Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of five Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Bluie Clark. There's Charles W. Bam Bam Bryant and Jerry Radioactive Rolling. Oh boy, and this is stuff you should know. You still got it after all these years, you still got it. Yep. Hey, I think before we get going, we should talk very briefly about our audiobook. Oh yeah, because this week, in real time, we are each recording our respective parts for the audio book. And first of all, we just want to tell everyone there's going to be an audiobook version. Yeah, spoiler of Stuff you should know, colon and mostly incomplete guide two very interesting things man still an income compendium of mostly interesting things. Uh yeah, so we're we're trying to push that out as uh, you know, get both, is what I say. But if you're into audio books, we're doing one. But also I just want to make sure people know what they're getting. And I put this on the Stuff you Should Know Army page. They're not getting twenty seven new podcast episodes, no, and they should know that because our podcast is unscripted conversation. An audiobook is us reading an audiobook and rather than just weirdly trading lines reading from a script, which would I think that would dash a lot of people's image of of what we do. We are each reading chapters and I think they're gonna mix in some stuff here and there. But um, yeah, I mean it's gonna be great and fun. But it's not podcast episodes. We don't get to just fart around and make jokes like we gotta read our books we have. Oh man, we will be kept in line. If we try to fart around and make jokes, it would not be good. There's this whole time as money etho, yelling, sometimes crying. It's a real stressful situation. Everybody, How did you had that go for yesterday? Did you enjoy yourself? I just told you there's a lot of yelling and crying. It was very stressful. Yeah, it was fun. It was. It reminded me a lot of recording um The End of the World, because you know, I wrote those and then I read them, So it was very similar to that, except um a lot less heavy. Yeah. I was slightly nervous at first for some reason after talking for twelve years, probably just because you weren't there, But then it was like, uh, you know it was it was fine. Did Fleet the director calm you make you feel better? Yeah? I mean, you know, I got I got in my group. I felt pretty pretty comfy by the end of it. Yeah, So, I mean it has it is fun. It's definitely a lot of extra work this week, but it's kind of cool. You know, at the end, we're gonna have a bona fide audio book. That's right in, a bonafide book that you can pre order now. And uh, we're also working on getting that pre order gift available to the UK and Australia and other parts of the world because we have different publishers there. It's not like we were trying to exclude everyone, no, no, but we are moving heaven Earth to get it done. And yeah, if you're in the US and Canada and your pre order, if you haven't gotten your poster yet, worry not. You're going to get your pre order gift eventually. That's right. Wow. So um for the fifteen seventeen people who stuck around prepared to learn about fallout shelters, because that's ultimately what we're here to talk about today, that's right. Actually, before that, I have to say one more thing, O, God, I posted that squirrel attack video on my Instagram, you know that we talked about on the episode because people kept asking and so I put it up. I'm at Chuck the podcaster. If you want to see a squirrel go berserk and literally fly through the air and hit me in the leg, then you can. You can see that. And it's been like fifteen thousand times. Now, one of these days, I hope you'll infest up to what you did to provoke that squirrel. I mean, the whole thing is there. You see me exit my house, so yeah, but I mean we didn't know like what happened half hour before. You know, that had been ongoing for the last week. That's so now I think we're going to talk about fallout shelters because Chuck Um, your house has a basement, but it's exposed on one side to the outdoors. It's not an in ground basement as far as I know, and hopefully I'm not divulging too much information about your house, so so weird fans will be able to find it and show up. Well, actually, you know, one side of it is exposed to the world, but the other side is you know, ten feet of earth and red clay, like it could have been a great fallout shelter had it not been for that one side. Sure, but there are things you could do or could have done. I think we should use past tents here, because the need for a fallout shelter, as far as the nuclear war goes vanishingly remote these days. I like to think, I don't think should getting any fear mongering. Um, but there are a few things you could have done or could do to build the follow up shelter with that. That that good side, I guess, and we're going to talk about that today. But mainly what we're talking about the followup shelters is almost kind of like this examination of the world psyche during the Cold War, to where as the nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union in the United States started to build up in step with one another, and we were suddenly in a nuclear arms race where just ten years before there were no such thing as nuclear weapons, people started to realize like, oh man, if one of these goes off near me, I'm in big trouble. And they started looking around to the government to say, hey, um, what should I do? And at first the government was like you know, figure it out