In the 1961 ‘Twilight Zone’ episode ‘The Shelter,’ neighbors turn against one another out of desperation. This debate was dramatized in a 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone,” in which desperate neighbors storm the entrance to the basement shelter of the only suburban family with enough foresight to build one. The opposite of dying neighborly was the mainstream debate over the right to shoot someone you didn’t want intruding into your private shelter. … If the bomb does come, let’s just all die neighborly.”

I could not go in there and leave them children and Grandma outside.

Jess then imagines Joyce’s response following an air raid test: “Thank God, you’re saved, Jess Semple! But let’s tear that shelter down tomorrow. … How would we keep the other roomers out in case of a raid?” “And if roomers built their own shelters – me and Joyce living in a kitchenette, for instance. With so many people living in every rooming house, “Even if the law required it, how could landlords build enough shelters for every roomer?” he wonders. In this story, Jess vainly tries to adapt the government’s basement and backyard bomb shelter initiative to his cramped urban neighborhood. Hughes’s phrase comes from “ Bomb Shelters,” one of his “Simple Stories.” These were brief and humorous vignettes of the serious issues faced by Jess and Joyce Semple, a fictional working-class Black couple living in Harlem. The morality or survivability of nuclear war itself seldom was. The practicality and the morality of private shelters were debated publicly.

As a result, sheltering was available primarily to the military, government officials and those who could afford it. Faced with a Congress unwilling to fund large-scale sheltering measures, the Kennedy administration decided instead to encourage the private development of the individual shelter industry and to establish dedicated spaces within existing public structures.Īlthough in Europe and elsewhere, vast public shelters were built, the community bomb shelter was almost universally rejected in the U.S.

Government issue fallout shelter sign