JFK'S fallout shelter (Cuban Missile Crisis)

Late in the afternoon on the eighth day of the Cuban missile crisis, as President John F. Kennedy and his tightly drawn circle of advisers mulled their rapidly constricting options, talk turned from the steely language of brinkmanship to the question of what might happen to U.S. citizens if ballistic missiles were launched. "What is it that we ought to do for the population in affected areas," Kennedy asked, "in case the bombs go off?"

Of all the presidents who served during the Cold War, Kennedy was the strongest proponent of sheltering citizens from atomic attack. Before the Cuban missile crisis, as one story goes, Kennedy called navy assistant secretary Paul Fay to ask if he had built a bomb shelter for his family. "No," Fay answered jokingly, "I built a swimming pool instead." "You made a mistake," JFK responded. As Fay recalled, "He was dead serious."


jfk's bunker.



On Peanut Island, near Palm Beach, Florida, a five-minute helicopter ride from the former Kennedy estate, one can imagine life in the atomic age at its most terrifying extreme: when nearly one-eighth of the Strategic Air Command's nuclear force was airborne and loaded, the nation's armed forces were on standing five-minute alert under DEFCON2, and anywhere--even the president's vacation home--was a potential target. In December of 1961 the U.S. Navy Seabees came to this tiny "spoils island"--formed out of dredge material in 1919--to covertly build an emergency fallout shelter for Kennedy and his family

bunker entrance.



www.metropolismag.com...

ne1 see the sum of all fears at the beginning with the mock soviet attack that was one sweet ass bunker the pres had