Key moments in nuclear history
July 16, 1945 — The U.S. detonates the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, N.M.
Aug. 6, 1945 — The U.S. drops the atomic bomb Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000.
Aug. 9, 1945 — The U.S. drops a second atomic bomb, Fat Man, on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing more than 70,000.
Nov. 1, 1952 — The U.S. tests the more powerful hydrogen bomb (or thermonuclear bomb) for the first time on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific.
Oct. 30, 1961 — The Soviet Union tests the hydrogen "Tsar Bomba." The equivalent of 57 million tons of TNT, it's the largest nuclear device ever exploded on Earth. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was only the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT.
Oct. 16 to 28, 1962 — The U.S. and Soviet Union narrowly avoid nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The metal sign on the front of Memorial Hall has been baked and bleached by more than 45 years of exposure to the sun.
It’s the only real radiation the decrepit downtown landmark has been subjected to — but it was prepared for worse.
A lot worse.
In the early 1960s, Memorial Hall was designated by the federal government to play host to a crowd it never hoped to entertain — 1,690 scared friends and neighbors, moms and dads, brothers and sisters, all hoping to live through a massive strategic nuclear attack on the U.S. by the Soviet Union.
If they made it to Memorial Hall — or Crowell-Collier or the downtown Post Office or any other tank-thick public building with a yellow and black fallout shelter sign out front — it was a good thing.
It meant they hadn’t been vaporized.
But they still were at risk of hair loss, leukemia, sterility and even death because of fallout, those radioactive particles of dirt swept up in a mushroom cloud, then carried hundreds of miles on the wind and sprinkled across everything.
“As part of the training,” recalled Ned Hune, a former volunteer for Clark County’s defunct Office of Civil Defense, “we had to sit down and plot fallout patterns based on what we thought was the kilotonnage for the bombs dropped on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Springfield airport.”
It’s a time that defined several generations and now seems completely strange, even kitschy, to others.
And in regards to those fallout shelter signs, one generation’s ironic bedroom decoration was another generation’s last line of defense.
“That sign,” Hune said, “is there to save my ass.”
The reality is, the frost of the Cold War nipped at everybody, everywhere — even locally.
“It was part of the culture in which we lived,” said Hune, who now, at age 63, does commercial sales for the local Batteries Plus store. “It was the culture in which we grew up.”
In all likelihood, the 1,690 people huddled in Memorial Hall would’ve had to stay there for two weeks, waiting for the radiation to weaken outside and relying inside on crackers, carbohydrate supplements and stores of water put there by the government sometime in 1962, the year President Kennedy’s National Fallout Shelter Program kicked into gear.
But it never happened.
Twenty years ago come November, the opening of the Berlin Wall put a fatal crack in the Soviet Union — by December 1991, our ideological adversary through the space race, through the Olympic games, through Rambo movies, was no more.
All these years later, the nuclear arsenals remain, a lot smaller but no less deadly.
And every once in a while, you’ll still see a haunting yellow-and-black marker — on the front of Memorial Hall, Crowell-Collier, the Champaign County Court House and Urbana’s Masonic Temple.
There’s one on the side of the Urbana United Methodist Church, now hidden by trees.
Look to your immediate right when you walk into the Springfield post office.
There it is.
There’s another one in the basement of the post office.
It’s the fallout shelter sign, property of the Department of Defense.
For Hune, seeing one to this day is a nostalgic reminder of days gone by.
“It’s just, ‘Oh, gee, I remember when,’ ” he said. “I wouldn’t see any reason to take them down.”
Bombs away
A good chunk of money was spent on surveying public buildings, marking them with fallout shelter signs and stocking them with everything from crackers to chemical toilets — $800 million between 1962 and 1967, according to a 1968 Civil Defense training manual.
So when the program ended?
“Are you going to pay someone to take down the signs?” asked Civil Defense volunteer Mike Schulsinger. “There are a great number of abandoned military bases they just walked away from after World War II.”
The government had unveiled the now-iconic fallout shelter sign — featuring three upside-down yellow triangles — on Dec. 2, 1961, at a time when nuclear war between the superpowers seemed inevitable.
Berlin was in crisis. The wall was going up.
Then in September 1961, the Soviet Union turned its back on a unilateral testing moratorium enacted in 1958 and resumed nuclear testing.
Naturally, the U.S. followed within days.
That same month, the Cold War blew into City Hall, and Springfield city commissioners talked of building a giant bomb shelter downtown — to house “permanent mimeographed records of the city,” not to mention a hospital, jail, police station, administrative wing and radio transmitter.
It apparently didn’t happen, because the beauty of the National Fallout Shelter Program was that it used existing concrete structures.
Office buildings, schools, factories, churches and more were fitted with signs and rations.
To be designated as such, a public fallout shelter needed to have room for at least 50 people (of course, some people opted to build their own fallout shelter at home for as little as $50).
Sharon Bramble, a local postal employee since 1973, remembers rations stacked on top of each other in the old coal room of the post office.
The post office was marked for a capacity of 1,840 people in the event of an attack.
“Everybody thought the Russians were coming,” Bramble said.
But, she added, “I was 19 years old. I had other things on my mind.”
Soon enough, everybody else did, too. Tensions eased.
Fallout
“Nobody after the ’60s was trained to go to fallout shelters,” Schulsinger, 56, said. “That whole strategy just fell apart.”
As a kid interested in citizens’ band radio, Schulsinger had joined the all-volunteer Clark County Civil Defense as a North High junior around 1969.
“At the time,” he said, “the best information was that these were survivable events.”
It would’ve been his job to monitor radiation in a public shelter if an attack happened.
He received one course on how to use a Geiger counter, but the rest of his training was self-taught through manuals.
“The training books were aimed at somebody with about an eighth-grade education,” remembered Schulsinger, still a volunteer for the Clark County Emergency Management Agency. (Nationally, the Pentagon’s Office of Civil Defense eventually became the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.)
But not long after joining Civil Defense, Schulsinger helped clean out the city’s public fallout shelters.
“How old a cracker can you eat?” he asked. “Some of the crackers were 10 years old when they were removed.”
It was clear that neither superpower had blinked.
“All the supplies were consolidated at Crowell-Collier at that point,” Schulsinger said. “People got tired of stumbling over them.”
Not only that, “They had some prescription medication that was just lying around,” he said.
But elsewhere nationally, as evidenced by photos on the Internet, some shelters still have original rations in them.
Not even FEMA is all that sure when the program officially ended, leading to some confusion at places like the local post office where fallout shelter signs remain posted.
Postmaster Sue Vanzant isn’t sure if she can take hers down.
“I never knew what was right or what was wrong,” she confessed. “Are they active? I’ve never had anyone say.”
Even still, she’d like to keep her two signs right where they are.
“All of it is pretty cool,” Vanzant said. “It goes along with the history of the Springfield post office.”
Then again, to this day, FEMA urges people on its Web site to find out if any public buildings have been designated as fallout shelters.
“Gosh, it would be nice to know where they are,” said Lisa D’Allessandris, director of the county’s EMA.
No local list exists anymore.
“The approach is different,” she said. “You’re not going to leave your home in a tornado situation and run to the post office.”
So in 2009, even with nuclear proliferation and dirty bombs in the news regularly, you’re on your own now.
But as Schulsinger noted, “I’d hate to think that somebody would try to hide in Memorial Hall at this point.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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