September 19, 2026 • 47 mins
The advent of nuclear weapons and the Cold War kicked off a craze in the US for building rec rooms with foot-thick reinforced walls and outfitted with survival rations and board games. Would they work? Probably not. Find out (but not really) in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, it's me, Josh. And Fallout shelters have been
on my mind a lot lately. We've been doing some
episodes about the Cold War, and they played a big
role in that. And that second season of Fallout, the
TV show based on the game, it's really good. And
on Wednesday, I got trapped in the Fallout shelter in
(00:21):
the basement of an abandoned school for 18 hours. And
someone finally found me. and the fire department had to
come cut a hole in the steel door with a
huge saw. So I thought that maybe releasing our episode
on fallout shelters again as this week's select would be
a good idea. It came out in 2020, and it's
pretty good, and I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kablooey Clark.
There's Charles W. Bam Bam Bryant and Jerry Radioactive Roland.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Oh, boy.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
You still got it.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
After all these years.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
You still got it.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Hey, I think before we get going, we should talk
very briefly about our audio book.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Because this week in real time, we are each recording
our respective parts for the audio book. And first of all,
we just want to tell everyone there's going to be
an audio book version.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, spoiler.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Of Stuff You Should Know, colon, and Mostly Incomplete Guide
to Very Interesting Things.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Man, still. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Yeah, so we're trying to push that out as a.
You know, get both is what I say. But if
you're into audiobooks, we're doing one. But also, I just
want to make sure people know what they're getting. And
I put this on the Stuff You Should Know Army page.
They're not getting 27 new podcast episodes.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
No.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
And they should know that because our podcast is unscripted conversation.
An audiobook is us reading an audiobook. And rather than
just weirdly trading lines, reading from a script, which would
I think that would dash a lot of people's image
of what we do. We are each reading chapters, and
(02:29):
I think they're going to mix in some stuff here
and there. But, yeah, I mean, it's going to be
great and fun, but it's not podcast episodes. We don't
get to just fart around and make jokes. Like, we've
got to read our book.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Oh, man, we will be kept in line. If we
tried to fart around and make jokes, it would not
be good. There's this whole time is money ethos and yelling,
sometimes crying. It's a real stressful situation, everybody.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
How did that go for you yesterday? Did you enjoy yourself?
Speaker 1 (02:56):
I just told you there's a lot of yelling and crying.
It was very stressful. Yeah, it was fun. It reminded
me a lot of recording The End of the World. Yeah, exactly. Because,
you know, I wrote those and then I read them. Right.
So it was very similar to that, except a lot
less heavy.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, I was slightly nervous at first for some reason
after talking for 12 years, probably just because... you weren't there.
But then it was like, you know, it was fine.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Did Fleet, the director, calm you, make you feel better?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Yeah. I mean, you know, I got in my groove.
I felt pretty comfy by the end of it.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah. So, I mean, it is fun. It's definitely a
lot of extra work this week, but it's kind of cool.
You know, at the end, we're going to have a
bona fide audio book.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
That's right. And a bona fide book that you can
pre-order now. And we're also working on getting that pre-order
gift available to the UK and Australia and other parts
of the world because we have different publishers there. It's
not like we were trying to exclude everyone.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
No, no, no. But we are moving heaven and earth
to get it done. And yeah, if you're in the
US and Canada and you pre-order, if you haven't gotten
your poster yet, worry not. You're going to get your
pre-order gift eventually.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Wow. So for the 15, 17 people who stuck around,
prepare to learn about fallout shelters because that's ultimately what
we're here to talk about today.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
That's right. Actually, before that, I have to say one
more thing.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Oh, God.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
I posted that squirrel attack video on my Instagram, you know,
that we talked about on the episode. Yeah. Because people
kept asking, so I put it up. I'm at Chuck
the Podcaster. If you want to see a squirrel go
berserk and literally fly through the air and hit me
in the leg, then you can see that. It's been
viewed like 15,000 times now.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
One of these days, I hope you'll fess up to
what you did to provoke that squirrel.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
I mean, the whole thing's there. You see me exit
my house, so... Yeah, but I.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Mean, we didn't know, like, what happened a half hour before. Right.
You know, that had been ongoing for the last week
or so. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
No backstory.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
So now, I think we're going to talk about fallout shelters. Because, Chuck,
your house has a basement... But it's exposed on one
side to the outdoors. It's not an in-ground basement as
far as I know. And hopefully I'm not divulging too
much information about your house so weird fans will be
able to find it and show up.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Well, actually, you know, one side of it is exposed
to the world. But the other side is, you know,
10 feet of earth and red clay. Like it could
have been a great fallout shelter had it not been
for that one side.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Sure. But there are things you could do. Or could
have done. I think we should use past tense here.
Because the need for a fallout shelter as far as
a nuclear war goes is vanishingly remote these days. Yeah.
I like to think. I don't think we should get
into any fear mongering here.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
No, I agree.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
But there are a few things you could have done
or could do to build a fallout shelter with that
good side, I guess. And we're going to talk about
that today. But mainly what we're talking about with fallout
shelters is almost kind of like this examination of the
world psyche during the Cold War to where as the
(06:11):
nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States
started to build up in step with one another and
we were suddenly in a nuclear arms race where just
10 years before there were no such thing as nuclear weapons,
people started to realize like, oh man, if one of
these goes off near me, I'm in big trouble. And
they started looking around to the government to say, hey,
(06:35):
what should I do? And at first, the government was like,
you know, figure it out yourself. And then eventually, the
government kind of got a little more involved. And before
you know it, we had a national fallout shelter program.
As feeble and terrible as it was, at least we
had one.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, what's really funny is when you read up on
this stuff and you learn that President Kennedy, John F. Kennedy,
that is, Ask Congress for $ 100 million to build public
fallout shelters.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
That is such an adorable number now. It is. That
would build like 10 fallout shelters these days.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. That's like the amount of money that
would take to get like a motorcade to the Capitol
from the White House basically, you know?
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, but it was a real threat back then. And
I can't remember what episode. It may have been nuclear radiation–
We did one on the disaster in Japan.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
We've done a couple on this. But I know that
I told the story of my father like having us
sort of do 20 percent of a fallout shelter when
I was 10 or 12 years old after the movie
The Day After aired on television.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
I mean, you know, it was my brother and I
taking out– digging out buckets of dirt and carrying them
out in the woods and dumping them for probably three
or four weekends and then we stopped.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
That's awesome. So you guys were 20 percent covered if
something happened. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
I mean, we could have. Yeah, it was pretty gross.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
So was it akin to this this this shelter that
we were going to go over at the end? Was
it like that?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Well, I mean, it eventually could have been, which is
to say a, you know, kind of a concrete room
underground surrounded by earth.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Oh, yeah. No, I'm saying like the kind where it's
like you dig a trench and put some wood poles.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Oh, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
This is part of.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
My basement. Like, my dad had a workshop, and on
the interior wall of the workshop, he knocked down the
cinder block wall, and we just started digging.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Oh, wow.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Which I'm sure was super safe to the foundation of
the house.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Sure, right. He's like, oh, it's probably not load-bearing.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
But yeah, there was definitely a point in time, especially
during the height of the Cold War, where it was like,
this is, we're really in danger here. The world was
just kind of walking around, just twitching and shaking at
the idea of this. And part of the problem was,
Not just the idea that a bomb was going to
go off and just blow cities apart. Because apparently there
(09:05):
was this one of the nuclear deterrent theories, the game
theories that people kind of operated under said, no, you
know what? If we ever engage in nuclear war, we're
just going to be attacking military installations side to side.
And so we don't really have to worry about that
for people in New York or D.C. or, you know, Atlanta, wherever,
(09:27):
any of the major metropolitan cities. We don't have to
worry about those cities getting leveled. But there's going to
be a huge problem for the people living there because
there's such a thing as radioactive fallout. It's not just
the bomb that gets you. It's the fallout afterward.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah. I mean, if you're talking about a nuclear bomb,
a nuclear warhead, it depends on what kind. You know,
back then it was different than it is now. Mm-hmm.
Let's say a one megaton H-bomb back in the day
would completely wipe out everything within about two miles. from
where it hit.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, and I know I said we weren't going to fearmonger, Chuck,
but I found out that there is a bomb in
the U.S. arsenal called the B-83, which is 1.2 megatons,
and it can be carried around very easily by the
B-2 bomber. So those exist.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
So two miles, everything is gone. And this is from
the blast. And a person, if you're like five miles
away from that bomb site, you're going to get hit
with third-degree burns just from that blast.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, you're going to be hating life. So the blast
is going to be bad enough. And again, yeah, just
for people miles away could be burned to death, incinerated, vaporized,
just all sorts of terrible stuff. But if you're living
outside of that blast zone, you got problems in the
radioactivity that's going to be generated by it. Because when
(10:49):
those bombs explode, they release a lot of radioactive particles
of different varieties. And those things go up in the
air and they get kind of carried around and stirred
up in the atmosphere. But a lot of them are
heavy enough that they come back down in basically around
the area, in a larger area around the bomb's epicenter.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, and We should probably just go over some of
these different types of radiation. Some of it you might
recognize from various Incredible Hulk comic books.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
But you've got your alpha particles, your beta particles. You've
got gamma rays. You've got neutrons.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
The gamma rays is what got Hulk, right?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
I think so, right?