yourself. And then eventually the government kind of got a little more involved, and before you know it, we had a national fallout shelter program. As feeble and terrible as it was, at least we had one. Yeah. What's really funny is when you read up on this stuff and you learn that President Kennedy, uh John F. Kennedy, that is, asked Congress for a hundred million dollars to build public fallout shelters. That is such an adorable number. Now that would build like tin fallout shelters these days, maybe like that's maybe that's like the amount of money that would take to get like a motorcade to the cap right from the White House basically, you know. Yeah, but it was a real threat back then. Um, and I can't remember what episode it may have been, Uh nuclear radiation. Uh we did one on the disaster in Japan. Yeah, we've done a couple on this. But I know that I told the story of my father like having us sort of do of a fallout shelter when I was ten or twelve years old after the movie the day after aired on television, And yeah, I remember that. Yeah, I mean, you know, it was my brother and I taking out digging out buckets of dirt and carrying them out in the woods and dumping them for probably three or four weekends and then we stopped. So you guys were coverage if something happened, Yeah, I mean we could have. Yeah, it was pretty gross. So was it akin to this, um this this shelter that we were going to go over at the end? Was it like that? Well, I mean it eventually could have been, which is to say, a you know, kind of a concrete room underground surrounded by earth. Oh yeah, no, I'm saying like the kind where it's like you dig a trench and put some woodpoles. This is part of um my basement. Like my dad had a workshop and on the interior wall of the workshop he knocked down the cinder block wall and we just started digging, which I'm safe to the foundation of the house, right, He's like, yeah, it's probably not low bearing. Yeah, exactly. But yeah. There was definitely a point in time, especially during the height of the Cold War, where it was like this is this is We're really in danger here. The world was just kind of walking around just twitching and shaking at the idea of this and part of the problem was not just the idea that um a bomb was going to go off and just blow cities apart, because apparently there was this UM one of the nuclear deterrent theories, the game theories that that people kind of operated under. UM said, no, you know what, if we ever engage in nuclear war, UM, we're just going to be attacking military installations side to side, and so we don't really have to worry about that for people in New York or d C. Or you know, Atlanta, wherever, any of the major metropolitan cities. We have to worry about those cities getting leveled. But there's gonna be a huge problem for the people living there because there's such a thing as radioactive fallout. It's not just the bomb that gets you, it's the fallout afterward. Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about a nuclear bomb, a nuclear warhead, uh to pends on what kind um. You know, back then it was, it was different than it is now. But let's say a one megaton h bomb back in the day would completely wipe out everything within about two miles from where I hit. Yeah, and I know I said, we weren't in a fearmonger Chuck but I found out that there is a bomb in the U s Arsenal called the B A D three which is one point to megatunts and it can be carried around very easily by the B two bomber. So those exists. Uh so two miles everything is gone. Um and this is from the blast and a person if you're like five miles away from that bomb site, you're gonna get hit with third degree burns just from that blast. Yeah, you're gonna be hate in life. Um. So the blast is going to be bad enough. And and again yet just for from for people miles away could be burned to death, um, incinerated, vaporized, just all sorts of terrible stuff. But if you're living outside of that blast zone, you've got problems in the radioactivity that's going to to be generated by it. Because when those bombs explode, they release a lot of radioactive particles of different varieties, and those things go up in the air and they get kind of carried around and stirred up in the atmosphere, but a lot of them are heavy enough that they come back down and basically around the area in a larger area around the bomb's epicenter. Yeah, and we should probably just go over some of these different types of radiation. Some of it you might recognize from various incredible Hulk comic books. But you've got your alpha particles, your beta particles, you've got gamma raise, you've got neutrons. The gamma rais is what got Hulk, right, I think so? Right, Yeah, I'm pretty sure because gamma rays are green and Hulk was green. That's right. I think that's it. And the other sweet sweet purple pants that somehow still fit. So the alpha and beta particles, they are not great, but they are easily stopped. It's probably the best way to say it. Yeah, So here's the thing, Like every everything I tried to read about this is like they would go to great links to be like, well, this one isn't isn't like that much of a problem. This one's way worse, And then finally they throw up their hands and be like, actually, all of this is just gonna be one big giant cluster because depending on the different type of radioactive particle um, there's different situations where they're way worse than the other one. Like a gamma ray is really bad because it can go clear through several inches of lead right into you on the