Although Kennedy insisted that the main form of deterrence of a Soviet attack was our retaliation, it was widely reported, and promoted by many military authorities, that America’s ability to survive a nuclear war was actually an important deterrent to a Soviet nuclear attack. President Kennedy’s 1961 letter to all Americans in Life Magazine, effectively calling on homeowners to build fallout shelters, set the stage for the notion that we must be prepared to live through nuclear Armageddon. It can remain poisonous for weeks, months or years. Which, of course, is where fallout shelters came in.įallout is the poisonous, radioactive dust that spreads out after a nuclear explosion. This gave rise during the late 1950s, and particularly after the arrival of President Kennedy in 1961, to the notion that the American people needed to be prepared for the possibility of a nuclear war. Almost as important, the project introduced into mainstream American policy-making the idea that nuclear war with the Soviet Union just might be unavoidable. The project was historic, not least because it established that there would be a permanent potential for nuclear war between the United States and the USSR and that the Soviets would be deterred from attacking the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower established a secret project called “Project Solarium” ( named after the solarium room in the White House) in 1953 to evaluate the overall American approach to its rivalry with the Soviet Union. The story of these 1960s fallout shelters is relevant to the story of cybersecurity today. Some of these aging, underground living quarters are still around, and they are popular within the “prepper” community.
They were also underground bunkers built beneath thousands of American homes. Anyone born before 1960 has memories of something called a “ fallout shelter” (No, not the video game.) These were underground emergency living quarters (based on European experience with World War II bomb shelters) that were built by the federal government and some private interests beneath many large public buildings, notable by their black and yellow signs.
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