Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Fallout Shelters: Probably Useless (Let’s Never Find Out)

Episode Date: September 19, 2026

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I never received scholarship money to pay for my student loans. Maybe this is the meta question for the podcast. What is Miss America at this point? Listen to The Curse with Miss America on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 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 elect would be a good idea. It came out in 2020, and it's pretty good, and I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kablooy Clark. There's Charles W. Bam Bam Bryant and Jerry Radioactive Rowland. Oh, boy.

And this is stuff you should know. You still got it. After all these years. You still got it. Yep. Hey, I think before we get going, we should talk very briefly about our audiobook. Oh, yeah. Because this week in real time, we are each recording our respective parts for the audiobook.

And first of all, we just want to tell everyone there's going to be an audiobook version. Yeah. Spoiler. Of stuff you should know, colon, and mostly incomplete guide to very interesting things. Man, still. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. 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. No. 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. Yeah.

We are each reading chapters. And 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 got to read our book. No, we have, oh, man, we will be kept in line. If we try to fart around and make jokes, it would not be good. There's this whole time as money ethos and yelling, sometimes crying.

It's a real stressful situation, everybody. How did you go for you yesterday? Did you enjoy yourself? I just told you there's a lot of yelling and crying. It was very stressful. Yeah, it was fun. It reminded me a little. lot of recording the end of the world. Yeah, exactly. You know, I wrote those and then I read them.

Right. So it was very similar to that, except a lot less heavy. 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. Did Fleet the director calm you make you feel better? Yeah, I mean, you know, I got in my groove. I felt pretty, pretty comfy by the end of it. Yeah. So, I mean, it has, 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 audiobook. That's right, in 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. No, no, but we are moving heaven and earth to get it done. And yeah, if you're in the U.S. 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. That's right. 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. That's right. Actually, before that, I have to say one more thing. 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

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. One of these days, I hope you'll fess up to what you did to provoke that squirrel. I mean, the whole thing's there. You see me exit my house, so. Yeah, but I mean, we didn't know, like, what happened a half hour before. Right. You know, that had been ongoing for the last week.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. No backstory. So now, I think we're going to talk about fall. out 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. 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. side. 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 in any fear mongering here. No, I agree. 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 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, what should I do? And at first the government was like, hmm, 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. 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.

Right. That is such an adorable number now. It is. That would build like 10 fallout shelters these days. Yeah. Maybe. That's like the amount of money that would take to get like a motorcade to the capital from the White House, basically, you know?

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. 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% of a fallout shelter when I was 10 or 12 years old after the movie the day after aired on television. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, 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. So you guys were 20% covered if something happened.

Yeah, I mean, we could have, yeah, it was pretty gross. So was it akin to this shelter that we were going to go over at the end? Was it like that? Well, I mean, it eventually could have been, which is to say a, you know, kind of a concrete room underground surrounded by Earth. Oh, yeah, no, I'm saying like the kind where it's like you dig a trench and put some wood poles on Earth over it. No, this is part of 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.

Oh, wow. Which I'm sure was super safe to the foundation of the house. Sure, right. He's like, oh, it's probably not lobe-bearing. Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, there was definitely a point in time, especially during the height of the Cold War, where it was like, 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 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, 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. 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. But let's say a one megaton, H-bomb, back in the day, would completely wipe out everything within about two miles from where I hit. 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 B83, which is 1.2 megatons, and it can be carried around very easily by the B2 bomber. So those exist. 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. Yeah, you're going to be hate in 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've got problems in the radioactivity that's going to be generated by it. Because when 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, and basically around the area, and a larger area around the bomb's epicenter.

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. Right. But you've got your alpha particles, your beta particles. You've got gamma rays. You've got neutrons. The gamma rays is what got Hulk, right? I think so, right?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure. Because gamma rays are green and Hulk was green. That's right. I think that's it. Any of those sweet, sweet purple pants that somehow still fit. For sure. So the alpha and beta particles, they are not great, but they are easily stopped.

It's probably the best way to say it. Yeah, so here's the thing. Like, everything I tried to read about this was, like, they would go to great lengths and 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 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 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.

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 a new,

clear bomb is concerned. Yeah, not at all. So don't, you know, if you read up on this stuff and I 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.

