[stevem]

The first house my wife and I bought had a fallout shelter. It says right here that having to live in it until the world was safe after nuclear war would have made the survivors pive for death by vaporization.

I read somewhere that a nuclear blast does what forrest fires do only to universal levels. It sucks all the oxygen away so survivors can't breathe. I don't know about that. I've never tested it and don't want to.

[driftdiver]

Yes it will in the immediate area. Depends on the size of the bomb and your distance.

[JRandomFreeper]

Some of the survivors of Hiroshima made it to Nagasaki just in time to get nuked again.

I call that a Bad Week(tm). But they survived.

/johnny

[ansel12]

We have already had one atomic war.

WWII started as a conventional war, but ended as a nuclear war.

[WhiskeyX]

This particular shelter was a radiation shelter and not a bomb blast shelter. You only need to woory about being asphyxiated and/or roasted dead or alive in a shelter when the shelter is located within the fire zone which is a few miles or so of the hypocenter of the nuclear explosion. Any shelter located beyond the very close proximity of the blast and fire effects will not be affected by the loss of oxygen or extreme heat. The radiation shelter was intended to provide enough mass to stop harmful radiation and radiation contaminated air from reaching the occupants of the shelter during the two week period required for these radioactive contaminants to decay to relatively safer leveels.

The auntor/s of the article demonstrated some tremendous ignorance in their implied criticism of the need for a shelter so far from the population centers in Milwaukee and Chicago. The surgeon owner of the shelter knew full well the greatest danger was posed by radioactivee fallout coming from the Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases and other military and commercial targets located westwards and southwestwards frrom the shelter location in Wisconsin. The SAC bomber bases and SAC missile silos hundreds of miles away in those directions were upwind of the Wisconsin shelter. The radioactivee fallout from the attacks on those targets would have fallen out all over wisconsin. The only question is whether or not the shelter had been built and equipped properly to filter the air supply to remove radioactive contaminants and whether or not the steel plate door had the necessary thickness to stop the radiation?