the American landscape.

government began to exhort the American public to build home and commercial shelters as early as 1955, and the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles in 1958 accelerated the construction of personal fallout shelters in case the tension between countries led to the deployment of nuclear missiles. In 1949, the first successful test of a Soviet atomic weapon put Americans on the edge of their seats about atomic warfare. The Cold War was a time of international and domestic tension under the threat of nuclear war, with lasting impacts on the cultures of numerous countries, including the United States.

If you would like to contribute materials to the Atlas, please reach out to the editors: Sarah Kanouse (s.kanouse at ) and Shiloh Krupar (srk34 at ).Ĭover Image by Shanna Merola, 'An Invisible Yet Highly Energetic Form of Light,' from Nuclear Winter.įunded by grants from Georgetown University and Northeastern University. Using the buttons on the left, you may also browse the Atlas's artworks and scholarly essays, access geolocated material on a map, and learn more about contributors to the project. In addition to the stages of the production process, you may view in sequence the positivist, technocratic version of this story, or the often hidden or repressed shadow side to the industrial processing of nuclear materials. These paths roughly track the movement of radioactive materials from the earth, into weapons or energy sources, and then into unmanageable waste-along with the environmental, social, technical, and ethical ramifications of these processes. You may browse the Atlas by following the curated 'paths' of information and interpretation provided by the editors.

Plans for 1950s fallout shelter r