wow....jeez.... I would not feel safe knowing there was a bomb buried in my backyard... that sounds pretty danged dangerous.

Look on the bright side, if it exploded it'd make world news. "Revenge of Mother Nature - Local area shocked by exploding ground". I actually wouldn't find it too bad in a fallout shelter, except for the fact that you probably wouldn't have alot of air. And all the shelter would do would be giving you a few years of life in isolation, as you can never exit it due to the radiation.

... I'll book a flight to Mars as soon as possible.

Erm... I trust that Radioactive Fallout would settle after about 2 weeks, and that after that the Radiation levels would be safe. People made shelters to be in for short periods. Also, places like Chernobyl are still rather dangerous to live around because it's a gradual leak of Radiation.

I guess. Maybe a couple weeks in a shelter would be doable, as long as there was electricity... if not, I'd go insane.

You use a filtration unit to draw in fresh air from outide. Fallout shelters don't need to be air-tight, you just need to make sure that all air coming IN has been thoroughly filtered (a series of high-quality modern HEPA filters woul probably do the job, actually), with an intake vent at least 3-5 feet off the ground. And maintain slightly positive pressure, so that the airflow through all other leaks is "from IN to OUT", thus keeping the radioactive dust outside your safe shelter.


"A few years" ...? Depending on how big it was, you could spend a lifetime in a shelter.

Freeze-dried food has a shelf-life in excess of thirty years - so a twenty-year stay wouldn't necessarily be any especial hardship, foodwise. And for a lot of it, you only need to add water, and POOF, it's edible. Cold, but edible. Keep a camp stove and large supply of fuel on hand, and you can then heat that food up.

With enough storage space, you can also set aside a ton of candles, lamp oil, or even those "glow stick" things. Some of them are good for up to 12 hours apiece; they may not provide enough light to read by, but certainly, enough to walk around by.

Water is a problem - you can lay in a LOT of it, but you'd still need to go to outside sources eventually. There're several good ways to purify water, though (especially colloidal silver, which can also double as a medical antiseptic) - aside from radioactive particulates. Filtration might cover that angle, though.

For sanitation ...? Chemical Toilet. ^_^

Entertainment? Aforementioned power supply, a television and DVD player, and a ton of DVDs. Also, books. Especially RPG books, IMO. Boardgames galore - not just monopoly and such, but more-complex games like Civilization. And card games (the new acetate-film cards being highly recommended for their durability). If you have a sustainable model for power generation, electronic format books become an option - nice, dense storage, there.

If it were me, I'd build a multilevel affair, VERY deep - the roof should IMO be at least 50' down. 100' would be preferable. Multi-layer enclosure around the shelter proper (alternating [rebar-embedded concrete] and [packed sand]) for ground-shock protection. Lay in materials for assembling a positive-pressure-enabled, airtight greenhouse on the surface after a few years (along with a solar-panel farm). And for assembling a few ground vehicles (multifuel-capable, preferably), in parts, as well. Low-tech agricultural and industrial stuff - and textbooks on their use. Medical supplies, and textbooks for that, too; the nearest doctor may be "don't hold your breath" away ...!

Access would be via a series of stairs, climbing in a spiral pattern from a room BELOW the bottom floor of the shelter, with a grated floor, then a stairway back up to the shelter. This would provide composite blast protection (due to turning corners so often), and even some fallout-leak protection (let the dust settle to the bottom level, and through the grated floor, then you go back UP into the shelter). Also, you can use a series of open drains (or a septic-tank-like gravel leech field), and a supply of nonpotable water to hose down anyone returning from the exterior (to wash off any fallout stuck to your excursion outfit - a radiation or hazmat suit, if need be. Or just rubberised clothes, if surface radiation levels are low enough that you just want protection from tracking dust back inside.

150% as much sleeping space and consumables for your expected initial population - over the course of 20 years, after all, there may be a few births. Or you may just find your neighbors knocking on the door in a panic while the air-raid sirens are wailing, on Night 1. Having the capacity to let in a FEW more people is always a comforting throught, at the least. And ... there's always the possibility that you'll need to have stuff to TRADE with, so having excess is useful for that, too.


...


Now, if I can only find the $250,000,000 it would take for me to even contemplate building and equipping that sort of thing. (Seriously, once for giggles and gags, I priced just the FOOD supplies needed for 5 people over 20 years, plus some "tip of the iceberg" supplies for other stuff (enough glow-sticks to light a twelve-room shelter for ten years, 2 sticks per room per 12 hours) ... and it came to almost nine million dollars. NOT including the actual shelter to put it all in!).

How would you get planning permission for that??

... and why wouldn't one get the permission to do so? Considering that, for decades (40's, 50's, 60's, even early 70's), the Federal Government advocated people doing EXACTLY that?

Besides, if I were to actually do something like this ... I'd be building it in a remote area - so as long as the plans were sound, I don't expect there'd be any difficulty involved.

*rolls eyes* You crazy americans you.

sound's like you've been planning this for a while.