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Because gamma rays are green and Hulk was green.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
I think that's it.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
And he had those sweet, sweet purple pants that somehow
still fit.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
For sure.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
So the alpha and beta particles, they are not great,
but they are easily stopped is probably the best way
to say it.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah. So here's the thing. Like everything I tried to
read about this was like they would go to great
lengths to be like, well, this one isn't like that
much of a problem. This one's way worse. And then
finally they'd throw up their hands and be like, actually,
all of this is just going to be one big
giant cluster. Right. Because depending on the different type of
radioactive particle– there's different situations where they're way worse than
(12:09):
the other one. Like a gamma ray is really bad
because it can go clear through several inches of lead
right into you on the other side of the lead
through your body. And then everything it comes in contact with,
say all of your cells and tissues and bones and
all that stuff, it really screws them up genetically and
you can develop cancer and radiation sickness and all that.
(12:30):
That's pretty bad. But then you've got alpha particles where
they can be stopped by a piece of paper. They
can't even make it through your skin, but they could
get all over like crops in the water and we
drink them and eat them. And then they cause all
sorts of problems inside of you too. So there's really
no good radioactive particle as far as a fallout from
(12:51):
a nuclear bomb is concerned.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, not at all. So don't, you know, if you
read up on this stuff and it said, oh, a
piece of paper or a little bit of plastic can
stop beta particles and alpha particles. Just think about the
air you're breathing, the water you're drinking, the maze you're growing. Sure.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Do you want to get traditional?
Speaker 2 (13:11):
It's all very dangerous.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah. Don't just be like, oh, let's make a paper
suit out of newspapers and maybe a little paper tri-cornered
hat out of newspapers. I'll be fine.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
But like you said, when this bomb hits, that mushroom
cloud goes up. Everything's all mixed together. And as the
wind blows, these little, I think John Fuller, our old pal,
wrote this one a long time ago, right? Yep. for
How Stuff Works, but he said there are lots of little,
they act like little tiny missiles, basically, that are just
going off all over the place.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, that was the neutrons, right?
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah, I think the neutrons specific, he called the missiles,
but they kind of all are.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, they are. They're super high energy and gamma rays,
like I said, they can pass right through you. Neutrons
are a problem in the relative immediate blast area because
They're very heavy, so they don't go nearly as far as, say,
like gamma rays or X-rays or alpha particles or beta particles.
But they all do damage in their own unique special
(14:11):
snowflake way.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah, and it's also, I mean, this stuff is being
carried around by the wind. But the actual particles that
you're seeing is actually Earth that is now enriched with
this stuff. That is poofed up from that crater where
Earth used to be, I guess.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Right. And so knowing all this, like this was this
is like why people started to be like, oh, OK,
maybe we should start building fallout shelters to live in
or inhabit for, you know, the immediate period after this
this nuclear attack to give us a chance to survive.
And hopefully, you know, make it a few weeks and
(14:48):
then things will die down. Everybody will have forgotten about
the whole nuclear holocaust. And we can come back out
and restart civilization. That was the really honestly, if you
get down to it, the thinking behind fallout shelters in
the United States in the 60s and late 50s. All right.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Should we take a break there then talk about these things?
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I think so.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Some more?
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
All right. We'll be right back, everyone.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
So, Chuck, I think since we've got one act under
our belt, we need to start the second act by
telling everybody they can preorder our book.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Hey, I took some vitamins, you know. I've been taking
vitamins as much as I can. Oh, yeah? And I've
got this multivitamin, you know, like the worst a vitamin
can taste. I've got that horrible vitamin taste just stuck
in the back of my throat because it got stuck
there for a half of a millisecond before it washed down.
And it's just left this terrible taste of vitamin coating
(16:06):
back there. And it's driving me batty.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
How is your health with the vitamins? Can you tell
the difference?
Speaker 1 (16:14):
No, none.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
How's your pee? How's your urine?
Speaker 1 (16:16):
It's bright yellow, which makes me just feel like such
a chump, especially after our vitamin supplement episode. Oh, right.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Didn't we say like we pee most of it out?
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Yeah. There's good ones for sure. And I like to
think I'm taking good ones, but I just know that
there's no telling right now.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
You're like, I'm using injectables now.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Pretty much snortable vitamins.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
So fallout shelters, it's funny here, and I'm glad John
put it this way because it really makes a lot
of sense. If you think about an SPF for sunscreen.
It's the same exact way with a fallout shelter. You
have a PF, a protection factor. And that is just
very simply a representative of being in a fallout shelter
(16:57):
or just being out in the open. And FEMA put
out a pamphlet called Standards for Fallout Shelters. And they said,
you need a PF of 40.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
At least.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, if you want to, you know. And that puts
you down to about 2.5% of the radiation, which I
heard that number and I thought that was too much.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, no, I think what you're really shooting for is
something like 300, that kind of thing. And they're saying
like a minimum of 40 or else you might as
well just go lay out in the radioactivity for all
the protection you're going to get. Another way to look
at that PF number is that it's the denominator and
the fraction of the radioactive exposure that you get. compared
(17:40):
to being outside of the shelter. So a PF of
40 would mean that you get one 40th. I'm more
of a fraction guy than a decimal dude.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Oh, yeah?
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Uh-huh. How about you? You like decimals or fractions more?
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I don't like either one, but I think for our
next live show in 2022, you should wear a shirt
that says fraction guy, and I'll have one that says
decimal dude.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
And that'll just be our new tour outfit.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Fair enough.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
And you can have yours printed on a button-down shirt,
of course.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Okay. Because nothing looks better than good silk screening on
a button down Oxford. Maybe by the time we go
on tour again, this horrible vitamin taste will be out
of my mouth.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Maybe so. So with fallout shelters, there's a couple of
kinds if you're going back to the 1960s that people
were talking about. And that is the public one and
then the private one that you just build at your
house like we kind of didn't do. I went down
a bit of a rabbit hole, and this would be
(18:40):
right up your alley. You probably did this.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Rabbit hole's pretty safe, I bet. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Depends on how deep, I guess.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
But if you start Googling 60s fallout shelters— Oh, and
I did. Oh, boy. It's just a treasure trove of
articles and pictures. I saw one that these people in
Woodland Hills, a suburb of L.A., or part of greater
Los Angeles, bought a house— Not too long ago, a
(19:08):
few years ago, and they found a– did you see
this one?
Speaker 1 (19:11):
No, I saw some in Milwaukee.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Oh, well, I saw that Milwaukee article too.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
That was great.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
But they found a 15-foot-down under-the-earth fallout shelter.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
That was fully stocked. It was like a time capsule
from 1961.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
And Brendan Fraser and Christopher Walken were living in it.
I can't remember who the mom was. Do you remember?
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Oh, I didn't see that.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh, you didn't? No. No. It was a cute movie. Yeah?
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Was that Encino Man?
Speaker 1 (19:39):
No, no, no. This was Blast from the Past. Oh, okay.
Encino Man was great, too, because the weasel's in it.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Oh, was he?
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah, Pauly Shore.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, I knew it then.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Is.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
I just didn't.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Pauly Shore, Sean Austin, and Brendan Fraser.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Sean Aston.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Whatever. That guy's rich enough. He doesn't care what I say.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
So I was looking at all these 1961 period products
and just, like, getting tingly feelings in my body because
they were perfectly preserved for the most part, like, faded
and stuff. But there was a can, like a coffee can,
but it said, multi-purpose food, Meals for Millions. And so
I was like, I got to find out what this is.
And it turns out that Meals for Millions was a
(20:22):
nonprofit from way back then that is now- Pepper International. No,
now it's transformed into another name these days. I think
Freedom from Hunger is the new name.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
But these two guys, Clifford Clinton and Dr. Henry Borsuk,
took on this task of– Borsuk was a biochemist at Caltech.
And they took on this project of trying to find
the best food to feed, like the cheapest, absolute most
bare bones thing you could put in a package to
feed the hungry.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
And that's what they came up with was this stuff
in a can. And it is 68% defatted soy grits.
Plus dehydrated potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, onions, leeks, parsley, and spices
fortified with vitamins and minerals. And it comes in a
can and you boil it up and eat it. And
(21:17):
it was something like two cents per serving.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
And it was a really ingenious idea, but this became,
I think, kind of a popular thing for fallout shelters
because you could just stock cans and cans of this,
like the most bare bones caloric sort of healthy thing
you could get.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Meals for millions. That's pretty great. I did not expect
it to actually be as healthy as what you just
listed off.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, I would love to taste some of it.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
What?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Multi-purpose food.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
It just traveled the woodland hills. I know. Just call
it food. What do you mean multi-purpose food?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
I don't know. Is it like a pomade as well
or something?
Speaker 1 (21:51):
A food that I ran across that was pretty popular,
especially among government-funded fallout shelters, was this kind of like,
wheat cracker that was made from bulgur wheat. And apparently
they were inspired by some crackers that were found in
Egyptian tombs that were still edible after a couple thousand years.
(22:13):
So they're like, oh, that'd be perfect for fallout shelters.
So they kind of recreated those.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Tasteless, edible.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, multipurpose, apparently. You could shave with them, too.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
You might could. That Milwaukee article is pretty cool, though.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I think it said that at the time there were
like 3,000-plus personal shelters in the city of Milwaukee alone.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yeah, the thing is, like, that's probably a pretty good number.
The thing is there's no official numbers for the fallout
shelters that were built around the Cold War because there
were a lot of private ones, but there was also
public ones too. So let's keep talking about the private
ones first because if we're going to follow the historical timeline—
(22:57):
which I'm in favor of. Around, I think, the late 1950s,
I think it was 1957, in the Eisenhower administration, there
was a report that's now called the Gaither Report. And
it basically said, here's everything we figured out about a
nuclear war. the cities are toast. People are going to
(23:18):
die en masse. We have no place to put them
for them to shelter in. And everybody's in a lot
of trouble if there is a nuclear war. So really,
the best thing we need to focus on is to
prevent a nuclear war from happening. Well, that leaked out.
