The Fallout Shelter Sign: What It Means and America’s Cold War Shelters

The yellow-and-black fallout shelter sign marked a building that the US government had approved as a public shelter against radioactive fallout. It was unveiled on 1 December 1961, the number in its circle showed how many people the shelter held, and the shelters behind the surviving signs haven’t been stocked or maintained for decades.

The fallout shelter sign at a glance

The sign came first in the public’s mind, but it was only the visible end of a survey. The Defense Department introduced it on 1 December 1961, and the 1962 contracts covered 400,000 aluminium signs for outside walls and a million steel ones for inside.¹ Through fiscal year 1971, about 118,000 buildings had been marked as shelters and some 95,000 more had been picked out as possible shelters without being marked.² That’s a lot of basements. Our wider guide to Cold War bunkers puts the public shelters next to the government and military sites; this page stays with the sign and the buildings behind it.

The speech that started it: July 1961

On 25 July 1961, in a radio and television address on the Berlin crisis, President Kennedy asked for money “to identify and mark space in existing structures”, public and private, “that could be used for fall-out shelters in case of attack”, and “to stock those shelters with food, water, first-aid kits and other minimum essentials for survival”. The same speech asked for an extra $207 million in civil defence appropriations, and he promised that “in the coming months, I hope to let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of attack.”³

Note the word “existing”. The plan wasn’t to build shelters but to find them. Architects and engineers surveyed public and private buildings against Eisenhower-era standards and worked out how to improve the ones that fell short. State and local civil defence offices ran the work, and in December 1961 Kennedy told Nelson Rockefeller that the Department of Defense was taking it over.⁴ Congress had already voted more than $169 million for fallout shelters that year.⁵

What counted as a shelter? ORAU’s history says the survey looked for structures that could hold 50 people or more, with a protection factor of 100.⁵ Sean Colby, who maps Boston’s old shelters, told WGBH the figure was a protection factor of at least 40, with room for 50 people or more at 10 square feet each, usually in basements or middle floors.⁶ We couldn’t find the original criteria document online to settle which number applied when, so we give both.

The sign: who designed it and what it means

The brief for the sign survives in the Office of Civil Defense’s own fact sheet: children, people who didn’t speak English and people who couldn’t read all had to recognise it, and it could be made out at up to 200 feet. Yellow and black were chosen as the most easily identified attention-getting pair. The finished design is a black circle on a yellow ground with three yellow triangles inside, points down, and “Fallout Shelter” in yellow block letters on black underneath.¹

The number is the part people ask about. Overlays let local officials put the shelter’s maximum capacity inside a small circle on the sign, and yellow arrows below the lettering pointed the way.¹ On many signs you’ll still see that little disc, sometimes with the number long gone and only the word “Capacity” left, as in the photo.

Who drew it is less tidy. Popular accounts credit Robert Blakeley, described by the Washington Post obituary writer Harrison Smith as “a midlevel bureaucrat in the Army Corps of Engineers”, who was asked in 1961 to design a sign for the new programme. Smith told The World that the design was one of several offered by a graphic design company in Virginia, and that Blakeley’s name was on the patents.⁷ The Office of Civil Defense fact sheet doesn’t name him at all: it says the design contract went to graphic arts studios, with a psychologist to recommend the symbol.¹ Blakeley died in October 2017, aged 95.⁷⁸

The two accounts also disagree about the triangles. The fact sheet says the Office of Civil Defense first planned to use the radiation warning symbol and dropped it, because a shelter stands for safety and the trefoil for a hazard.¹ Smith’s version is that Blakeley picked the three triangles in a black circle because they represented the symbol for radiation.⁷ Blakeley himself told The New York Times the design might have been inspired by Clarence Hornung’s Handbook of Designs and Devices, first published in 1932.⁸ From a designer’s point of view, we’d say the result sits somewhere between the two: close enough to the trefoil to say “radiation”, different enough to say “come in”.

There’s a family footnote too. According to Smith, Blakeley’s children were more excited about the sign than he was, because he’d asked them to help in “developing the reflective paint that was used on all these signs”.⁷

Civil defence already had a look of its own. The design writer Steven Heller traces its emblem system to 1939 and Charles T. Coiner, design director at the N.W. Ayer agency, and sees the fallout sign as drawing on it; the system was retired in 2006.⁸ Signs with that blue-and-white “CD” triangle and the words “Shelter Inside” still turn up on buildings, like the one pictured further down.

What was inside a public fallout shelter

The shelter was usually an ordinary room. What made it a shelter was solid walls between the people and the fallout outside,⁹ plus a stack of federal boxes. Stocking began in October 1962, shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis showed how few designated shelters were ready, and in the end only about a third of them received the two-week supply: water, “survival biscuits”, medical and sanitation kits and radiation detection meters. Citizens were trained to run the shelters too.⁴ Local civil defence officials did the stocking, with supplies from the federal government.⁵

That Washington shelter, under the Oyster-Adams School about 2.5 kilometres north of the White House, is the best snapshot we found of a stocked shelter left alone. Frank Blazich, a curator at the National Museum of American History, prised open a rusted can dated “Nov 1962” there in 2018 and called the place “a time capsule”. His verdict on the contents: “Tastes a bit stale.”¹⁰ Colby told WGBH that a few Boston spaces, City Hall among them, still had water barrels and 1962 crackers, and he wasn’t tempted: “You could probably eat them. I wouldn’t.”⁶

One thing a public fallout shelter didn’t have was a blast door. Fallout shelters were meant for dust drifting in from a strike somewhere else, not for the blast itself.⁶ Explosion-resisting steel doors were a vault maker’s speciality, going back to designs such as a 1909 round safe door with hidden chambers to take the gas of a blast,¹³ and they went into the government’s own hideaways, such as the congressional bunker under the Greenbrier, rather than into school basements.¹⁴

