In the midst of the 1961 Berlin Crisis, President John F. In the face of almost certain annihilation should the bombs fall on Washington, the DCD had to do something, and so DCD came to

That the threat of fallout was irrelevant to D.C. Blast shelters were uneconomical if not impossible to construct.įallout shelters, however, were relatively inexpensive to prepare and could protect Washingtonians from a real threat. In 1956, the DCD director himself called a nuclear attack on Washington “pretty near hopeless.” DCD had few options.

The District of Columbia Office of Civil Defense (DCD) was formed in 1950 to ready the American capital for nuclear disaster.

shelters were marked by luminescent black and yellow signs, stocked with provisions for hundreds of thousands of people and located in over a thousand public and private buildings throughout the city. An SS-4 missile - the type deployed to Cuba during the missile crisis - would have left a 1.5 mile radius of complete destruction.įallout shelters only protect occupants from fallout-the deadly radioactive dust resulting from a nuclear detonation-but not the blast itself. Had a nuclear bomb detonated over Washington during the early 1960s, most of Washington’s 760,000 residents would be dead, even those who made it to a fallout shelter. However, since the capital was a primary target in the event of nuclear war and most shelters were located downtown, the city’s fallout shelters could not have saved Washingtonians in a direct attack. At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, the District of Columbia prepared hundreds of fallout shelters.

Fallout shelter symbol on person