And people said, well, what are we going to do?
And this is when the government was like, I don't know,
why don't you build some shelters and leave us alone?
(23:40):
And so people started doing that. And it became like
a huge craze. And so shelters in places like that
home in Woodland Hills or that one in Milwaukee that
are still around today in some cases, that became like
a big deal, like adding like a really nice swimming
pool or adding like a rec room or something like that.
(24:02):
People turned to fallout shelters, and they started building them
like crazy.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, and from that Milwaukee, I think it was in
Milwaukee was the name of the website.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
But from what they said was they were being marketed
as sort of multipurpose rec rooms that in case the
S goes down, it's conveniently, you know, lined with concrete.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
And you could just sort of easily convert it. And
I guess you would have some stuff stashed there in
either a closet or in bins or something.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
When you're not using it, you know, when there's no
nuclear disaster, you're just using it as sort of a
playroom or something.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yeah, there was some decorators show in Chicago in the
late 50s, I think, and they build this thing as
the living or the family room of tomorrow. Yeah, it
was exactly what you described. It was like a normal
functioning family room, but it just happened to be in
a basement in like foot thick concrete encased under the dirt.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, I remember seeing when I was a kid, my
brother and I did lots of Sort of, I mean,
I guess it wasn't urban exploring, but... Trespassing? Suburban exploring.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Sure, okay.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
And I remember a couple of distinct times that we
saw vent pipes just coming out of the earth in
the forest. And we never saw any entryway or anything
like that. But that had to be some sort of
fallout shelter, I think.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Yeah, probably.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I mean, they were near homes. But not, like, in
the yard. We'd come across a couple of them in
our various expeditions.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Like, you know, just clearly a vent pipe just coming
out of the woodland forest floor.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what it was. I hope.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah, well, we didn't dig around.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
If not, have you ever seen that Hugh Jackman movie where, like,
his wife is kidnapped?
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Prisoners?
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Yeah, man, that was really good.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
I mean, really good.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, great movie. That's What's-His-Face doing the new Dune movie.
Denis Villeneuve.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Oh, well, there you go. That's why it was so good.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, he's a master.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
I'm sorry, Chuck. I just can't not correct you. His
name is Dennis. Dennis Villeneuve. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Okay, I mispronounced it.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
So, I was kidding. Anyway, there was the private fallout
shelter trend that just blew up and became a thing.
And then in 1961, President Kennedy sent a letter out.
Surely it went out to more than just this. But
if you were a Life magazine subscriber, which was pretty
substantial back in 1961, in the September 15th edition, you
(26:43):
got a letter from President Kennedy basically saying like, hey,
you know, this whole possibility of nuclear war thing. Well,
we've decided we're going to do something about it. We,
the government. And we're going to start what's called the
National Fallout Shelter Survey. And with the survey, basically what
we're going to do is send out government officials. And
(27:06):
they're going to look at buildings all around the country
and identify sites that have the potential of serving as
a fallout shelter. And everyone says, well, that's great. So
like a fallout shelter. So if like a nuclear bomb
goes off over our city, we're going to be safe.
It's like, no, don't be ridiculous. A lot of money. No,
this is going to protect you from radioactive fallout. You'll
(27:28):
have to survive the blast, but this will hopefully protect
you from the fallout afterward.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, and, you know, we kind of laugh about that, but,
I mean, there's no way they could have built enough, like,
adequate shelters to protect all Americans from the blast.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
No, I mean, there was a lot of Americans. Apparently,
they did look at it at first. They could have
pretended to. And it was going to be, like, $ 200
billion in... In 1961 dollars.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
That's another cute number, actually.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
They were like, oh, no, we can't do that. We
don't have that kind of money. So it was like
you said, I think $ 190 million is what they ended
up spending on it, which to me seems like a
lot of money to send out some people to look
at buildings and decide what was a fallout shelter and
what wasn't.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Yeah, you know, what's really funny is when you look
at what people did around the world, what countries did
around the world, and how it so jibes with how
those countries are still today. So the U.S. did what
we did. The Soviets said that they built a big
extensive system and they had an advanced cooling system and
(28:32):
all these filters protecting against everything and provisions, food and
water forever and everything. You know, this is this is
the press release they put out, basically. Who knows what
really happened?
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, because I found that on like Russia's so great
dot com or whatever. I mean, it was it was
like an urban exploration of like an abandoned shelter. But,
you know, was this just like the biggest one? How
many were like that? Right. Supposedly, the Soviets boasted of
a system that could protect most most of their citizens
from the blast.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
All right, so that makes sense. Sweden built 65,000, which
covered about 70% of the population.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
TS for the other 30%.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Switzerland built enough shelters for everybody. Okay. God bless them.
The UK said, you know what? We're going to build
enough for our military, our government, and the royal family.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, chin up, everyone else.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
And then Australia said, nah, we'll take a pass. We're
not going to build any because no one's going to
mess with us down here.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Yeah, they're like, everybody's right on the beach. Everyone knows
we're fine if the rest of the world's gone up
in flames. I think they're probably right.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
I mean, they were, and especially back then, enough off
the map or off the path of the threat that
they didn't even need to sweat it.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah. They're like, hey, what's all the ruckus up there?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
So the U.S. said, okay, we've got to do something.
Let's at least build these fallout shelters that are going
to protect people from radioactivity. And so they started building these— well,
I shouldn't say building. They started going on to private
property or public buildings and saying, hey, you've got a
really nice basement here.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Can you take down the human skins and clean it
up a little bit? We're going to put some bulgur
wheat biscuits in here. We're going to put in some
multipurpose food, don't ask. And we're going to turn this
place into a fallout shelter. And on their way out,
they would slap a sign, a very iconic sign, which
was a black circle saying, with three inverted triangles all
(30:36):
pointing toward the center that designated a fallout shelter. And
they did this in yellow in the event of like
a blackout during a nuclear war or something so that
you could easily see it.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, pretty cool. The company 3M made these for about
a penny each, and they made about 400,000 of these signs.
And they would stock these things with, you know, like
medical first aid kits, some water drums. Those crackers that
you talked about that if you add water could probably
double up as like cement patch.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah, I guess. But I think people would wrestle you
to the ground if you tried to use the water
for anything but drinking after, you know, in the event
of this. Sure.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
I mean, that's one thing we didn't mention. If you
go to build your own fallout shelter, you know, you
should have some food. But water obviously is far more important.
We've talked about that a lot, about how long the
human body can go without food and water. Got to
have a lot of water. I think I would stock
it up with some of that Mike's Mighty Good ramen.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Sure. Of course.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Which, by the way, we'd be remiss if we didn't
point out that they actually sent us a coupon code
for Stuff You Should Know listeners.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
This is not an ad, but we talk about that
ramen so much. They said, you know what? Tell everyone
Stuff You Should Know 20. We'll give them 20% off
ramen if they want to order some.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Very nice. Do you write the number 20 or write
out T-W-E-N-T-Y?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
The number 20 after stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
So 2-0.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Yeah, and you could stock up your own fallout shelter.
You can eat that stuff for lunch. Doesn't take up
a lot of room. Good calories.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
It's multipurpose food.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
You got to use some water for it, though.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Right. But I mean, hey.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Or you could collectively spit in it, I guess, and
heat that up. That's grody.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
You're going to get that water anyway, though, you know,
because you're going to drink the juice.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
That's true. So back to the public shelters, they have
these pretty well stocked. They said there was an actual
booklet in there that said, if you want a toilet,
cut a seat out of a chair and put a
bucket under it. And there's your toilet.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
And so when that pamphlet came out in particular, the
American citizenry said, like, for real, this is what our
tax dollars are doing. This is what we're getting from
our government. Cut a hole in the seat of a
chair and put a bucket under there. That's your advice
for the nuclear war that you're half responsible for having
us live under the threat of.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Right. They said, we're not socialists. You take care of yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
So the thing is, is like people would people would
people would read newspapers or people would like watch the
news or whatever. And they would be getting one channel
of information that was saying, like, yeah, here's what this,
you know, what a one megaton bomb could possibly do
to you. Or if this blew up over New York City,
(33:24):
this is what would happen. And people would say, well,
what's the point of having these fallout shelters? Because if
a bomb goes off over New York City, all of
those fallout shelters are going to be totally obliterated. There's
no point for them. And the government in doing something
like trying to at least lift some finger and make
(33:46):
people feel less anxious actually had the opposite effect because
it drew a lot of attention and focus to the
need for fallout shelters while at the same time reinforcing
the idea that these fallout shelters weren't going to be
worth anything for anybody unless maybe you lived in Topeka
or somewhere where there wasn't what's known as a key
(34:07):
target so that you might actually survive in a fallout
shelter that was well stocked and had few enough people.
It could work, but for most Americans, especially ones in
major cities, you're going to be in bad shape. And
the fallout shelter program really kind of pointed that out.
All right.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 1 (34:26):
I think so. All right.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
We'll take our last break and we'll be back right
after this. So before we broke, you said something about
(34:54):
unless you live in Topeka, doesn't Kansas have silos or no?