Do you want to get traditional? It's all very dangerous. Yeah, don't just be like, oh, let's make a paper suit out of newspapers. It may be a little paper, tried cornered hat out of newspapers. I'll be fine. 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,

old pal wrote this one a long time ago, right? Yeah. 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. Yeah, that was the neutrons, right? Yeah, I think the neutrons specific, he called the missiles, but they kind of all are.

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 snowflake way. 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. Right. And so knowing all this, this was why people started to be like, oh, okay, maybe we should start building fallout shelters to live in or inhabit for, you know, the immediate period after this nuclear attack to give us a chance to survive and hopefully, you know, make it a few weeks and then things will have died 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, should we take a break there, then talk about

these things? I think so. Some more? Yeah. All right. We'll be right back, everyone. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. The podcasts everyone's talking about. All in one place. And it's free.

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Download the free IHard Radio app today. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence. It's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Amade, Alex Carr, Faye Faye Leap, Homer Lockie, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed. So the Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it.

Well, yeah, it's up to us. But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to the Builders on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around. But why should you listen to ours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world. And we talk about pretty much everything under the sun.

For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes. Sometimes we even talk about. Just everyday mundane situations in our lives, like the cool Uber driver we just had. Or the food we just say, that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours.

And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen to out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 pre-order our book. 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 of 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 back there. It's driving me baddie. How is your health with the vitamins? Can you tell a difference? No, none. How's your pee?

How's your urine? It's bright yellow, which makes me just feel like such a chump, especially after our vitamin supplement episode. Oh, right. Didn't we say like we pee most of it out? 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. You're like, I'm using injectables now. Pretty much snortable vitamins. 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 or just being out in the open. Right.

And FEMA put out a pamphlet called Standards for Fallout Shelters, and they said, you need a PF of 40. At least. 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. 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 just, you might as well just go lay out in the, 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 to being outside of the shelter. So PF of 40 would mean that you get 1.40th. I'm more of a fraction guy than a decimal dude. Oh, yeah? How about you? You like decimals or fractions more? 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 due. Okay. And that'll just be our new tour outfit. Fair enough. And you can have yours printed on a button-down shirt, of course. Okay. That's, yeah.

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. 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 is be right up your alley. You probably did this. Rabbit hole is pretty safe, I bet. Yeah, it depends on how deep, I guess. Yeah. 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, these people in Woodland Hills, the suburb of L.A. or part of Greater Los Angeles, bought a house not too long ago, a few years ago, and they found a... Did you see this one? No, I saw some in Milwaukee.

Oh, well, I saw that Milwaukee article, too. That was great. But they found a 15-foot down under-the-earth fallout shelter that was fully stocked. It was like a time-cap. from 1961. And Brendan Fraser and Christopher Wacken were living in it.

I can't remember who the mom was. Do you remember? Oh, I didn't see that. Oh, you didn't? No. It was a cute movie. Yeah? Is that Encino Man?

No, no, no. This was blast from the past. Oh, okay. Encino Man was great, too, because the weasels in it. Oh, was he? Yeah, Polly Shore. Yeah, I knew who that is.

I just didn't... Polly Shore, Sean Austin, and Brendan Frasier. Sean Aston. Whatever. That guy's rich enough. He doesn't care what I say. 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've got to find out what this is. And it turns out that Meals for Millions was a nonprofit from way back then that is not. Now, what's it for international? No, now it's transformed into another name these days. I think Freedom from Hunger is the new name. Okay. But these two guys, Clifford Clinton and Dr. Henry Borsuch, took on this task of,

Borsuch 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. Right. 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 it was something like two cents per serving. Wow. 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. Meals for millions. That's pretty great.

I did not expect it to actually be as healthy as what you just listed off. Yeah, I would love to taste some of it. Well, it's just travel to Woodland Hills. I know. Just call it food. What do you mean multi-purpose food? I don't know. A pomade as well or something?

A seedling. 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 bulgar wheat. And apparently they were inspired by some crackers that were found in Egyptian tombs that were still edible after a couple thousand years. So they're like, oh, that would be perfect for fallout shelters. So they kind of recreated those.