other side of the lead through your body, and then everything it comes in contact with, say all of your cells and tissues and bones and all that stuff. It really screws them up genetically, and you can develop cancer and radiation sickness and all that. That's pretty bad. But then you've got alpha particles where they can be stopped by a piece of paper. They can't even make it through your skin, but they could get all over like crops in the water, and we drink them and eat them, and then they cause all sorts of sorts of problems inside of too. So there's really no good radioactive particle as far as a fallout from a nuclear bomb is concerned. Yeah, not at all. Because so don't you know if you read up on this stuff and it said, oh, a piece of paper, a little bit of plastic, you can stop beta particles and alpha particles. Just think about the area breathing, the water you're drinking, the the maze you're growing. Sure, if you want to get traditional, it's all very dangerous. Yeah, don't just be like, oh, let's make a paper suit out of newspapers and maybe a little paper tried corner and hat out of newspapers. I'll be fine. But like you said, when this bomb hits, that mushroom cloud goes up. Everything's all mixed together and as the wind blows these little uh. I think John Fuller old pal wrote this one a long time ago, right for how stuff works. But he said there are lots of little there. They act like little tiny missiles basically that are just going off all over the place. Yeah. That was the neutrons, right, I yeah, I think the neutrons specific he called the missiles, but they kind of all are. Yeah, they are there. They're super high energy and gamma rays um. Like I said, they can pass right through you. Neutrons are a problem in the relative immediate blast area because they're very heavy, so they don't go nearly as far as they like gamma rays or X rays or alpha particles or beta particles. But they all do damage in their own unique, special snowflake way. Yeah. And it's also I mean, this stuff is being carried around by um the wind, but the actual particles that you're seeing is is actually Earth that is now enriched with this stuff that is poofed up from that crater where Earth Earth used to be. I guess right, and so knowing all this like this was this is like why people started to be like, oh, okay, maybe we should start building fallout shelters to to live in or inhabit for you know, the immediate period after this this nuclear attack, UM, to give us a chance to survive and hopefully, you know, make it a few weeks, and then things will have died down, everybody has forgotten about the whole nuclear holocaust, and we can come back out and restart civilization. That was the really, honestly, if you get down to it, um, the thinking behind fallout shelters in the United States and the sixties and late fifties. All right, should we take a break there and then talk about these things? I think so some more. Yeah, all right, we'll be right back everyone, So chuck, I think, um, since we've got one act under our belt, we need to start the second act by telling everybody they can preorder our book. Hey, I took some vitamins. You know, I've been taking vitamins as much as I can, and I've got this multi vitamin you know, like the worst of vitamin can taste. I've got that horrible vitamin taste just stuck in the back of my throat because it got stuck there for half of a millisecond before it washed down, and it's just left this terrible taste of vitamin coding back there. It's driving me batty. How how is your health with the vitamins? Can you tell a difference? No? None? How's your pa? How's your urine? It's bright yellow? Which makes me just feel like such a chump, especially after our our vitamin supplement episode. Right, didn't we say like we pee most of it out? Yeah, there's good ones for sure, and I like the thing I'm taking go ones, but I just know that there's no telling right now. You're like, I'm using injectables now, pretty much snortable vitamins. So fallout shelters. Uh, it's funny here and and I'm glad John put it this way because it really makes a lot of sense. If you think about an SPF for sunscreen, it's a aim exact way with a fallout shelter. You have a PF, a protection factor, and that is just very simply a representative of UM being nfl out shelter or just being out in the open. And FEMA put out a pamphlet called standards for fallout shelters, and they said you need a PF of forty at least, yeah, if you want to, you know, and that that puts you down to about two point five of the radiation. Which I heard that number and I thought that was too much. Yeah, no, I think, um, what you're really shooting for is something like three hundred that kind of thing. Um that and they're saying like a minimum of forty or else, just you might as well just go lay out in the in the radioactivity for all the protection you're gonna get. Another way to look at that PF numbers that it's the denominator and the fraction of the radioactive exposure that you get compared to being outside of the shelter. So a PF of forty would mean that you get on. I'm more of a action guy than a decimal dude. Oh yeah, how about two? You you like decimals are fractions more? I don't like either one. But I think for our next live show in two you should wear a shirt that says fraction guy, and I'll have one that says decimal dude, and that'll just be our new tour outfit. Fair enough, and you can have yours printed on a button down shirt. Of course. Okay, that's yeah, because nothing looks better than good silk screening on a button