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Yeah, as I was saying it, I was like, shh. Yeah,
I'm glad you said something. At least they'll save us
the emails.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Okay, because that, you know, we did mention, but, you know,
we talked about game theory earlier about how the reasoning was, no,
you don't need to worry if you're in a big
city because there aren't military bases there.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Right.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
But, you know, that sort of goes the way of–
that war goes once anything goes wrong. So if one
bomb from the opposition, from the enemy, goes to somewhere
it isn't supposed to go, then all bets are off, basically.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
And then it's just bomb away.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Also, I want to give a shout-out to Robert Clara
from History.com, who wrote Nuclear Fallout Shelters Were Never Going
to Work, who wrote a pretty great article about how
this whole program was kind of doomed from the start.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
It kind of says it all.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Ill-conceived you know but not only was it ill-conceived they
were also like poorly stocked some of these things that
were designated fallout shelters never got their supplies water drums
were leaking and then um others worked really well so
well in fact that there's one they found at the
oyster adams bilingual school in dc which is a school
(36:12):
still functioning today part of dc public schools but there
is a fallout shelter that's like a um a time capsule, basically,
that has all of the original provisions in it, just
frozen in time still.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Wow. It's really neat. Yeah, like that house in California.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Yeah, basically. Except this was one of the designated public
fallout shelters, but below a school.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Yeah, I think, didn't they try to build them to
house at least 50 people? Mm-hmm. And I think they had,
they recommended for the personal ones that they be at
least six and a half feet tall. Yeah. And that
was one of the things that sort of would have
been the toughest, I think, about fallout shelters. So many
of them had very low ceilings. Obviously, there's no windows.
(36:57):
I mean, bunker life is tough going. And they recommended
two weeks, which is nuts to me. There's no way
I'm poking my head out after two weeks just to
see if it's how things are going up there.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Right. And I mean, like there was some logic and
reasoning to that two weeks in that there's that you
would have exceeded the half-life of a lot of the
radionuclides that are created. But yeah, there's plenty that would
still be around. Yes, it was never going to work
like Robert Clara put it.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
No, and I think that was sort of the idea
of what you were talking about with the public being
so disheartened and feeling helpless about our civil defense was... Like,
this is the general public, and they didn't think it
seemed like a good plan.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
But it makes me wonder, though, is that a good thing? Like,
it sucks to have that kind of mental anxiety that
we all collectively had during the Cold War, especially at
the height of this stuff, like in the 60s. Yeah.
I think it might have actually been good because then
the public was aware of just how dangerous things were
and would prevent a kind of cavalier attitude toward nuclear
(38:07):
war because they knew what was at stake and what
was at stake were their very lives.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Maybe. I mean, and maybe that's a bottom-up sort of
like a groundswell of public thought ekes its way up
into government. And, you know, I mean, I guess we'll
never know how close– I mean, I don't think we've
ever done one on the nuclear, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Have we not?
Speaker 2 (38:31):
I don't think specifically, but, you know, we've been on
the brink in a way that history has recognized, but
I'm curious how close it's been in times that we
never even knew about, you know?
Speaker 1 (38:43):
There's one guy who celebrated every year, I can't remember
what the day is, but it's basically like Save the
World Day, where this one Soviet soldier I guess a
missile commander basically had a few minutes, was being told
by his computers and all of his underlings that the U.S.
had launched a massive strike and that, you know, it
(39:05):
was up to him to call and order this counter
strike or call the people who would order the counter strike.
And he sweated it out. He said that he just
didn't believe that the Americans would have launched an unprovoked
all out nuclear strike like he was being shown. and
he stayed his hand and literally saved the world from
(39:26):
a nuclear war single-handedly. thing is, Chuck, is that has
happened more than once.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. It's funny that, like, we're basically
the last generation that grew up with any knowledge of
the threat of nuclear war like this.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Like, we sort of experienced the tail end of the
Cold War.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Perfect generation.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Yeah, but it's hard to... The Friendly Fire podcast, which
is one of my favorites, the war movie podcast that
our buddies Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica and John Roderick do.
They're younger. Roderick's, you know, a few years older than me.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Way old.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
So way older than you. But John kind of drives
this point home a lot about like it's really hard
to put into words what that does to a set
of generations when we're all sort of living under this
you know, very real threat that we could all die
the worst possible death. And, you know, not like, oh,
(40:25):
you kids have got it made or anything like that.
But it's a different sort of mindset, you know?
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah. I mean, it definitely is. And it definitely affects
you from every stage of your life, you know?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
I mean, it went away by the time we were
in college. But, you know, I remember my early years, obviously,
we were digging a fallout shelter. It was a big threat.
And movies and TV reinforce that every day.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yep. So if you wanted to build a fallout shelter,
we have to say there was a time in addition
to designating fallout shelters. By the way, if you find
one of those old fallout shelter signs, hang on to it.
You can pretty much take it. And unless there's a
close watching groundskeeper Willie type who takes care of that building,
(41:12):
nobody's probably going to notice it's gone. Yeah. And the U.S.
government has no idea how many are out there because
they never kept track of the fallout shelters. There was
no registry or anything. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I mean, they started shutting these down in the early
70s officially, started giving away the food, sent some of
it to organizations in Africa and Bangladesh. And then those
signs started, I think, in the mid-70s, started pulling those
signs out. And I think finally, just three years ago
in 2017, they said that They said that they got
(41:44):
the last of the signs out of New York City.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
And I don't think we mentioned it's hysterical that they
built these fallout shelters in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
As if that would, you know, that would lead to
good things.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Be spared.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. Or be spared.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Right. So if you did want to make a fallout shelter,
there's a pamphlet put out by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Where they basically hired boys. Yeah. They they had a
sideline in studying nuclear disaster survival. Well, like you couldn't
tell with their beard, you know.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Right.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
But this pamphlet basically was the result of Oak Ridge
hiring a bunch of families, regular old American families. And
saying a nuclear war is happening right now. Go build
a fallout shelter. Here's your instructions. And then seeing how
easy it could be done and then adjusting the instructions
and so on and so forth until they finally got
to this pamphlet. And the pamphlet basically came up with
(42:41):
this really good idea. fallout shelter where you just basically
dug a trench in in the ground that was several
feet deep covered it with wood poles covered the wood
poles with something like cloth the old bed sheet something
like that put dirt on it put shower curtains something
waterproof and then put more dirt on that and they
(43:01):
actually figured out that this particular fallout shelter had like
a a A protection factor of like 300.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Really?
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Yeah. And it would also survive a blast that most
houses would not survive.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Because you're just basically hunkered down in the earth. And
it would work for you if you wanted to. And
they said that it can be done. They used the
example that two non-athletic college-age girls did it in 36 hours.
That was how they were selling it.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
We got a couple of girl couch potatoes.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Right. Right. Look at them.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
When I was reading about that, I figured you'd get
maybe a 20 out of that.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
A 20? What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (43:44):
For PF.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
No, a 1 300th. Wow. Yeah. So there you go.
Thank you, Oak Ridge boys.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Giddy up. Oom-pah-pah.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
And since Chuck said that, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail.
All right, I'm going to call this....
Speaker 2 (44:03):
A series of apologies to Australia.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Oh, boy. Yeah, I know what this is about.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
So before we get into the email, I do think
we should address this, that we've had some ads running
in Australia only that have been no good. And these
aren't ads that we knew about. These aren't ads that
we read. We have a separate company in Australia that's
doing that for us. And everything is under review right
(44:30):
now because... Um, we don't want these ads out there.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
So yeah, it's a, it's a new relationship and we're
kind of figuring each other out.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
That's right. Um, but we do want to say that, uh,
none of these ads were our decision. Um, if you're
out there and your interest is peaked and you're like,
oh my gosh, what are they talking about? I'll never know.
They were, you know, there were ads for like mining
companies and stuff like that, among other things.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Not super S Y S K type stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
No, that's right. And, and we wanted to address it
head on. Uh, but also we wanted to address our own, uh,
foibles in the billabongs terminology that we were talking about
in the wetlands episode.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Just shameful, man. It is.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
And this is something we should know, even though we
are not Australians. But we use the term Aborigines very
sort of willy-nilly. And this is an email from Tanita.
She said, in the episode on wetlands, you used a
number of terms talking about billabongs that were not correct terminology.
The term Aborigines is considered outdated and and offensive as
(45:30):
it groups all indigenous groups into one term and its
connotations of colonial Australia. Some of the current terms and
correct terms for traditional owners of Australia include aboriginal people, indigenous,
First Nations people, and this is something that, you know,
we just should have known.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
So, Yeah, plus, I mean, it applies to more than
just the native people of Australia, too, you know? So,
of course.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah, and we got a bunch of emails from people
that said, if you really want to do right by
these people, you need to research the exact people that
you're talking about, like the Palawa people from Tasmania, where
she's from, or the Anaiwan people from the area around Armidale,
where she lives now. And we didn't do that, and
she said there were 250 different languages available In Australia,
(46:20):
before invasion, only 120 are now spoken. Billabong, in fact,
comes from the We're a Jury language from central New
South Wales and is now a common Australian English term.
And that is from Tanita and many others.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Thank you so much for taking it easy on us, Tanita.
That was very nice. Super Australian of you as well.
Just laid back and nice. And not at all like
chest pokey. So we appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
That's right. And, you know, if you're in the United
States and you're not quite sure what even this means,
it'd basically be like just saying Africa as a lump
all term for like any tribe in Africa and the
culture and the language that is very specific to that region. Right.
And we're not hip to that.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
No. So thanks again. Who was that? Tanita. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (47:10):
Thanks again, Tanita. Tanita. Thanks again, Australia, for taking such
good care of us over there. We appreciate you guys.
And thanks to everybody who listens to Stuff You Should Know.