Tasteless, edible? Yeah, multi-purpose, apparently. You could shave with them too. You might good. That Milwaukee article is pretty cool, though. Yeah. I think it said that at the time there were like 3,000-plus personal shelters in the city of Milwaukee alone. Yeah, the thing is, 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, 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 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? 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. People turned to fallout shelters and they started building them like crazy. Yeah, and from that Milwaukee, I think it was in Milwaukee was the name of the website. But from what they said was they were being marketed as sort of multi-purpose rec rooms that in case the S goes down, it's conveniently lined with concrete.

Right. And you could just sort of easily convert it. And I guess you would have some stuff stash there in either a closet or in bins or something. And 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. 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. where 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. 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... Trusspassing? Suburban exploring. Sure, okay. 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. Yeah, probably. I mean, they were near homes, but not like in the yard. We'd come across a couple of them in our various expeditions. Okay. Like, you know, just a clearly event pipe just coming out of the woodland forest floor. Gotcha, gotcha, got you. Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what it was.

I hope. Yeah, well, we didn't dig around. If not, have you ever seen that Hugh Jackman movie where like his wife is kidnapped prisoners yeah man that was really good yeah i mean really good yeah great movie so um that's uh what's his face this doing the new dune movie dene villanue oh well there you go that's why it was so good yeah he's he's a master um i'm sorry chuck i just i can't not correct you his name is dennis villanubb i'm sorry okay i mispronounced it so 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. I'm 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 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 this, with the survey, basically what we're going to do is send out government officials, and 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 saved. He's like, no, don't be ridiculous. That would cost a lot of money.

No, this is going to protect you from radioactive fallout. You'll have to survive the blast, but this will hopefully protect you from the fallout afterward. 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. No, I mean, there was a lot of Americans. Apparently, they did look at. it at first.

They could have pretended to. $200 billion in 19691. That's another cute number, actually. 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.

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's, so jibs 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 all these filters protecting against everything and provisions, food and water forever.

And, you know, this is the press release they put out, basically. Who knows what really happened? Yeah, because I found that on, like, Russia's Sogreat.com or whatever. I mean, it was, it was like an urban exploration of like an abandoned shelter, but, you know, was it just like the biggest one? How many were like that? Right. But supposedly the Soviets boasted of a system that could protect most of their citizens from the blast.

All right. So that makes sense. Sweden built 65,000, which covered about 70% of the population. T.S. for the other 30%. 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. Yeah, chin up, everyone else. 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. Yeah, they're like, everybody's read 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. I mean, they were, and especially back then,

enough off the map or off the path of, of the threat that they didn't even need to sweat it. Yeah. They're like, hey, what's all the ruckus up there? Yeah. 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 got a really nice basement here. Yeah. Can you take down the human, skins, clean it up a little bit.

We're going to put some boulder wheat biscuits in here. We're going to put in some multi-purpose 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, very iconic sign, which is a black circle with three inverted triangles all 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.

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.

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. 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. Sure. Of course. 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. Oh, yeah.

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 get them 20% off ramen if they want to order some. Very nice. Do you write the number 20 or write out T-W-E-N-T-Y? The number 20 after stuff you should know. So 2-0. Yeah, and you could stock up your own Fallout Shelter.

You can eat that stuff for lunch. It doesn't take up a lot of room, good calories. It's multi-purpose food. You've got to use some water for it, though. Right. But I mean, hey. Or you could collectively spit in it, I guess, and heat that up. That's grody.

You're going to get that water anyway, though, you know, because you're going to drink the juice. 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. And so when that pamphlet came out in particular, the American citizen 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, right? They said, we're not socialists. You take care of yourself. Yeah, so the thing is, is, like, 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 megatum bomb could possibly do to you, or if this blew up over New York City, 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 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 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, should we take a break? I think so. All right. We'll take our last break, and we'll be back right after this. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts, everyone's talking about.

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being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Amade, Alex Carr, Faye, Faye, Faye Leap, Homer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed. Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing,

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Or the food we just say that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect.

So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. So before we broke, you said something about unless you live in Topeka, doesn't Kansas have silos or no? 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. 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. Right.

