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?
IIRC, people located 25 miles from the blast area were supposed to be albe to survive if they had a shelter built to the civil defense specs. It was 3 inches of steel and either 3 or 6 feet of concrete.
They used to have pamphlets on how to convert a corner of the basement into shelter too.
We are very likely today to have a nuclear event. After all, didn’t bombs go missing from Russia when they imploded? I am sure that it is only a matter of time before a suitcase nuke(S) is used.
Our world is just as dangerous today as it was then, but the government now likes to pretend that everything is hunky dory.