Cold War Kids
99% Invisible
00:00
The Fear of Nuclear War
Kenneth Rose: Americans rejected shelters for a lot of reasons. The cost of a decent shelter was about $2,500 and that was half the median family income in the 1960s. We think roughly something like 200,000 shelters were built from the beginning of the Cold War to about 1965. It's about one for every 900 people. But in an era when a majority of Americans actually believed that there was going to be nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, I would say that 200,000 is actually a small number.
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