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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Fallout Shelter

When I moved to the city, there was a Cold War remnant I had never seen before.

Large government and public buildings had radioactive signs hung outside the door indicating that that building was a fallout shelter. This is the one on the school down the street from me.




I walk a lot in my area and I really started to notice more and more how many of these buildings exist. I start to think about the era. I've never really had to worry about nuclear bombs falling. I only saw U.S.S.R. printed on globes until 2nd grade. I've never worried about a country, so similar to my own, that we knew we had to be protected from them.

I also think about how likely it is that you would be able to make it to a shelter in time to survive a nuclear bombing. To me, it almost seemed like a false sense of security. Yes, I guess if you weren't at the epicenter of where the bomb was dropped, you have a little bit of time to get to a shelter before radioactive fallout started raining from the sky.

But that's a big if.

I know the threat was real, but I think there was a false sense of security. In the back of the minds of people in charge and in the military, they sort of knew that because we had nuclear missiles, Russia wasn't going to launch. It was basically going to be a standoff or total world destruction, and no matter what the propaganda said on either side, neither country was that evil.


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