down Oxford. Maybe by the time we go on tour again, this horrible vitamin taste will be out of my mouth. Maybe. So so with fallout shelters, there's a couple of kinds. Um if you're going back to the nineteen sixties that people were talking about, and that is the public one and then the private one that you just build at your house like we kind of didn't do. Um, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. It's and this is be right up your alley. You probably did. This rabbit hole is pretty safe. I bet yeah, depends on how deep I guess. But if you start googling sixties fallout shelters, oh and I did. Oh boy, it's just a treasure trove of articles and pictures. Um. I saw one that these people in Woodland Hills, a suburb of l A bought or part of Greater Los Angeles, bought a house not too long ago, a few years ago, and they found a did you see this one? No? I saw some of Milwaukee this. Oh well, I saw the Milwaukee Article two. That was great. But they found a fifteen foot down under the earth fallout shelter that was fully stopped, like it was like a time capsule from and Brendan Fraser and Christopher Walkin. We're living in it. I can't remember who the mom was. Do you remember I didn't see that? You didn't know? It was cute movie? Yeah? Is that in cine? No? Man, no, no, no, this was blast from the past. Man was great too because the weasels in it? Oh was he? Yeah, Pauly Shure, Yeah, I knew it. That is, I just didn't Polly Shore, Seawan Austin and Brendan, Sean Auston whatever. That guys rich enough, he doesn't care what I say. So I was looking at all these nineteen sixty one period products and just like getting tingly feelings in my body because they were perfectly preserved for the most part, like faded and stuff. But there was a can like a coffee can, but it said multipurpose food Meals for Millions, and so I was like, I gotta find out what this is. And it turns out that Meals for Millions was a nonprofit from way back then. That is now UM International. Now now it's it's it's it's transformed into another name. These days, I think Freedom from Hunger is the new name. But these two guys, Clifford Clinton and Dr Henry Borsuk, took on this task of Borsok was a biochemist at cal Tech, and they took on this project of trying to find the best food to feed, like the cheapest, absolute, most bare bones thing you could put in a package to feed the hungry. And that's what they came up with, was this stuff in a can and it is uh sixty defadded soy grits plus dehydrated potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, onions, leaks, parsley, and spices, fortified with vitamins and minerals and it comes in a can and you boil it up and eat it. And it was something like two cents per serving. And it was a really ingenious idea. But this became I think, kind of a popular thing for fallout shelters because you could just stop cans and cans of this, like the most bare bones, caloric sort of healthy thing you could get meals for millions. That's pretty great. I did not expect it to actually be as healthy as what you just listed listed off. Yeah, I would love to taste some of it. Multi purpose of wood hills, I know, just call it food, what do you multi purpose food? Is that like a palmaide as well? Maybe One of a food that I ran across um that was pretty popular, especially among government funded fallout shelters, was this kind of like wheat cracker that was made from vulgar wheat, and apparently they were inspired by some crackers that were found in Egyptian tombs that were still edible after a couple of thousand years. So they're like, oh, that would be perfect for fallout shelters, so they kind of recreated those taste. Yeah, multi purpose. Apparently you could shave with them too, you might good. The Milwaukee article was pretty cool though, Um. I think that it said that, um, at the time, they were like three thousand plus personal shelters in the city of Milwaukee alone. Yeah. The thing is is, like, that's that's probably a pretty good number. The thing is, there's no official numbers for the fallout shelters that were built around the Cold War because there were a lot of public or private ones. But there's also public ones too, So let's keep talking about the private ones first, because if we're gonna follow the historical timeline, which I'm in favor of, UM around I think the late nineteen fifties, I think it was nineteen fifty seven in the Eisenhower administration, there was a report that's now called the Gaither Report, and it basically said, um, here's everything we figured out about a nuclear war. Um, the cities are toasts. People are going to die on mass we have no place to put them, for them to shelter in. And everybody's in a lot of trouble if there is a nuclear war. So really the best thing we need to focus on is to prevent a nuclear war from happening. Well, that leaked out and people said, well, what are we gonna do? And this is when the government was like, I don't know, once you build some some shelters and leave us alone. And so people started doing that and it became like a huge craze, and so UM shelters in places like that home in Woodland Hills or that one in Milwaukee, UM that are still around today. In some cases that became like a big deal, like um uh, like adding like a really nice swimming pool, or adding like a rec room or something like that. People turned to fallout shelters and they started building them like crazy. Yeah, And and from that Milwaukee I think it was in Milwaukee was the name of the website. But from what they said was they were being marketed, um as sort