And if you want to get in touch with us
for any reason, no matter where you live in the world,
no matter what language you speak, you can send us
an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey guys, it's me, Josh. And Fallout shelters have been
on my mind a lot lately. We've been doing some
episodes about the Cold War, and they played a big
role in that. And that second season of Fallout, the
TV show based on the game, it's really good. And
on Wednesday, I got trapped in the Fallout shelter in
(00:21):
the basement of an abandoned school for 18 hours. And
someone finally found me. and the fire department had to
come cut a hole in the steel door with a
huge saw. So I thought that maybe releasing our episode
on fallout shelters again as this week's select would be
a good idea. It came out in 2020, and it's
pretty good, and I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kablooey Clark.
There's Charles W. Bam Bam Bryant and Jerry Radioactive Roland.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Oh, boy.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
You still got it.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
After all these years.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
You still got it.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Hey, I think before we get going, we should talk
very briefly about our audio book.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Because this week in real time, we are each recording
our respective parts for the audio book. And first of all,
we just want to tell everyone there's going to be
an audio book version.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, spoiler.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Of Stuff You Should Know, colon, and Mostly Incomplete Guide
to Very Interesting Things.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Man, still. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Yeah, so we're trying to push that out as a.
You know, get both is what I say. But if
you're into audiobooks, we're doing one. But also, I just
want to make sure people know what they're getting. And
I put this on the Stuff You Should Know Army page.
They're not getting 27 new podcast episodes.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
No.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
And they should know that because our podcast is unscripted conversation.
An audiobook is us reading an audiobook. And rather than
just weirdly trading lines, reading from a script, which would
I think that would dash a lot of people's image
of what we do. We are each reading chapters, and
(02:29):
I think they're going to mix in some stuff here
and there. But, yeah, I mean, it's going to be
great and fun, but it's not podcast episodes. We don't
get to just fart around and make jokes. Like, we've
got to read our book.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Oh, man, we will be kept in line. If we
tried to fart around and make jokes, it would not
be good. There's this whole time is money ethos and yelling,
sometimes crying. It's a real stressful situation, everybody.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
How did that go for you yesterday? Did you enjoy yourself?
Speaker 1 (02:56):
I just told you there's a lot of yelling and crying.
It was very stressful. Yeah, it was fun. It reminded
me a lot of recording The End of the World. Yeah, exactly. Because,
you know, I wrote those and then I read them. Right.
So it was very similar to that, except a lot
less heavy.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, I was slightly nervous at first for some reason
after talking for 12 years, probably just because... you weren't there.
But then it was like, you know, it was fine.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Did Fleet, the director, calm you, make you feel better?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Yeah. I mean, you know, I got in my groove.
I felt pretty comfy by the end of it.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah. So, I mean, it is fun. It's definitely a
lot of extra work this week, but it's kind of cool.
You know, at the end, we're going to have a
bona fide audio book.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
That's right. And a bona fide book that you can
pre-order now. And we're also working on getting that pre-order
gift available to the UK and Australia and other parts
of the world because we have different publishers there. It's
not like we were trying to exclude everyone.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
No, no, no. But we are moving heaven and earth
to get it done. And yeah, if you're in the
US and Canada and you pre-order, if you haven't gotten
your poster yet, worry not. You're going to get your
pre-order gift eventually.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Wow. So for the 15, 17 people who stuck around,
prepare to learn about fallout shelters because that's ultimately what
we're here to talk about today.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
That's right. Actually, before that, I have to say one
more thing.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Oh, God.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
I posted that squirrel attack video on my Instagram, you know,
that we talked about on the episode. Yeah. Because people
kept asking, so I put it up. I'm at Chuck
the Podcaster. If you want to see a squirrel go
berserk and literally fly through the air and hit me
in the leg, then you can see that. It's been
viewed like 15,000 times now.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
One of these days, I hope you'll fess up to
what you did to provoke that squirrel.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
I mean, the whole thing's there. You see me exit
my house, so... Yeah, but I.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Mean, we didn't know, like, what happened a half hour before. Right.
You know, that had been ongoing for the last week
or so. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
No backstory.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
So now, I think we're going to talk about fallout shelters. Because, Chuck,
your house has a basement... But it's exposed on one
side to the outdoors. It's not an in-ground basement as
far as I know. And hopefully I'm not divulging too
much information about your house so weird fans will be
able to find it and show up.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Well, actually, you know, one side of it is exposed
to the world. But the other side is, you know,
10 feet of earth and red clay. Like it could
have been a great fallout shelter had it not been
for that one side.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Sure. But there are things you could do. Or could
have done. I think we should use past tense here.
Because the need for a fallout shelter as far as
a nuclear war goes is vanishingly remote these days. Yeah.
I like to think. I don't think we should get
into any fear mongering here.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
No, I agree.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
But there are a few things you could have done
or could do to build a fallout shelter with that
good side, I guess. And we're going to talk about
that today. But mainly what we're talking about with fallout
shelters is almost kind of like this examination of the
world psyche during the Cold War to where as the
(06:11):
nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States
started to build up in step with one another and
we were suddenly in a nuclear arms race where just
10 years before there were no such thing as nuclear weapons,
people started to realize like, oh man, if one of
these goes off near me, I'm in big trouble. And
they started looking around to the government to say, hey,
(06:35):
what should I do? And at first, the government was like,
you know, figure it out yourself. And then eventually, the
government kind of got a little more involved. And before
you know it, we had a national fallout shelter program.
As feeble and terrible as it was, at least we
had one.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, what's really funny is when you read up on
this stuff and you learn that President Kennedy, John F. Kennedy,
that is, Ask Congress for $ 100 million to build public
fallout shelters.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
That is such an adorable number now. It is. That
would build like 10 fallout shelters these days.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. That's like the amount of money that
would take to get like a motorcade to the Capitol
from the White House basically, you know?
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, but it was a real threat back then. And
I can't remember what episode. It may have been nuclear radiation–
We did one on the disaster in Japan.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
We've done a couple on this. But I know that
I told the story of my father like having us
sort of do 20 percent of a fallout shelter when
I was 10 or 12 years old after the movie
The Day After aired on television.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
I mean, you know, it was my brother and I
taking out– digging out buckets of dirt and carrying them
out in the woods and dumping them for probably three
or four weekends and then we stopped.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
That's awesome. So you guys were 20 percent covered if
something happened. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
I mean, we could have. Yeah, it was pretty gross.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
So was it akin to this this this shelter that
we were going to go over at the end? Was
it like that?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Well, I mean, it eventually could have been, which is
to say a, you know, kind of a concrete room
underground surrounded by earth.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Oh, yeah. No, I'm saying like the kind where it's
like you dig a trench and put some wood poles.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Oh, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
This is part of.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
My basement. Like, my dad had a workshop, and on
the interior wall of the workshop, he knocked down the
cinder block wall, and we just started digging.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Oh, wow.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Which I'm sure was super safe to the foundation of
the house.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Sure, right. He's like, oh, it's probably not load-bearing.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
But yeah, there was definitely a point in time, especially
during the height of the Cold War, where it was like,
this is, we're really in danger here. The world was
just kind of walking around, just twitching and shaking at
the idea of this. And part of the problem was,
Not just the idea that a bomb was going to
go off and just blow cities apart. Because apparently there
(09:05):
was this one of the nuclear deterrent theories, the game
theories that people kind of operated under said, no, you
know what? If we ever engage in nuclear war, we're
just going to be attacking military installations side to side.
And so we don't really have to worry about that
for people in New York or D.C. or, you know, Atlanta, wherever,
(09:27):
any of the major metropolitan cities. We don't have to
worry about those cities getting leveled. But there's going to
be a huge problem for the people living there because
there's such a thing as radioactive fallout. It's not just
the bomb that gets you. It's the fallout afterward.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah. I mean, if you're talking about a nuclear bomb,
a nuclear warhead, it depends on what kind. You know,
back then it was different than it is now. Mm-hmm.
Let's say a one megaton H-bomb back in the day
would completely wipe out everything within about two miles. from
where it hit.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, and I know I said we weren't going to fearmonger, Chuck,
but I found out that there is a bomb in
the U.S. arsenal called the B-83, which is 1.2 megatons,
and it can be carried around very easily by the
B-2 bomber. So those exist.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
So two miles, everything is gone. And this is from
the blast. And a person, if you're like five miles
away from that bomb site, you're going to get hit
with third-degree burns just from that blast.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, you're going to be hating life. So the blast
is going to be bad enough. And again, yeah, just
for people miles away could be burned to death, incinerated, vaporized,
just all sorts of terrible stuff. But if you're living
outside of that blast zone, you got problems in the
radioactivity that's going to be generated by it. Because when
(10:49):
those bombs explode, they release a lot of radioactive particles
of different varieties. And those things go up in the
air and they get kind of carried around and stirred
up in the atmosphere. But a lot of them are
heavy enough that they come back down in basically around
the area, in a larger area around the bomb's epicenter.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, and We should probably just go over some of
these different types of radiation. Some of it you might
recognize from various Incredible Hulk comic books.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
But you've got your alpha particles, your beta particles. You've
got gamma rays. You've got neutrons.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
The gamma rays is what got Hulk, right?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
I think so, right?
