Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, October 6, 1961, President John F. Kennedy writes a letter to civil defense leaders

urging them to prioritize building nuclear fallout shelters.

That same year he pressed Congress to allocate hundreds of

millions of dollars for public shelters across the country that could serve in the case

of nuclear attack. And this letter that JFK wrote, there's actually some really

striking language in there, so I'm going to quote from it

he writes there is a need for a nationwide understanding of what each level of

government each private organization and each citizen can do to bring about and protect the population

against the major effects of a thermonuclear attack.

And that's really what we're going to talk about in this episode, shelters, but also this pervasive fear of nuclear attack that Kennedy is getting at and

existed throughout much of the early and mid-60s here to discuss as always is

Nicole Hammer of Columbia. Hello Nicky.

Hey Jody.

So, take us to 1961.

Does Kennedy write this letter and all of a sudden shelters start getting built all across the country?

That is definitely the impression that I think most of us have that Americans ran out

and started getting out their shovels and digging in their backyards and building these fallout

shelters.

But it actually wasn't that popular of an initiative. I mean there are a lot of reasons for that but by

early 1962 only about 1.4% of Americans had these fallout shelters but not only were

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