Backyard shelters and the 1961 boom

Alongside the public survey, 1961 was the big year of the family shelter. Life magazine’s September 1961 cover story, “You Can Protect Yourself from Nuclear Attack”, carried a letter from Kennedy encouraging family shelters and claimed that shelters could let 97 per cent of the population survive. In October he called for “fallout protection for every American as rapidly as possible”.⁴

The numbers moved, but not that far. The National Park Service counts about 1,565 private shelters in March 1960, roughly 60,000 by June 1961 and an estimated 200,000 by 1965: about one for every 266 households, or 0.4 per cent of homes. A 1961 Gallup poll found 93 per cent of Americans had no plans to build one, and about 600 fallout shelter companies later went bankrupt.⁴ In the end the administration decided to play down family shelters and put its money into the public survey.⁴ So if you grew up near a yellow sign, you were far more likely to have a school basement than a shelter in the garden.

Timeline

• 1961 25 July: Kennedy’s Berlin crisis speech asks for shelter space in existing buildings to be marked and stocked.
• 1961 September: Life runs “You Can Protect Yourself from Nuclear Attack”.
• 1961 1 December: the Defense Department introduces the fallout shelter sign.
• 1962 Contracts for 400,000 outdoor and a million indoor signs; stocking starts in October.
• 1964 June: the handbook Posting Fallout Shelter Signs is issued.
• 1965 An estimated 200,000 private shelters exist.
• 1970 Surveying, stocking and staffing come to an end.
• 1974 The programme is allowed to lapse.
• 2017 October: Robert Blakeley dies at 95. December: New York starts taking the signs off its schools.

Sources for the timeline: the presidential speech text,³ the National Park Service,⁴ ORAU on the sign and its handbook,¹ The World on Blakeley⁷ and ScienceAlert on New York.¹⁵

Why the programme ended

It ran out of steam rather than being switched off. Surveying, stocking and staffing carried on until 1970, and by 1974 the programme was allowed to lapse, which left towns and cities with the problem of what to do with the supplies.⁴ ORAU’s history puts the final end of the programme in the late 1970s, after which many shelters fell into disrepair or became storerooms.⁵

The supplies themselves had a shelf life. When Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment looked at civil defence in 1979, it noted that the “austere survival supplies” bought in the early 1960s had expired, and that stocking, and even the marking of unmarked buildings, was now to be done in a crisis.² Later FEMA guidance for the radiation kits was to keep them in a bulk store run by the locality rather than in the shelters, unless a shelter had the space and security for them.¹²

The government’s own bunkers are a different story, told elsewhere on this site: Raven Rock, the Pentagon’s alternate command site in a Pennsylvania mountain,¹⁶ and, across the Atlantic, regional government headquarters such as the Kelvedon Hatch nuclear bunker in Essex.¹⁷

Are fallout shelters still active?

No, not in the Cold War sense. Funding for the shelters ended in the 1970s, and FEMA, which absorbed the old Office of Civil Defense, told Reuters in 2017 that it “does not have a position regarding the signs” and doesn’t keep historical lists of shelter locations.¹⁵ A FEMA spokeswoman told the Associated Press the following month that the agency has no current information on where the shelters are.⁹

New York decided the signs were doing more harm than good. In December 2017 its Department of Education began the first coordinated effort to remove them from schools, confirming that the old school shelters were no longer active. A Columbia University disaster planner put it bluntly to Reuters: “At best, they are ignored, at worst, they’re misleading and are going to cost people’s lives.”¹⁵ The AP put the number of shelters once believed to be in New York City alone at about 18,000.⁹

That doesn’t make the buildings useless. ORAU’s view is that a standing shelter’s walls would still give some shielding, but it’s unlikely to be stocked.⁵ And the advice has come back round to the same idea the survey was built on. Ready.gov, the federal preparedness site, says to “get inside, stay inside and stay tuned”: go to a basement or the middle of a large building, preferably one with brick or concrete walls, and stay there for at least 24 hours unless there’s an immediate danger such as fire or officials say otherwise.¹⁸ The page doesn’t mention fallout shelter signs at all.

How to spot an old fallout shelter near you

If you’re searching for “fallout shelters near me”, the honest answer is that there’s no official map. We couldn’t find a current national list, and FEMA says it doesn’t keep one.¹⁵ What you can find are the signs, and they follow a system set out in the 1964 handbook Posting Fallout Shelter Signs.¹ Here’s what to look for on a walk round town.

The buildings tend to be the solid public ones: schools, hospitals and office blocks were what the 1961 questionnaires asked about.⁵ The AP’s description of a typical choice is concrete, cinder block or brick with no windows.⁹ Signs keep disappearing through demolition, renovation and vandalism, and by WGBH’s count Boston alone had more than 2,000 buildings identified and over 1,000 marked by the mid-1960s.⁶ Local enthusiasts such as Colby’s Fallout Five Zero have taken on the mapping for their own cities.⁶

A word of caution if you spot one: a sign on a wall doesn’t give you the right to go looking for the shelter. The rooms behind them are today’s basements, plant rooms and storerooms, so treat the sign as a piece of street history and leave the building to its owners. If you came here from the games, we’ve also written up how Fallout’s vaults compare with the real shelters.

Fallout shelter myths

Sources for the myths: the National Park Service on stocking and the 1974 lapse;⁴ Reuters via ScienceAlert on FEMA;¹⁵ the Office of Technology Assessment on expired supplies;² WGBH on what the shelters protected against;⁶ and ORAU on the symbol.¹

Frequently asked questions