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Because gamma rays are green and Hulk was green.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
I think that's it.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
And he had those sweet, sweet purple pants that somehow
still fit.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
For sure.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
So the alpha and beta particles, they are not great,
but they are easily stopped is probably the best way
to say it.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah. So here's the thing. Like everything I tried to
read about this was like they would go to great
lengths to be like, well, this one isn't like that
much of a problem. This one's way worse. And then
finally they'd throw up their hands and be like, actually,
all of this is just going to be one big
giant cluster. Right. Because depending on the different type of
radioactive particle– there's different situations where they're way worse than
(12:09):
the other one. Like a gamma ray is really bad
because it can go clear through several inches of lead
right into you on the other side of the lead
through your body. And then everything it comes in contact with,
say all of your cells and tissues and bones and
all that stuff, it really screws them up genetically and
you can develop cancer and radiation sickness and all that.
(12:30):
That's pretty bad. But then you've got alpha particles where
they can be stopped by a piece of paper. They
can't even make it through your skin, but they could
get all over like crops in the water and we
drink them and eat them. And then they cause all
sorts of problems inside of you too. So there's really
no good radioactive particle as far as a fallout from
(12:51):
a nuclear bomb is concerned.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, not at all. So don't, you know, if you
read up on this stuff and it said, oh, a
piece of paper or a little bit of plastic can
stop beta particles and alpha particles. Just think about the
air you're breathing, the water you're drinking, the maze you're growing. Sure.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Do you want to get traditional?
Speaker 2 (13:11):
It's all very dangerous.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah. Don't just be like, oh, let's make a paper
suit out of newspapers and maybe a little paper tri-cornered
hat out of newspapers. I'll be fine.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
But like you said, when this bomb hits, that mushroom
cloud goes up. Everything's all mixed together. And as the
wind blows, these little, I think John Fuller, our old pal,
wrote this one a long time ago, right? Yep. for
How Stuff Works, but he said there are lots of little,
they act like little tiny missiles, basically, that are just
going off all over the place.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, that was the neutrons, right?
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah, I think the neutrons specific, he called the missiles,
but they kind of all are.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, they are. They're super high energy and gamma rays,
like I said, they can pass right through you. Neutrons
are a problem in the relative immediate blast area because
They're very heavy, so they don't go nearly as far as, say,
like gamma rays or X-rays or alpha particles or beta particles.
But they all do damage in their own unique special
(14:11):
snowflake way.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah, and it's also, I mean, this stuff is being
carried around by the wind. But the actual particles that
you're seeing is actually Earth that is now enriched with
this stuff. That is poofed up from that crater where
Earth used to be, I guess.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Right. And so knowing all this, like this was this
is like why people started to be like, oh, OK,
maybe we should start building fallout shelters to live in
or inhabit for, you know, the immediate period after this
this nuclear attack to give us a chance to survive.
And hopefully, you know, make it a few weeks and
(14:48):
then things will die down. Everybody will have forgotten about
the whole nuclear holocaust. And we can come back out
and restart civilization. That was the really honestly, if you
get down to it, the thinking behind fallout shelters in
the United States in the 60s and late 50s. All right.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Should we take a break there then talk about these things?
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I think so.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Some more?
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
All right. We'll be right back, everyone.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
So, Chuck, I think since we've got one act under
our belt, we need to start the second act by
telling everybody they can preorder our book.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Hey, I took some vitamins, you know. I've been taking
vitamins as much as I can. Oh, yeah? And I've
got this multivitamin, you know, like the worst a vitamin
can taste. I've got that horrible vitamin taste just stuck
in the back of my throat because it got stuck
there for a half of a millisecond before it washed down.
And it's just left this terrible taste of vitamin coating
(16:06):
back there. And it's driving me batty.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
How is your health with the vitamins? Can you tell
the difference?
Speaker 1 (16:14):
No, none.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
How's your pee? How's your urine?
Speaker 1 (16:16):
It's bright yellow, which makes me just feel like such
a chump, especially after our vitamin supplement episode. Oh, right.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Didn't we say like we pee most of it out?
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Yeah. There's good ones for sure. And I like to
think I'm taking good ones, but I just know that
there's no telling right now.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
You're like, I'm using injectables now.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Pretty much snortable vitamins.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
So fallout shelters, it's funny here, and I'm glad John
put it this way because it really makes a lot
of sense. If you think about an SPF for sunscreen.
It's the same exact way with a fallout shelter. You
have a PF, a protection factor. And that is just
very simply a representative of being in a fallout shelter
(16:57):
or just being out in the open. And FEMA put
out a pamphlet called Standards for Fallout Shelters. And they said,
you need a PF of 40.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
At least.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, if you want to, you know. And that puts
you down to about 2.5% of the radiation, which I
heard that number and I thought that was too much.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, no, I think what you're really shooting for is
something like 300, that kind of thing. And they're saying
like a minimum of 40 or else you might as
well just go lay out in the radioactivity for all
the protection you're going to get. Another way to look
at that PF number is that it's the denominator and
the fraction of the radioactive exposure that you get. compared
(17:40):
to being outside of the shelter. So a PF of
40 would mean that you get one 40th. I'm more
of a fraction guy than a decimal dude.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Oh, yeah?
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Uh-huh. How about you? You like decimals or fractions more?
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I don't like either one, but I think for our
next live show in 2022, you should wear a shirt
that says fraction guy, and I'll have one that says
decimal dude.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
And that'll just be our new tour outfit.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Fair enough.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
And you can have yours printed on a button-down shirt,
of course.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Okay. Because nothing looks better than good silk screening on
a button down Oxford. Maybe by the time we go
on tour again, this horrible vitamin taste will be out
of my mouth.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Maybe so. So with fallout shelters, there's a couple of
kinds if you're going back to the 1960s that people
were talking about. And that is the public one and
then the private one that you just build at your
house like we kind of didn't do. I went down
a bit of a rabbit hole, and this would be
(18:40):
right up your alley. You probably did this.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Rabbit hole's pretty safe, I bet. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Depends on how deep, I guess.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
But if you start Googling 60s fallout shelters— Oh, and
I did. Oh, boy. It's just a treasure trove of
articles and pictures. I saw one that these people in
Woodland Hills, a suburb of L.A., or part of greater
Los Angeles, bought a house— Not too long ago, a
(19:08):
few years ago, and they found a– did you see
this one?
Speaker 1 (19:11):
No, I saw some in Milwaukee.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Oh, well, I saw that Milwaukee article too.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
That was great.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
But they found a 15-foot-down under-the-earth fallout shelter.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
That was fully stocked. It was like a time capsule
from 1961.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
And Brendan Fraser and Christopher Walken were living in it.
I can't remember who the mom was. Do you remember?
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Oh, I didn't see that.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh, you didn't? No. No. It was a cute movie. Yeah?
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Was that Encino Man?
Speaker 1 (19:39):
No, no, no. This was Blast from the Past. Oh, okay.
Encino Man was great, too, because the weasel's in it.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Oh, was he?
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah, Pauly Shore.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, I knew it then.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Is.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
I just didn't.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Pauly Shore, Sean Austin, and Brendan Fraser.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Sean Aston.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Whatever. That guy's rich enough. He doesn't care what I say.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
So I was looking at all these 1961 period products
and just, like, getting tingly feelings in my body because
they were perfectly preserved for the most part, like, faded
and stuff. But there was a can, like a coffee can,
but it said, multi-purpose food, Meals for Millions. And so
I was like, I got to find out what this is.
And it turns out that Meals for Millions was a
(20:22):
nonprofit from way back then that is now- Pepper International. No,
now it's transformed into another name these days. I think
Freedom from Hunger is the new name.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
But these two guys, Clifford Clinton and Dr. Henry Borsuk,
took on this task of– Borsuk was a biochemist at Caltech.
And they took on this project of trying to find
the best food to feed, like the cheapest, absolute most
bare bones thing you could put in a package to
feed the hungry.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
And that's what they came up with was this stuff
in a can. And it is 68% defatted soy grits.
Plus dehydrated potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, onions, leeks, parsley, and spices
fortified with vitamins and minerals. And it comes in a
can and you boil it up and eat it. And
(21:17):
it was something like two cents per serving.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
And it was a really ingenious idea, but this became,
I think, kind of a popular thing for fallout shelters
because you could just stock cans and cans of this,
like the most bare bones caloric sort of healthy thing
you could get.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Meals for millions. That's pretty great. I did not expect
it to actually be as healthy as what you just
listed off.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, I would love to taste some of it.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
What?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Multi-purpose food.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
It just traveled the woodland hills. I know. Just call
it food. What do you mean multi-purpose food?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
I don't know. Is it like a pomade as well
or something?
Speaker 1 (21:51):
A food that I ran across that was pretty popular,
especially among government-funded fallout shelters, was this kind of like,
wheat cracker that was made from bulgur wheat. And apparently
they were inspired by some crackers that were found in
Egyptian tombs that were still edible after a couple thousand years.
(22:13):
So they're like, oh, that'd be perfect for fallout shelters.
So they kind of recreated those.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Tasteless, edible.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, multipurpose, apparently. You could shave with them, too.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
You might could. That Milwaukee article is pretty cool, though.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I think it said that at the time there were
like 3,000-plus personal shelters in the city of Milwaukee alone.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yeah, the thing is, like, that's probably a pretty good number.
The thing is there's no official numbers for the fallout
shelters that were built around the Cold War because there
were a lot of private ones, but there was also
public ones too. So let's keep talking about the private
ones first because if we're going to follow the historical timeline—
(22:57):
which I'm in favor of. Around, I think, the late 1950s,
I think it was 1957, in the Eisenhower administration, there
was a report that's now called the Gaither Report. And
it basically said, here's everything we figured out about a
nuclear war. the cities are toast. People are going to
(23:18):
die en masse. We have no place to put them
for them to shelter in. And everybody's in a lot
of trouble if there is a nuclear war. So really,
the best thing we need to focus on is to
prevent a nuclear war from happening. Well, that leaked out.
