Amazon’s new series Fallout starts with the end of the world: News reports of an international crisis interrupt a children’s birthday party, mushroom clouds appear outside, and chaos ensues. The year is 2077, but it feels like the 1950s. In this world, the Cold War never ended, and neither did the consumerism that defined mid-century America.

Two centuries after the opening sequence—when the plot of Fallout shifts into gear—cities are devastated, and communities have descended into violence. But brands endure. Advertisements for “Nuka-Cola” and “Super Duper Mart” litter the new American wasteland. Meanwhile, deep underground, a parallel society of Vault Dwellers live in high-tech shelters, cooking with “Atomic Queen” ovens, watching movies on “Radiation King” VHS players, and snacking on “Sugar Bombs.”

Lucy and Hank MacLean enjoy some relaxation in Vault 33, where it feels a lot like 1950s America. Courtesy of Prime Video.

The show, which might easily be dismissed as suburban nostalgia, is rooted in messy historical reality. In mid-century America, conspicuous acts of consumption defined a society facing the end, spurred in large part by the macabre influence of the bomb—evincing fascination and discomfort.

Today, trotting out the bomb to advertise goods might seem misguided at best and exploitative at worst. But in the 1940s and 1950s, the dawn of a new technological age promised an unleashing of scientific potential, and audiences were entranced. Walt Disney produced the 1957 television special for schoolchildren “Our Friend the Atom,” and President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a very public pro-nuclear campaign called “Atoms for Peace” to reassure the public that the nuclear future was not just about destruction. Meanwhile, atomic advertisers tapped into the excitement of technological modernity while trying to sidestep the true horrors of nuclear war.

Still from a 1950s U.S. Army information film, which appears in the documentary Atomic Café.

So, just as the fictional characters in Fallout sip on Nuka-Cola, real-life Americans of the era sipped a popular cocktail inspired by the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, less than an hour after reports of the successful attack on Hiroshima, members of the Washington Press Club mixed gin, Pernod, and vermouth, charging 60 cents a pour for the “Atomic Cocktail.” It was a smash hit with members of the press—and went on to become particularly beloved in Las Vegas, where atomic tests were a 1950s tourist attraction.

Fallout’s soundtrack features hits such as the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” (1941) and Five Stars’ “Atom Bomb Baby” (1957), harking back to a time when songs about the end of the world routinely climbed the Billboard charts. And its reimagined advertisements for “atom powered” wind-up robots and washing detergent that’s as “tough on dirt as a nuclear blast” refer to genuine Cold War-era products that stocked shelves at Macy’s and Sears.

But sometimes marketers weren’t successful in striking a balance between sensationalizing their products and terrifying their audience. Such was the case with a product central to both Fallout and the real-life Cold War home front: the fallout shelter.

One of the show’s main characters is Cooper Howard, “star of stage and screen” and “pitchman for the end of the world.” In advertisements for Vault-Tec, he sells shelters “strong enough to keep out the rads and the Reds.” His pitches close with a promise, made directly to the camera: “You can be a hero, too. By purchasing a residence in a Vault-Tec vault today. Because if the worst should happen tomorrow, the world is going to need Americans just like you to build a better day after.”

A 1951 prototype basement fallout shelter sits on a New Jersey boardwalk. Courtesy of the National Archives.

In real life, a similar directive came from an even bigger celebrity. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a nationwide address encouraging ordinary citizens to build their own fallout shelters. Speaking to around 25 million viewers, Kennedy argued, “We owe that kind of insurance to our families and to our country.” That September, President Kennedy opened an entire issue of Life magazine dedicated to fallout shelters with a letter that made the remarkable claim that “97 out of 100” citizens might survive the next war if they took survival into their own hands. Outsourcing survival to the private sector gave rise to swarms of local businesses. Newsweek estimated that in one week in October 1961, over 31 shelter companies applied for business licenses in Atlanta. In the same month companies like Peace-O-Mind Shelter Corporation in Texas, Survival-All Incorporated in Ohio, Survival Construction Specialist in Denver, and Diamond Blocks in Boston all opened their doors for business.

Driving profit was no afterthought in the development of the Cold War home front; it was central to its social function. Historian Lizabeth Cohen describes America immediately following the end of World War II as a “consumers’ republic” defined by the rise of powerful new political language that equated good citizenship with effective consumerism. Shelter businesses, then, attempted to marry two eminently successful ideological constructs of the era: national security and the self-made, individualistic, suburban consumer family. But there were limits to even the best salesman’s pitch. Fallout depicts a nation duped into life underground. But many real-life American households were not so easily convinced—and shelter salesmen routinely went bust, even as the atomic clock ticked close to midnight.

Take James Byrne, a Detroit-based plywood businessman who described the shelter trade as a “can’t miss proposition,” with every political statement from the Oval Office a “million-dollar free advertisement.” As international tensions rose in the summer and fall of 1962, Byrne went door to door trying to make a buck—and failed miserably. “People listen to the sales pitch, take all the literature,” Byrne’s best salesman, Sal George recalled, “ask questions and then just walk away.”

