The Swiss authorities maintained large communal shelters (such as the Sonnenberg Tunnel until 2006) stocked with over four months of food and fuel.

The Federal Law on the Protection of the Population and Civil Protection still requires that every inhabitant should have a place in a shelter close to where they live. Later, the law ensured that all residential buildings built after 1978 contained a nuclear shelter able to withstand a blast from a 12 megaton explosion at a distance of 700 metres. Switzerland built an extensive network of fallout shelters, not only through extra hardening of government buildings such as schools, but also through a building regulation requiring nuclear shelters in residential buildings since the 1960s (the first legal basis in this sense dates from 4 October 1963). The Sonnenberg Tunnel, in Switzerland, was the world's largest civilian nuclear fallout shelter, designed to protect 20,000 civilians in the eventuality of war or disaster ( civil defense function abandoned in 2006). Germany has protected shelters for 3% of its population, Austria for 30%, Finland for 70%, Sweden for 81%, and Switzerland for 114%. The former Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries often designed their underground mass-transit and subway tunnels to serve as bomb and fallout shelters in the event of an attack. Similar projects have been undertaken in Finland, which requires all buildings with area over 600 m² to have an NBC (nuclear-biological-chemical) shelter, and Norway, which requires all buildings with an area over 1000 m² to have a shelter. In 2017, New York City began removing the yellow signs since members of the public are unlikely to find viable food and medicine inside those rooms. The United States ended federal funding for the shelters in the 1970s. In November 1961, in Fortune magazine, an article by Gilbert Burck appeared that outlined the plans of Nelson Rockefeller, Edward Teller, Herman Kahn, and Chet Holifield for an enormous network of concrete lined underground fallout shelters throughout the United States sufficient to shelter millions of people to serve as a refuge in case of nuclear war. Over the period 1961-1963, there was a growth in home fallout shelter sales, but eventually there was a public backlash against the fallout shelter as a consumer product. A letter from President Kennedy advising the use of fallout shelters appeared in the September 1961 issue of Life magazine.

Pittman, the federal government started the Community Fallout Shelter Program. in September 1961, under the direction of Steuart L. The NEAR civilian alarm device was engineered and tested but the program was not viable and was terminated in 1967. The National Emergency Alarm Repeater (NEAR) program was developed in the United States in 1956 during the Cold War to supplement the existing siren warning systems and radio broadcasts in the event of a nuclear attack. These buildings were placarded with the orange-yellow and black trefoil sign designed by United States Army Corps of Engineers director of administrative logistics support function Robert W. Plans were made, however, to use existing buildings with sturdy below-ground-level basements as makeshift fallout shelters. 1963ĭuring the Cold War, many countries built fallout shelters for high-ranking government officials and crucial military facilities, such as Project Greek Island and the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker in the United States and Canada's Emergency Government Headquarters. Department of Defense, Office of Civil Defense. History North America File:Fallout shelter water storage can.jpgįallout shelter water storage can: a 66 liters ( 17 1⁄ 2 U.S. gal) barrel issued by the U.S. 6.2 Measures to lower the gamma dose rate.6 Other matters and simple improvements.

5 Weapons versus nuclear accident fallout.

4 Different types of radiation emitted by fallout.

Fallout shelter files