And people said, well, what are we going to do?
And this is when the government was like, I don't know,
why don't you build some shelters and leave us alone?
(23:40):
And so people started doing that. And it became like
a huge craze. And so shelters in places like that
home in Woodland Hills or that one in Milwaukee that
are still around today in some cases, that became like
a big deal, like adding like a really nice swimming
pool or adding like a rec room or something like that.
(24:02):
People turned to fallout shelters, and they started building them
like crazy.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, and from that Milwaukee, I think it was in
Milwaukee was the name of the website.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
But from what they said was they were being marketed
as sort of multipurpose rec rooms that in case the
S goes down, it's conveniently, you know, lined with concrete.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
And you could just sort of easily convert it. And
I guess you would have some stuff stashed there in
either a closet or in bins or something.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
When you're not using it, you know, when there's no
nuclear disaster, you're just using it as sort of a
playroom or something.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yeah, there was some decorators show in Chicago in the
late 50s, I think, and they build this thing as
the living or the family room of tomorrow. Yeah, it
was exactly what you described. It was like a normal
functioning family room, but it just happened to be in
a basement in like foot thick concrete encased under the dirt.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, I remember seeing when I was a kid, my
brother and I did lots of Sort of, I mean,
I guess it wasn't urban exploring, but... Trespassing? Suburban exploring.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Sure, okay.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
And I remember a couple of distinct times that we
saw vent pipes just coming out of the earth in
the forest. And we never saw any entryway or anything
like that. But that had to be some sort of
fallout shelter, I think.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Yeah, probably.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I mean, they were near homes. But not, like, in
the yard. We'd come across a couple of them in
our various expeditions.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Like, you know, just clearly a vent pipe just coming
out of the woodland forest floor.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what it was. I hope.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah, well, we didn't dig around.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
If not, have you ever seen that Hugh Jackman movie where, like,
his wife is kidnapped?
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Prisoners?
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Yeah, man, that was really good.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
I mean, really good.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, great movie. That's What's-His-Face doing the new Dune movie.
Denis Villeneuve.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Oh, well, there you go. That's why it was so good.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, he's a master.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
I'm sorry, Chuck. I just can't not correct you. His
name is Dennis. Dennis Villeneuve. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Okay, I mispronounced it.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
So, I was kidding. Anyway, there was the private fallout
shelter trend that just blew up and became a thing.
And then in 1961, President Kennedy sent a letter out.
Surely it went out to more than just this. But
if you were a Life magazine subscriber, which was pretty
substantial back in 1961, in the September 15th edition, you
(26:43):
got a letter from President Kennedy basically saying like, hey,
you know, this whole possibility of nuclear war thing. Well,
we've decided we're going to do something about it. We,
the government. And we're going to start what's called the
National Fallout Shelter Survey. And with the survey, basically what
we're going to do is send out government officials. And
(27:06):
they're going to look at buildings all around the country
and identify sites that have the potential of serving as
a fallout shelter. And everyone says, well, that's great. So
like a fallout shelter. So if like a nuclear bomb
goes off over our city, we're going to be safe.
It's like, no, don't be ridiculous. A lot of money. No,
this is going to protect you from radioactive fallout. You'll
(27:28):
have to survive the blast, but this will hopefully protect
you from the fallout afterward.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, and, you know, we kind of laugh about that, but,
I mean, there's no way they could have built enough, like,
adequate shelters to protect all Americans from the blast.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
No, I mean, there was a lot of Americans. Apparently,
they did look at it at first. They could have
pretended to. And it was going to be, like, $ 200
billion in... In 1961 dollars.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
That's another cute number, actually.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
They were like, oh, no, we can't do that. We
don't have that kind of money. So it was like
you said, I think $ 190 million is what they ended
up spending on it, which to me seems like a
lot of money to send out some people to look
at buildings and decide what was a fallout shelter and
what wasn't.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Yeah, you know, what's really funny is when you look
at what people did around the world, what countries did
around the world, and how it so jibes with how
those countries are still today. So the U.S. did what
we did. The Soviets said that they built a big
extensive system and they had an advanced cooling system and
(28:32):
all these filters protecting against everything and provisions, food and
water forever and everything. You know, this is this is
the press release they put out, basically. Who knows what
really happened?
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, because I found that on like Russia's so great
dot com or whatever. I mean, it was it was
like an urban exploration of like an abandoned shelter. But,
you know, was this just like the biggest one? How
many were like that? Right. Supposedly, the Soviets boasted of
a system that could protect most most of their citizens
from the blast.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
All right, so that makes sense. Sweden built 65,000, which
covered about 70% of the population.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
TS for the other 30%.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Switzerland built enough shelters for everybody. Okay. God bless them.
The UK said, you know what? We're going to build
enough for our military, our government, and the royal family.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, chin up, everyone else.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
And then Australia said, nah, we'll take a pass. We're
not going to build any because no one's going to
mess with us down here.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Yeah, they're like, everybody's right on the beach. Everyone knows
we're fine if the rest of the world's gone up
in flames. I think they're probably right.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
I mean, they were, and especially back then, enough off
the map or off the path of the threat that
they didn't even need to sweat it.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah. They're like, hey, what's all the ruckus up there?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
So the U.S. said, okay, we've got to do something.
Let's at least build these fallout shelters that are going
to protect people from radioactivity. And so they started building these— well,
I shouldn't say building. They started going on to private
property or public buildings and saying, hey, you've got a
really nice basement here.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Can you take down the human skins and clean it
up a little bit? We're going to put some bulgur
wheat biscuits in here. We're going to put in some
multipurpose food, don't ask. And we're going to turn this
place into a fallout shelter. And on their way out,
they would slap a sign, a very iconic sign, which
was a black circle saying, with three inverted triangles all
(30:36):
pointing toward the center that designated a fallout shelter. And
they did this in yellow in the event of like
a blackout during a nuclear war or something so that
you could easily see it.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, pretty cool. The company 3M made these for about
a penny each, and they made about 400,000 of these signs.
And they would stock these things with, you know, like
medical first aid kits, some water drums. Those crackers that
you talked about that if you add water could probably
double up as like cement patch.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah, I guess. But I think people would wrestle you
to the ground if you tried to use the water
for anything but drinking after, you know, in the event
of this. Sure.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
I mean, that's one thing we didn't mention. If you
go to build your own fallout shelter, you know, you
should have some food. But water obviously is far more important.
We've talked about that a lot, about how long the
human body can go without food and water. Got to
have a lot of water. I think I would stock
it up with some of that Mike's Mighty Good ramen.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Sure. Of course.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Which, by the way, we'd be remiss if we didn't
point out that they actually sent us a coupon code
for Stuff You Should Know listeners.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
This is not an ad, but we talk about that
ramen so much. They said, you know what? Tell everyone
Stuff You Should Know 20. We'll give them 20% off
ramen if they want to order some.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Very nice. Do you write the number 20 or write
out T-W-E-N-T-Y?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
The number 20 after stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
So 2-0.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Yeah, and you could stock up your own fallout shelter.
You can eat that stuff for lunch. Doesn't take up
a lot of room. Good calories.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
It's multipurpose food.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
You got to use some water for it, though.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Right. But I mean, hey.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Or you could collectively spit in it, I guess, and
heat that up. That's grody.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
You're going to get that water anyway, though, you know,
because you're going to drink the juice.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
That's true. So back to the public shelters, they have
these pretty well stocked. They said there was an actual
booklet in there that said, if you want a toilet,
cut a seat out of a chair and put a
bucket under it. And there's your toilet.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
And so when that pamphlet came out in particular, the
American citizenry said, like, for real, this is what our
tax dollars are doing. This is what we're getting from
our government. Cut a hole in the seat of a
chair and put a bucket under there. That's your advice
for the nuclear war that you're half responsible for having
us live under the threat of.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Right. They said, we're not socialists. You take care of yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
So the thing is, is like people would people would
people would read newspapers or people would like watch the
news or whatever. And they would be getting one channel
of information that was saying, like, yeah, here's what this,
you know, what a one megaton bomb could possibly do
to you. Or if this blew up over New York City,
(33:24):
this is what would happen. And people would say, well,
what's the point of having these fallout shelters? Because if
a bomb goes off over New York City, all of
those fallout shelters are going to be totally obliterated. There's
no point for them. And the government in doing something
like trying to at least lift some finger and make
(33:46):
people feel less anxious actually had the opposite effect because
it drew a lot of attention and focus to the
need for fallout shelters while at the same time reinforcing
the idea that these fallout shelters weren't going to be
worth anything for anybody unless maybe you lived in Topeka
or somewhere where there wasn't what's known as a key
(34:07):
target so that you might actually survive in a fallout
shelter that was well stocked and had few enough people.
It could work, but for most Americans, especially ones in
major cities, you're going to be in bad shape. And
the fallout shelter program really kind of pointed that out.
All right.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 1 (34:26):
I think so. All right.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
We'll take our last break and we'll be back right
after this. So before we broke, you said something about
(34:54):
unless you live in Topeka, doesn't Kansas have silos or no?
