In a recent issue, one of our authors recalled the atom-bomb drills that his grade school held. Your columnist is barely old enough to have experienced a few of these in the late 1960s. By that time even young children had some inkling of how terribly destructive atomic bombs were, and every time we had a drill, someone was sure to express skepticism about whether kneeling with our heads against the wall would be of any use against a nuclear attack. The teacher would then explain that since the bombs were likely to be targeted at New York City, some 60 miles away, there was a good chance that we would have only fallout to contend with. In the third grade, we were still naive enough to think, “Oh, good.”
A-bomb drills survive only in memory, to be indulgently chuckled at someday by our children (if we’re lucky), but more tangible artifacts of the Cold War are still around. In Gainesville, Georgia, a 1961 fallout shelter has recently been dug up and removed to safety.
The shelter was a mass-produced model made mostly of sheet steel. When buried under three feet of earth, supposedly enough to block 99.9 percent of gamma rays, it was visible as a shallow mound with two protruding air vents and a hatch for entry and exit. On the inside it was 12 feet by 8 feet. The shelter had hookups for electricity and water and a pipe leading to the exterior for waste disposal, as well as bunks and storage shelves. It cost $1,500 to build.
After decades of disuse, the shelter became endangered when the property it sat under was acquired for a sewage-pump station. Although the man who had built it, Walter Ladd, told the Gainesville Times , “Ah, it ain’t much,” history lovers pleaded with the city not to demolish it. In 2003 a team of historians measured and photographed the shelter and drew up a set of plans, and the next year it was removed to a local preservationist’s property. So far, worries that it would collapse have proved unfounded. The Hall County Historical Society hopes one day to put it on display to show how real and visceral fear of a nuclear attack was in the early 1960s.