of multi purpose wreck rooms that in case the s goes down, it's conveniently um you know, lined with concrete and you could just sort of easily convert it. And I guess you would have some stuff stash there in either a closet or in in bins or something. And when you're not using you know, when there's no nuclear disaster, you're just using it as sort of a playroom or something. Yeah, there was some decorators show in Chicago in the late fifties I think, and they build this thing is the Living or the Family Room of Tomorrow, where it was exactly what you described. It was like a normal functioning family room, but it just happened to be in a basement in like foot thick concrete encased under the dirt. Yeah. I remember seeing when I was a kid, my brother and I did lots of sort of I mean, I guess it was an urban exploring but trespassing suburban exploring, and I remember a couple of distinct times that we saw event pipes just coming out of the earth in the forest and we never saw any entry way or anything like that. But that had to be some sort of fallout shelter. I think, yeah, probably. I mean we were near homes, but not like in the yard. We'd come across a couple of them in our various expeditions, like you know, just a clearly event pipe just coming out of the woodland forest. So yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what it was. I hope. Yeah. Well we didn't dig around if not. Have you ever seen that Hugh Jackman movie where like his wife is kidnap prisoners. Yeah? Man, that was really good. I'm really good. Yeah, great movie. So, Um, that's what's his face is doing the New Dune movie, didn't Evellaneus? Oh? Well, there you go. That's why it was so good. Yeah, he's he's a master. Um. I'm sorry, Chuck, I just can't not correct you. His name is Dennis Dennis Villanov. I'm sorry. So, um I was kidding. Anyway, Um, there was the private fallout shelter trend that just blew up and became a thing, and then UM in nineteen sixty one, President Kennedy sent a letter out. I'm surely it went out to more than just this, but there if you were a Life magazine subscriber, which was pretty substantial back in UM, in the September fifteenth edition, you got a letter from President Kennedy basically saying like, hey, you know this whole possibility of nuclear war thing, Well, we've decided we're going to do something about it. We the government, and we're going to start what's called the National Fallout Shelter Survey. And this with the survey, basically, what we're going to do is send out government officials and they're going to look at buildings all around the country and identify sites that have the potential of serving as a fallout shelter. And everyone says, well, that's great. So like a fallout shelter, so if like a nuclear bomb goes off over our city, we're gonna be saving. He's like, no, don't be ridiculous. That would cost a lot of money. Now this is going to protect you if um, if from radioactive fallout, you'll have to survive the blast, but this will this will hopefully protect you from the fallout afterward. Yeah, and you know, we kind of laugh about that, but I mean, there's no way they could have built enough like adequate shelters to protect all Americans from the blast. No, I mean there was a lot of Americans apparently did look at it at first, and they could have pretended to two hundred billion in in n another cute number. Actually they were like, oh no, that's we can't do that. We don't have that kind of money. So it was, like you said, I think a hundred and hundred and ninety million is what they ended up spending on it, which to me seems like a lot of money to send out some people to look at buildings and decide what was a fall at shelter and what wasn't. Yeah. You know what's really funny is when you look at what people did around the world, what countries did around the world, and how it's so jibes with how those countries are still today. Um, so the US did what we did. The Soviets said that they built a big, extensive system and they had an advanced cooling system and all these filters protecting against everything, and provisions food and water forever and uh, you know, this is this is the press release they put out. Basically, who knows what really happened? Yeah, because I found that on like Russia so Great dot com or whatever, and I mean it was it was like an urban exploration of like an abandoned shelter. But you know, was this just like the biggest one? How many were like that? Supposedly the Soviets boasted of a system that could protect most most of their um citizens from the blast. All right, so that makes sense. Um, Sweden built sixty thousand, which covered about the population. Ts for the other thirty percent, Switzerland built enough shelters for everybody, Okay, God bless him. Uh. The UK said, you know what, We're gonna build enough for our military, our government in the royal family. Yeah, chin up everyone else. And then Australia said, we'll take a pass. We're not gonna build any because no one's gonna mess with us down here. Yeah, they're like everybody's read on the beach. Everyone knows we're fine if the rest of the world's gone up in flame. I think they're probably right. I mean they were, they were, and especially back then. Enough off the map, uh or off the path of of the threat that they didn't even need to sweat it. Yeah, they're like, hey, what's all the all the ruck is up there? So um. But the so the US said, Okay, we've got to do something. Let's at least build these fallout shelters that are going to protect people from radio activity. Um. And so they