We are certainly not in the clear now. In fact we are probably as close as ever.
Check out the thoughts of the http://www.thebulletin.org/ and where they have the clock set to.
Look at the timeline at see where it has been before. As you will see, in their opinions (and these are very smart people) we are in troubled times right now.

Burt or Vault Boy won't save us. Duck and cover was just a way to help ease the tensions of the public, nothing more really, because those in the know, knew hiding under a desk would not help in the least.

Many people did build shelters under their homes, but what would they emerge to? Not really anything like what we see in Fo3. Pure horror is what we would find, most would wish they didn't survive and probably kill themselves soon afterwards.

My grandparents old house had a 50s Nuclear bomb shelter. My brother and I used to play with some friends in there, acting like it was a army base for us. I guess we were playing the early stages of The Enclave, since it was before FO and such?

lol, sounds fun. I would have loved that as a kid.

There's always some threat. If we walked around every day paranoid that any second could be our last, nothing would ever get done and life would svck.

this thread needs to be sticky so.much.WIN

you know that the Germans basically built an underground city during WW2 ?






in some place in the world there is a bomb shelter in every home.

I find it very frightening that we were almost indulged in atomic war. All those pictures of the shelters in a 50' style is a scar to America about how we almost got ourselves killed.

The Fallout series is built upon this very possibility. Since we avoided the war with the Russians it would be suitable that this happened with the Chinese, considering the fact that those are the current superpowers.

That would be great. I try to come in here every couple weeks so it doesn't get lost.

I'd like to second the recommendation of http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ earlier in this thread.
Also, the british documentary http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059894/ from 1965 is excellent. It was considered too bleak and depressing for the public at first, so the BBC decided not to show it. Luckily the film got some air time later. It's a nice example of how some people did realize the true effects of even a limited nuclear exchange in the sixties, despite of the upbeat tone of many of the "educational" films from that era.

I'll have to check those out.

I hope nothing like that happens any time soon.

My high school had an old sign in one of the classes listing what you should do in case of nuclear attack. It said to put a newspaper on your head if there were no tables around to hide under.

Remember: CIVIL DEFENSE IS COMMON SENSE!

everyone knows paper is the best defense against nuclear weapons. :nuke:

Some of the "advice" was just nonsense designed to make it seem like a nuclear war could be won, or to seem as if the goverment was doing something to protect its citizens where as most govermments didnt spend much money on bunkers that would help for the general populace

The United States was actually getting ready to fire of there nukes and one point. They detected something headed towards alaska, and so they were almost ready to fire, but then it turns out someone made a mistake and it was nothing. But, they had the silos open and everything. It only takes 15 minutes for the united states to fire all of it's nukes.

All right...guess its time for the "old fart" to add his devaluated two cents.

Was born in '62, so lived though several TEOTWAWKI (The End of The World As We Know It) moments - which was used long before REM made it popular. Worst was through high school from '78 to '81 - was darned certain one of the two biggest, baddest boys on the block was bound to start something, with Iron Lady Thatcher in the cheerleading section. Then, poof! Not with a bang, but a whimper, the USSR folds! Then we had the turbulent months of Y2K - which incidently was quite real, simply not the huge meltdown everyone was expecting.

But ahh - those shelters!! In college some friends and myself were invited to clean out a section of steam tunnels to make room for more obsolete junk; with the proviso that "you haul it out - its yours - we don't want to know". The first Civil Defense oddity (absurdity actually) was the TOILETS!! Imagine opening a cardboard drum roughly 2' diameter and 3' tall and pulling out a seat designed to fit on top of the drum, along with plastic liners, 200-grit toiletpaper, and a gallon jug of iodine to keep the stench down after using it. Remember, a shelter was designed to hold a few hundred folks in a fairly confined space for an indefinite amount of time - even BO would start getting on other people's nerves! Then the good stuff was uncovered! Survey meters, dosimeters, and a dozen ANG11 radios - complete with corroded batteries. Food came up next (almost literally!) We uncovered several varieties, the first were 45lb tins of hard candy (for carbs), large tins of crackers, carton after carton of someones idea of peanut butter, and a few cases of C-Rations (grand-daddy to MREs). The candy was great - we put bowls of it out during dorm parties. The crackers in contrast were actually disguised roach poison (roomie discovered a dead roach next to some so the moniker stuck!). The C-rats were to say the least disgusting - ever see a green egg? Even the Lucky Strike studs were dried out. Only salvageable thing out of those were the sterno heaters and the pound cake. The peanut butter - we set it out on the curb one morning and it was gone that afternoon after classes - best forgotten. But the most darkly humorous thing we later discovered was that even though we hauled out six or seven pickup truck-loads of stuff out; NONE of us saw a CAN OPENER in any of the stuff! Holy Water Chips, batman!

Being in "tornado alley", we have a nice low-budget home-made 'Vault" which I've nicknamed 13. Should the house be destroyed, we could live somewhat comfortably for a few months in it. The shelter is made from several 14'dia steel culverts welded together into a bedroom/commons/storage/physical plant arrangement. Stays a pleasant 74 degrees year round!