2/23/2024 0 Comments Fallout shelter sign pop artDigging through the archives at the Historical Society archives, the trail of paperwork - Civil Defense Shelter Management Manuals, Shelter Construction blueprints, procurement schedules, and even a map of a fictional “Gopher County” Minnesota depicting an imaginary post-fallout planning scenario - traces a bureaucratic trail of dystopia. Kennedy, through a freshly funded World War II-era Civil Defense Program, began accelerating the public fallout shelter program, efforts to identify, mark, and supply spaces for people to bury themselves in the event of all-out nuclear war. Government-sponsored doomsday preppingĪs far as I can tell, the American public fallout shelter program hit its stride in 1961, as the U.S.-Soviet standoffs over Berlin and Cuba brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Paul’s 3M factory, might have an important story to tell. Considering President-elect Trump’s open discussion during the campaign of “never, ever” ruling out using nuclear weapons, these grim signs, invented and manufactured in St. The sign, now 50 years old, is a horrifically wonderful remnant of a dark time in American history, when eschatological preparation so imbued the public mind that it had entered the basements of our buildings. Rounding the corner toward the Xcel Energy Center, I spotted a sign perched above the old entrance to Roy Wilkins Auditorium: the yellow-and-black sign declaring FALLOUT SHELTER, distraught with age but still clinging to the brick remnants of the old doorway.
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