started building these um why I shouldn't say building. They started going on to private property or public buildings and saying, hey, you've got a really nice basement here, Um, can you take down the human skins and clean it up a little bit. We're gonna put some bulgar wheat biscuits in here, we're gonna put in some multi purpose food, don't ask, and uh, we're gonna turn this place into a fallout shelter. And on their way out, they would slap a sign, very iconic sign, which is black circle with three inverted triangles all pointing towards the center. Um that designated a fallout shelter. And they did this in yellow in the event um of a like a blackout during a nuclear war something, so that you could easily see it. Yeah. Pretty cool. The company three M made these for about a penny each, and they made about four hundred thousand of these signs, and they would stock these things with um, you know, like medical first aid kits, some water drums, those crackers that you talked about that if you add water, could probably double up as like cement patch. Yeah, I guess, but I think people would wrestle you to the ground if you tried to use the water for anything but drinking after, you know, in the event of this sure, I mean, that's one thing we didn't mention. If you go to build your own fallout shelter, um, you know you should have some food, but water obviously it's far more important. We've talked about that a lot, about how long the human body can go without food and water. You gotta have a lot of water. Um. I think I would stock it up with some of that Mike's mighty good Ramen here of course, which by the way, uh, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that they actually sent us a coupon code for stuff you should know this sners. Oh yeah, this this is not an ad. But they, uh we we talked about that Ramen so much. They said, you know what, tell everyone stuff you should know twenty we'll get them off ramen. If they want to order something very nice to you write, write the number twenty or right out t W E N t WA the number twenty after stuff you should know. So two zero yeah, and you can stock up your own fallout shelter. You can eat that stuff for lunch. Didn't take up a lot of room, good calories, it's multi purpose food. You gotta eat some water for it, though, right but I mean hey, or you can collectively spit in it, I guess, and heat that up. That's grody. You're gonna get that water anyway, though, you know, because you're gonna drink the juice. That's true. Uh So back to the public shelters, they have these pretty well stocked. They said, there was an actual booklet in there that said, if you want a toilet, cut a seat out of a chair and put a bucket under it, and there's your toilet. And so when that pamphlet came out, in particular the American citizen, we said, like, for real, this is our tax dollars are doing. This is what we're getting from our government. Cut a cut a hole in the seat of a chair, and put a bucket under there. That's your advice for the nuclear war, that you're half responsible for having us live under the threat of right, they said, we're not socialists. Take care of yourself. Yeah. So the thing is is like people would people would write, people would um read newspapers, or people would um like watch the news or whatever, and they would be getting one channel of information that was saying like, yeah, here's what this. You know what one megaton bomb could possibly do to your if this blew up over New York City. This is what would happen. And people would say, well, what's the point of having these fallout shelters because if a bomb goes off over New York City, all of those fallout shelters are going to be totally obliterated. There's no point for them. Um and the government and doing something like trying to at least lift some finger people feel less anxious actually had the opposite effect because it drew a lot of attention and focus to the need for fallout shelters, while at the same time reinforcing the idea that these fallout shelters weren't gonna be worth anything for anybody unless maybe you lived in Topeka or somewhere where there there wasn't what's known as a key target that you might actually survive in a fallout shelter that was well stocked and had few enough people, it could work. But for most Americans, especially ones in major cities, you're going to be in bad shape. And the Fallout Shelter program really kind of pointed that out. All right, should we take a break? I think so, all right, we'll take our last break and we'll be back right after this. So before we broke, you said something about unless you live in Topeka, Uh, does in Kansas have silos or no military as I was saying, and I was like, yeah, I'm glad you said something. At least he'll save us the emails. Okay, because that you know, we we did mention, but you know, we talked about game theory earlier about how the reasoning was, No, you don't need to worry if you're in a big city because they aren't a military bases there. But you know that it sort of goes the way of UM that war goes once anything goes wrong. So if one UM bomb from the opposition from the enemy goes to somewhere it isn't supposed to go, then all bets are off basically, and then it's just bomb away. Also, I want to give a shout out to Robert Clara from history dot com who wrote nuclear fallout shelters were Never going to work, who wrote a pretty great article about how this whole pro rams kind of doomed from the start because it all ill conceived, you know. But not only was it ill conceived, they were also like poorly