Fallout Shelter Sign

In the 1960s, America was closer to nuclear war than it had ever been before. The arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States had been raging for over a decade, and each superpower pledged to defend its side of the iron curtain. This led to an aggressive buildup of conventional and nuclear arms on both sides, culminating in a faceoff in the middle of October in 1962. When the Soviet Union began transporting nuclear missiles to launch sites in Cuba, 90 short miles from the Florida coastline, the United States government demanded the immediate withdrawal of the missiles. There was a tense standoff, but eventually a compromise came a couple weeks later.[1] However, this event revealed the fragile peace between the superpowers, making nuclear war a much more plausible threat in the minds of Americans. In 1965, ninety percent of Americans polled considered nuclear war a possibility. However, not everyone had the finances to do something about the threat.[2] Many of the wealthy Americans and institutions, including Concordia College, built fallout shelters to increase the odds of survival in the event of an atomic bomb detonation.

This wooden “fallout shelter” sign is a relic from the '60s at Concordia. Concordia was buying into the threat of nuclear war, evidenced by courses offered at the college teaching atomic weapon defense and how to measure radiation levels. Although the room that the fallout shelter sign was associated with is unknown now, it is likely that it was in the basement of a hall. There were multiple fallout shelters in the basements of campus buildings during this period.[3] Although nuclear weapons still exist and are a possible threat today, it is a rarity to see a “fallout shelter” anymore.  

          [1] Mary B. Norton et al., A People & A Nation (Boston: Wadsworth, 2012), 791.

          [2] Gene N. Levine and John Modell, “American Public Opinion and the Fallout-Shelter Issue,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 29, no. 2 (1965): 274-275, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2747061.

          [3] Carroll Engelhardt, On Firm Foundation Grounded (Moorhead: Concordia College, 1991; Digital Horizons), 240, http://digitalhorizonsonline.org/u?/cord-hm,6.

Essay by Gunnar Vraa