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Yeah, as I was saying it, I was like, shh. Yeah,
I'm glad you said something. At least they'll save us
the emails.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Okay, because that, you know, we did mention, but, you know,
we talked about game theory earlier about how the reasoning was, no,
you don't need to worry if you're in a big
city because there aren't military bases there.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Right.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
But, you know, that sort of goes the way of–
that war goes once anything goes wrong. So if one
bomb from the opposition, from the enemy, goes to somewhere
it isn't supposed to go, then all bets are off, basically.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
And then it's just bomb away.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Also, I want to give a shout-out to Robert Clara
from History.com, who wrote Nuclear Fallout Shelters Were Never Going
to Work, who wrote a pretty great article about how
this whole program was kind of doomed from the start.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
It kind of says it all.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Ill-conceived you know but not only was it ill-conceived they
were also like poorly stocked some of these things that
were designated fallout shelters never got their supplies water drums
were leaking and then um others worked really well so
well in fact that there's one they found at the
oyster adams bilingual school in dc which is a school
(36:12):
still functioning today part of dc public schools but there
is a fallout shelter that's like a um a time capsule, basically,
that has all of the original provisions in it, just
frozen in time still.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Wow. It's really neat. Yeah, like that house in California.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Yeah, basically. Except this was one of the designated public
fallout shelters, but below a school.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Yeah, I think, didn't they try to build them to
house at least 50 people? Mm-hmm. And I think they had,
they recommended for the personal ones that they be at
least six and a half feet tall. Yeah. And that
was one of the things that sort of would have
been the toughest, I think, about fallout shelters. So many
of them had very low ceilings. Obviously, there's no windows.
(36:57):
I mean, bunker life is tough going. And they recommended
two weeks, which is nuts to me. There's no way
I'm poking my head out after two weeks just to
see if it's how things are going up there.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Right. And I mean, like there was some logic and
reasoning to that two weeks in that there's that you
would have exceeded the half-life of a lot of the
radionuclides that are created. But yeah, there's plenty that would
still be around. Yes, it was never going to work
like Robert Clara put it.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
No, and I think that was sort of the idea
of what you were talking about with the public being
so disheartened and feeling helpless about our civil defense was... Like,
this is the general public, and they didn't think it
seemed like a good plan.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
But it makes me wonder, though, is that a good thing? Like,
it sucks to have that kind of mental anxiety that
we all collectively had during the Cold War, especially at
the height of this stuff, like in the 60s. Yeah.
I think it might have actually been good because then
the public was aware of just how dangerous things were
and would prevent a kind of cavalier attitude toward nuclear
(38:07):
war because they knew what was at stake and what
was at stake were their very lives.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Maybe. I mean, and maybe that's a bottom-up sort of
like a groundswell of public thought ekes its way up
into government. And, you know, I mean, I guess we'll
never know how close– I mean, I don't think we've
ever done one on the nuclear, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Have we not?
Speaker 2 (38:31):
I don't think specifically, but, you know, we've been on
the brink in a way that history has recognized, but
I'm curious how close it's been in times that we
never even knew about, you know?
Speaker 1 (38:43):
There's one guy who celebrated every year, I can't remember
what the day is, but it's basically like Save the
World Day, where this one Soviet soldier I guess a
missile commander basically had a few minutes, was being told
by his computers and all of his underlings that the U.S.
had launched a massive strike and that, you know, it
(39:05):
was up to him to call and order this counter
strike or call the people who would order the counter strike.
And he sweated it out. He said that he just
didn't believe that the Americans would have launched an unprovoked
all out nuclear strike like he was being shown. and
he stayed his hand and literally saved the world from
(39:26):
a nuclear war single-handedly. thing is, Chuck, is that has
happened more than once.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. It's funny that, like, we're basically
the last generation that grew up with any knowledge of
the threat of nuclear war like this.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Like, we sort of experienced the tail end of the
Cold War.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Perfect generation.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Yeah, but it's hard to... The Friendly Fire podcast, which
is one of my favorites, the war movie podcast that
our buddies Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica and John Roderick do.
They're younger. Roderick's, you know, a few years older than me.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Way old.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
So way older than you. But John kind of drives
this point home a lot about like it's really hard
to put into words what that does to a set
of generations when we're all sort of living under this
you know, very real threat that we could all die
the worst possible death. And, you know, not like, oh,
(40:25):
you kids have got it made or anything like that.
But it's a different sort of mindset, you know?
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah. I mean, it definitely is. And it definitely affects
you from every stage of your life, you know?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
I mean, it went away by the time we were
in college. But, you know, I remember my early years, obviously,
we were digging a fallout shelter. It was a big threat.
And movies and TV reinforce that every day.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yep. So if you wanted to build a fallout shelter,
we have to say there was a time in addition
to designating fallout shelters. By the way, if you find
one of those old fallout shelter signs, hang on to it.
You can pretty much take it. And unless there's a
close watching groundskeeper Willie type who takes care of that building,
(41:12):
nobody's probably going to notice it's gone. Yeah. And the U.S.
government has no idea how many are out there because
they never kept track of the fallout shelters. There was
no registry or anything. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I mean, they started shutting these down in the early
70s officially, started giving away the food, sent some of
it to organizations in Africa and Bangladesh. And then those
signs started, I think, in the mid-70s, started pulling those
signs out. And I think finally, just three years ago
in 2017, they said that They said that they got
(41:44):
the last of the signs out of New York City.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
And I don't think we mentioned it's hysterical that they
built these fallout shelters in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
As if that would, you know, that would lead to
good things.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Be spared.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. Or be spared.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Right. So if you did want to make a fallout shelter,
there's a pamphlet put out by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Where they basically hired boys. Yeah. They they had a
sideline in studying nuclear disaster survival. Well, like you couldn't
tell with their beard, you know.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Right.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
But this pamphlet basically was the result of Oak Ridge
hiring a bunch of families, regular old American families. And
saying a nuclear war is happening right now. Go build
a fallout shelter. Here's your instructions. And then seeing how
easy it could be done and then adjusting the instructions
and so on and so forth until they finally got
to this pamphlet. And the pamphlet basically came up with
(42:41):
this really good idea. fallout shelter where you just basically
dug a trench in in the ground that was several
feet deep covered it with wood poles covered the wood
poles with something like cloth the old bed sheet something
like that put dirt on it put shower curtains something
waterproof and then put more dirt on that and they
(43:01):
actually figured out that this particular fallout shelter had like
a a A protection factor of like 300.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Really?
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Yeah. And it would also survive a blast that most
houses would not survive.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Because you're just basically hunkered down in the earth. And
it would work for you if you wanted to. And
they said that it can be done. They used the
example that two non-athletic college-age girls did it in 36 hours.
That was how they were selling it.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
We got a couple of girl couch potatoes.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Right. Right. Look at them.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
When I was reading about that, I figured you'd get
maybe a 20 out of that.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
A 20? What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (43:44):
For PF.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
No, a 1 300th. Wow. Yeah. So there you go.
Thank you, Oak Ridge boys.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Giddy up. Oom-pah-pah.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
And since Chuck said that, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail.
All right, I'm going to call this....
Speaker 2 (44:03):
A series of apologies to Australia.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Oh, boy. Yeah, I know what this is about.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
So before we get into the email, I do think
we should address this, that we've had some ads running
in Australia only that have been no good. And these
aren't ads that we knew about. These aren't ads that
we read. We have a separate company in Australia that's
doing that for us. And everything is under review right
(44:30):
now because... Um, we don't want these ads out there.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
So yeah, it's a, it's a new relationship and we're
kind of figuring each other out.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
That's right. Um, but we do want to say that, uh,
none of these ads were our decision. Um, if you're
out there and your interest is peaked and you're like,
oh my gosh, what are they talking about? I'll never know.
They were, you know, there were ads for like mining
companies and stuff like that, among other things.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Not super S Y S K type stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
No, that's right. And, and we wanted to address it
head on. Uh, but also we wanted to address our own, uh,
foibles in the billabongs terminology that we were talking about
in the wetlands episode.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Just shameful, man. It is.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
And this is something we should know, even though we
are not Australians. But we use the term Aborigines very
sort of willy-nilly. And this is an email from Tanita.
She said, in the episode on wetlands, you used a
number of terms talking about billabongs that were not correct terminology.
The term Aborigines is considered outdated and and offensive as
(45:30):
it groups all indigenous groups into one term and its
connotations of colonial Australia. Some of the current terms and
correct terms for traditional owners of Australia include aboriginal people, indigenous,
First Nations people, and this is something that, you know,
we just should have known.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
So, Yeah, plus, I mean, it applies to more than
just the native people of Australia, too, you know? So,
of course.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah, and we got a bunch of emails from people
that said, if you really want to do right by
these people, you need to research the exact people that
you're talking about, like the Palawa people from Tasmania, where
she's from, or the Anaiwan people from the area around Armidale,
where she lives now. And we didn't do that, and
she said there were 250 different languages available In Australia,
(46:20):
before invasion, only 120 are now spoken. Billabong, in fact,
comes from the We're a Jury language from central New
South Wales and is now a common Australian English term.
And that is from Tanita and many others.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Thank you so much for taking it easy on us, Tanita.
That was very nice. Super Australian of you as well.
Just laid back and nice. And not at all like
chest pokey. So we appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
That's right. And, you know, if you're in the United
States and you're not quite sure what even this means,
it'd basically be like just saying Africa as a lump
all term for like any tribe in Africa and the
culture and the language that is very specific to that region. Right.
And we're not hip to that.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
No. So thanks again. Who was that? Tanita. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (47:10):
Thanks again, Tanita. Tanita. Thanks again, Australia, for taking such
good care of us over there. We appreciate you guys.
And thanks to everybody who listens to Stuff You Should Know.
And if you want to get in touch with us
for any reason, no matter where you live in the world,
no matter what language you speak, you can send us
an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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