stocked. Some of these things that were designated followed shelters never got their supplies. Um, water drums were leaking, and then um, others worked really well, so well in fact, that there's one they found at the Oyster Adams Bilingual School in d C, which is a school still functioning today part of d C Public Schools, but there is a fallout shelter that's like a um, a time capsule basically that has all of the original provisions and it just frozen in times still. It's really in California, Yeah, basically, um, except this was one of the designated public fallout shelters, but below a school. Yeah. I think didn't they try to build them to how's at least fifty people, and I think they had they recommended for the personal ones that they be at least six and a half feet tall. Yeah, and that was one of the things that sort of, um would have been the toughest I think about fallout shelters, just so many of them were very had very low ceilings. Obviously there's no windows. I mean, it's bunker life is tough going. And they recommended two weeks, and which is nuts to me, Like, there's no way I'm poking my head out after two weeks just to see if it's how how things are going up there? Right? And I mean like there was some logic and reasoning to that two weeks and that there's that you would have exceeded the half life of a lot of the radio new clides that are not enough for created, but yeah, there's plenty that would still be around. Yes, it was. It was never never going to work, like Robert Clara put it, no, And I think that was sort of the idea of what you're talking about, with the public being so disheartened and feeling helpless about our civil defense. Was um like, this is the general public and they didn't think it seemed like a good plan. But it makes me wonder, though that a good thing, Like it sucks to have that kind of mental anxiety that we all collectively had during the Cold War, especially at the height of this stuff, like in the sixties. But I think it might have actually been good because then the public was aware of just how dangerous things were and would prevent a kind of cavalier attitude toward nuclear war because they knew what was at stake, and what was at stake were their very lives. Maybe, I mean, and maybe that's a bottom up sort of like a groundswell of public thought eats its way up into the into government, and you know, I mean, and I guess we'll never know how close we ever got. I mean, I don't think we've ever done one on the nuclear the Cuban missile crisis, have we not? I don't think specifically, but you know, we've been on the brink in a in a way that history has recognized. But I'm curious how close it's been in times that we never even knew about. You know, there's one guy who celebrated every year. I can't remember or what the day is, but it's basically like Save the World Day, where this one um Soviet I guess, a missile commander basically had a few minutes was being told by his computers and all of his underlings that the US had launched a massive strike and that you know, it was up to him to to call and order this counter strike or call the people who would order the counter strike, and he sweated it out. He said that there he just didn't believe that the Americans would have launched an unprovoked, all out nuclear strike like he was being shown. And he stayed his hand and literally saved the world from a nuclear war like single handedly. And the scary thing is, Chuck, is that has happened more than once. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. It's funny that, like we're basically the last generation that grew up with any knowledge of the threat of nuclear war like this, like we sort of experienced the tail into the Cold War. Perfect generation. Yeah, but it's it's hard to um and um. The Friendly Fire podcast, which is one of my favorites, the war movie podcasts that uh, our buddies Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica and John Roderick do they're younger. Roderick's you know, a few years older than me, old, so way older than you. But um, John kind of drives this point home a lot about like it's really hard to put into words what that does to a a set of generations when we're all sort of living under this, you know, very real threat that we could all die the worst possible death. And you know, not like oh, you kids have got it made or anything like that, but it's it's a different sort of mindset, you know. Yeah, I mean it definitely is. It definitely affects you from from every stage of your life. You know. I mean it went away by the time we were in college, but you know, I remember my early years. Obviously we were digging a fallout shelter. It was. It was a big threat, and movie and TV reinforce that every day. So, um, if you wanted to build a fallout shelter, we have to say there was um a time in addition to designating fallowoup shelters. By the way, if you find one of those old fallout shelter signs, hang onto it, you can pretty much take it. And unless there's a close watching groundskeeper willie type who takes care of that building, nobody's probably gonna notice it's gone. And the U. S. Government has no idea how many are out there because they never kept track of the fallout shelters. There was no registry or anything. Yeah, I mean they shut started shutting these down in the early seventies, officially started giving away the food. UM sent some of it to organizations in Africa, in Bangladesh. And then those signs started, I think in the mid seventies, started pulling those signs out. And I think finally just three years ago