October 6, American President Urges Them To Build Bomb Shelters

American President Urges Them To Build Bomb Shelters

Today is an auspicious day, in retrospection, with incidences of decades standing that remind us the United State of America and Soviet Union rivalry.

A typical case was on October 6, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy, speaking on civil defense, advised American families to build bomb shelters to protect them from atomic fallout.

This was in addition to the government’s promise to begin providing protection to its citizens.

President Kennedy directive was to provide a buffer for Americans in the event of radiation from a nuclear attack from Soviet Union. “There is need for a nationwide understanding of what each level of government, each private organisation and each citizen can do to bring about and maintain the best attainable protection for the civilian population against the major effects of a thermonuclear attack,” the president reportedly said. Soviet Union was then ruled by Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who two years earlier, November 1958 to be precise, had issued an ultimatum to the Western powers, indirectly America, six months to agree to withdraw from Berlin and make it a free, demilitarized city.

Proposals put forward by the US government concerning Berlin were rejected, whereas the ones put forward by the Soviet side were equally considered difficult to adhere to by the West.

Thus, in that era of cold war, a period of escalating tensions with the Soviet Union, Kennedy’s recommendations made much sense, although it was to become the subject of nationwide controversy, some for and others against.

Nonetheless, at Kennedy’s request for $100 million to build a network of public fallout shelters, Congress magnanimously voted for $169 million.

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The in-vogue shelters soon left the media hype as the period of détente gradually edged the cold war era, with the onset of the 1970s.

-Editor’s Note: Watch out for more of our historical recaps