When President Kennedy told the nation to start building nuclear fallout shelters in 1961, Russians had a goofy leader who wore ill-fitting suits and waved his shoes at people. What with Boris Yeltsin’s overworked liver and the last spate of Kremlin coup rumors, soon they could have Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a man so goofy he gets thrown out of–not bars–entire countries.
“An airburst would be the first thing,” says Moriarty pensively. “That would knock out all your communications. Now you’re a sitting duck for the incoming–your radar is knocked out, your air defense won’t work. You’re a sitting duck.” He pauses. “And they’ll destroy you.”
“And another thing you should be aware of,” Moriarty mentions, almost as an afterthought. “The more sophisticated nuclear powers like Russia may have possession of neutron bombs, because it does a foreign power no good to invade a country when it’s all destroyed. They’d rather kill all the people.”
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Afterward, Quinn insisted it was the public’s own fault if they were worried, because they didn’t understand the warning system. A real take-cover siren would have been a series of wails, or a constant wailing up and down for three minutes, he said, not the steady wail that he had set off.
But the Sun-Times soon learned that a 1960 feasibility study of the tunnels had found them unsuitable. “A blast in the vicinity of the Chicago River would cause the tunnels to crack and flood,” said the regional civil defense director. We know now, of course, that it doesn’t take a nuclear bomb.
Throughout the crisis, civil defense workers answered calls from a worried public. A typical question was, “If there’s a bombing, what kind of food should I eat?” And the answer was, “Something that doesn’t require much cooking.”
