How to Build Your Own Family Shelter From the Fallout Shelter
In the 50s and 60s, your home was incomplete if you didn’t have your own fallout shelter. This classic video tutorial shows you how to build your own.
Welcome to Retro Week , where we light up the flux condenser and introduce you to the 1950s know-how of everything from making casseroles to building fallout shelters to joys for kids to relax and play with trash.
The video, titled Walt Builds a Family Fallout Shelter, can be viewed in full below on the YouTube channel of the US National Archives :
You can use this Family Fallout Shelter Bulletin, which was released around the same time, to find out what materials you need and help you keep track of the videos.
Once built, Walt says you can comfortably live in it for at least two weeks, which is probably enough to avoid nuclear fallout (assuming the world wasn’t completely blown to smithereens). Just make sure it has food, clean water, fresh clothes, and something to use as a toilet. It is difficult to say how effective this type of shelter will be during and after an explosion – many variables come into play here, but if built in a basement as suggested, it should be reasonably safe.
I would like to say that we no longer need such things in our homes, but the threat of nuclear war seems as real as it did during the height of the Cold War. Prepare for the worst, inform your family and be safe.