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 isn't supposed to go, then all bets are off, basically. Yeah. And then it's just bomb away. 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. It kind of says it all. It was 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 others worked really well so well, in fact, that there's one they found at the Oyster Adams Bilingual School in D.C., which is a school still functioning today part of D.C. public schools. But there is a fallout shelter that's like a

time capsule, basically, that has all of the original provisions in it. frozen in time still. Wow. It's really neat. It's really neat. Yeah, basically. Except this was one of the designated public fallout shelters, but below a school. Yeah, I think didn't they try to build them to house at least 50 people?

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. There's so many of them had very low ceilings. Obviously, there's no windows. I mean, it's bunker life is tough going. And they recommended two weeks, which is nuts to me. Like, 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. Right. And, I mean, like, there was some logic and reasoning to that two weeks and that there's that you would have exceeded the half-life of a lot of the radio nuclides 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. 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.

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. But 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 war because they knew what was at stake and what was at stake were their very lives. Maybe.

Maybe. I mean, and maybe that's a bottom-up sort of like a groundswell of public thought eaks its way up into government. And, you know, I mean, I guess we'll never know how close we ever got. I mean, I don't think we've ever done one on the nuclear, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Have we not? 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.

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, 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 was up to him to call and order this counterstrike 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 a nuclear war, like single-handedly. And the scary thing is, Chuck, is that has happened more than once. 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. Yeah.

Like, we sort of experienced the tail end of the Cold War. Perfect generation. Yeah, but it's hard to, um, And 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 a few years older than me. Way old. 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, you kids have got it made or anything like that, but it's a different sort of mindset, you know. Yeah. I mean, it definitely is. It definitely affects you from every stage of your life, you know. 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. 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, 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, I mean, they started shutting these down in the early 70s officially. Yeah. 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 the last of the signs out of New York City, which, and I don't think we mentioned, And it's hysterical that they built these fallout shelters in Manhattan and Brooklyn as if that would, you know, that would lead to good things. Be spared. Right. Exactly. Right. So if you did want to make a fallout shelter, there was a pamphlet put out by Oakridge National Laboratory where they basically hired. The Oak Ridge Boys? Yeah. They had a sideline in studying nuclear disaster survival. Like you couldn't tell with their beard, you know. But this pamphlet basically was the result of Oakridge 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 this really good fallout shelter where you just basically dug a trench 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 actually figured out that this particular fallout shelter

had like a protection factor of like 300. Really? Yeah. And it would also survive a blast that most houses would not survive. Wow. because you're just basically hunker 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. We got a couple of girl couch potatoes. Right. Look at them. Wow. Yeah.

When I was reading about that, I figured you'd get maybe a 20 out of that. A 20, what do you mean? For PF. No, a one 300th. Wow. Yeah. So there you go. Thank you, Oakridge, boys.

Gitty up. Oum Papa. And since Chuck said that, everybody, it's time for a listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this a series of apologies to Australia. Oh, boy. Yeah, I know what this is about. 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 now because we don't want these ads out there. Yeah, it's a new relationship, and we're kind of figuring each other out. That's right. But we do want to say that none of these ads were our decision. 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 ads for like mining companies and stuff like that, among other things. Not super SY-S-K-type stuff. No, that's right. And we wanted to address it head-on. But also, we wanted to address our own foibles in the Billabong's terminology that we were talking about in the wetlands episode.

Just shameful, man. It is. And this is something we should know, even though we are not Australians. But we used the term aborigines very sort of willy-nilly. And this is an email from Tanita, she said. In the episode in Wetlands, you used a number of terms talking about billabongs that were not correct terminology. The term aborigines is considered outdated and offensive as it groups all indigenous groups into one term and as 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 we just should have known. Yeah, plus, I mean, it applies to more than just the native people of Australia too, you know? So, of course. 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 Aniwan people from the area around Armidale, where she lives now. And we didn't do that. And she said there were 250 different languages in Australia before invasion. Only 120 are now spoken. Bilobong, 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. Thank you so much for taking it easy on us to need it.

That was very nice. Super Australian of you as well. Just lay back in nice and not at all like chest pokey. So we appreciate that. That's right. And, you know, if you're in the United States and you'm 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. No. So thanks again. Who was it, Tanita? Yeah. Okay. Thanks again, 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 Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know. is a production of IHeartRadio.

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