in two thousand seventeen, they they said that they said that they got the last of the signs out of New York City, which and I don't think we mentioned. It's hysterical that they built these fallout shelters in Manhattan and Brooklyn, as if that would you know, that would lead to good right, So, um, so if you if you if you did want to make a fallout shelter, there's um. There was this a pamphlet put out by Oakridge National Laboratory where they basically hired yeah, they had a sideline and studying nuclear disaster survival, um what like you couldn't tell with their beards, you know, but um, the this pamphlet basically was the result of Oakridge hiring a bunch of families, regular old American families and saying, um, a nuclear war is happening right now, go build a fallout shelter. Here's your instructions, and then seeing how easy it could be done, and then adjusting the instructions and so on and so forth until they finally got to this pamphlet, and the pamphlet basically came up with this really good fallout shelter where you just basically dug a trend in the ground that was several feet deep, covered it with wood poles, covered the wood poles with something like cloth, the old bed sheets something like that, put dirt on it, put shower curtains something waterproof, and then put more dirt on that. And they actually figured out that this particular fallout shelter had like a protection factor of like three hundred. Yeah that and it would also survive a blast that most houses would not survive because you're you're just basically hunkered down in the earth, and it would it would work for you if you wanted to. And they said that, um, it can be done. They used the example that to non athletic college age girls did it in thirty six hours. That was that was how they were selling it. We had a couple of girl couch potatoes, right, look, at them. Wow. Yeah. When I was reading about that, I was I figured you'd get maybe a twenty out of that. What do you mean for PF No One? Yeah, so there you go. Thank you, Akridge boys, getty up Papa. And since Chuck said that, everybody, it's time for a listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this, uh a series of apologies to Australia. Oh boy. So before the we get into the email, UM, I do think we should address this that we've had some ads running in Australia only that have been no good. Uh. And these aren't ads that we knew about. These aren't ads that we read. Um, we have a separate company in Australia that's doing that for us, and everything is under review right now because um, we don't want these ads out there. So yeah, it's a it's a new relationship when we're kind of figuring each other out, that's right. But we do want to say that none of these ads were our decision. Um. If you're out there and your interest is peaked and you're like, oh my gosh, what are they talking about, I'll never know they were. You know, there were ads for like mining companies and stuff. Like that, among other things, not super s y s K type stuff. That's right, and and we wanted to address it head on, uh, but also we wanted to address our own uh foibles in the billabongs terminology that we were talking about in the Wetlands episode just shameful, man, it is. And this is something we should know, even though we are not Australians, but we use the term aborigines very sort of willy nilly uh. And that is this um is an email from Tanita she said, Uh in the episode and Wetlands, he used a number of terms talking about billabongs that were not correct terminology. The term aborigines is considered outdated and defensive as it groups all indigenous groups into one term and as connotations of colonial Australia. Some of the current terms and correct terms for traditional owners of Australia uh include Aboriginal people, Indigenous First Nations people. And this is something that you know, we just should have known. So yeah, Plus, I mean it applies to more than just um, the native people of Australia too, you know. So of course, yeah, and we got a bunch of emails from people that said, if you really want to do right by these people. You need to research the exact people that you're talking about, like the Palawa people from Tasmania where she's from, or the Annawan people from the area around Armadale where she lives now, and we didn't do that. And she said there were two hundred and fifty different languages in Australia before invasion, only a hundred and twenty year now spoken. Billabong in fact, comes from the uh We're a jury language from central New South Wales and is now a common Australian English term. And that is from Tinita and many others. Thank you so much for taking it easy on us, Tanita. That was very nice, super Australian of you as well, just laid back in nice and not at all like chest pokey, So we appreciate that. That's right. And you know, if you're in the United States and you're I'm not quite sure what even this means would basically be like just saying Africa as a lump all term for like any tribe in Africa and the culture and the language that is very specific to that region and we were not hip to that. So thanks again. Who was that, Tanita? Yeah, okay, thanks again, Tanita. Thanks again Australia for taking such good care of us over there. We appreciate you, guys, and thanks to everybody who listens to Stuff you Should Know. And if you want to get in touch with us for any reason, no matter where you live in the world, no matter what language you speak, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. 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