Getting desperate, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Byrne and George loaded up a flatbed truck with their model shelter, drove it around town, dropped the price by $100, and posted a sign reading “FALLOUT SHELTERS—WHILE THEY LAST.”  There was not even a “nibble of a sale.” Eventually, they offered it up free of charge, and a Michigan family hauled the shelter away. “Last I heard from them they were having trouble assembling it. But I’m not asking questions,” said Byrne.

His experience was not unique. Between 1961 and 1963 an estimated 600 shelter companies across the United States filed for bankruptcy. Given the opportunity to purchase their families’ safety, most citizens rejected the salesmen’s pitch.

“The future, my friend, is products,” a fellow actor tells Cooper Howard in Fallout. “You’re a product. I’m a product. The end of the world is a product.” Maybe in their world. But history shows us that when faced with the prospect of total annihilation, Americans never really embraced the idea that survival should be a consumer choice.

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But while the technology to share these images in Ukraine may be more advanced than ever before, the visuals of families in bomb shelters have always brought conflict to our doorsteps, making geopolitics concrete. A litany of photographs, government films, and Hollywood movies over the last 75 years communicates the public’s fears of nuclear war. These images offer us a nuclear temperature check of sorts, reflecting the shifting optimism, anxieties, and cynicism of the times.

It all started in Japan in the 1940s, in the immediate aftermath of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when images of hibakusha (Japanese survivors of the bomb) and of cities reduced to rubble first emerged. Since then, Japanese popular culture has always kept the atomic bomb front and center, from genbaku bungaku (atomic bomb literature), to the recognition of Godzilla (1954) as an atomic text, to the global success of anime films such as Akira (1988) and the work of Studio Ghibli.

Hiroshima, U.S.A. Collier 1950. Courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine.

Each nation had its own unique cultural reaction to the bomb. In the U.S., the Federal Civil Defence Administration, founded in 1951, set out to convince Americans that if the bomb did drop, they could survive the fallout. Over the course of a decade, the agency attempted to quell public anxiety over nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union through public education campaigns, school room drills, and exercises.

Nearly half a billion FCDA civil defence booklets depicted the All-American family in their fallout shelter—creating a key visual focal point for early conversation about nuclear war in the U.S. Decidedly suburban, heteronormative, and middle class in nature, this visual of white American families carefully lining shelter shelves with canned goods or taking their children by the hand as they walked toward their underground refuges broadcast a clear government-sanctioned message: A family that is together, well organized, and ready could survive the next war. Of course, the messaging had as much to do with domestic politics as with preparedness, reinforcing traditional ideas about marriage and family values.

Federal Civil Defense Administration Photograph Family Fallout Shelter. Courtesy of Digital Library of America.

Overlooking complex questions of class, race, and sexuality, this doctrine of DIY survival also shifted responsibility away from the state.  Putting the onus on the individual might have been a cheap and attractive policy for the government, but the notion of a nation of shelter builders taking survival into their own hands could only go so far. With the development of the hydrogen bomb and the knowledge that nuclear fallout caused cancer and cardiovascular disease, by the 1960s the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the bomb began to question whether nuclear war was winnable in a traditional sense.

Women’s Activities and Conferences [1958-1960]. Courtesy of Digital Commonwealth.

The anti-nuclear movement grew out of this, and with it, pop culture images of the family fallout shelter took a turn for the cynical. In a 1961 episode of the Twilight Zone, a quiet dinner party turned into a community tearing itself apart as fictional suburbanites scrambled to get access to the only fallout shelter in town. In the run up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Saturday Review covered a town hall meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, which descended into chaos when a community member threatened to shoot anyone who approached his private shelter.

Depictions of fallout shelters continued to reflect the public’s shifting moods as the Cold War continued to fluctuate in temperature. When Vietnam dominated headlines in the late 1960s and 1970s, cultural discussion around family shelters largely disappeared; the shift from atmospheric to underground testing of nuclear weapons, the passage of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and a decade of easing U.S.-Soviet tensions also fostered an atmosphere of relative ease. But a generation later, the election of Ronald Reagan returned nuclear war to watercooler conversation. By 1984, politicians were obsessing over the “Evil Empire,” and pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood topped the charts with “Two Tribes,” a single lamenting Cold War jockeying.

When the Wind Blows (1984). Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Fallout shelters re-emerged—though the family of the 1950s happily starting a new life underground had become a quaint relic of an already bygone past. In the 1980s, as global stockpiles of nuclear warheads totaled over 50,000, visual culture around shelters got increasingly bleak. With anti-nuclear activism heating up, the arts presented a society on fire, where the fallout shelter took on a new symbolic role: futile final bastion in a world devoid of hope. In the United Kingdom, where NATO stationed cruise missiles in 1979, filmmakers contributed two notable visions of bunkered families facing the end of the world. The animated feature When the Wind Blows (1986) told the story of an elderly couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, living in a tiny Cotswolds village after a nuclear strike rendered Britain a radioactive wasteland. The terrifying docudrama Threads (1984) dramatized the devastation of thermonuclear war in Sheffield and traumatized a generation.

The Cold War’s conclusion—the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama declared—repurposed shelters as historical relics, and in turn, they became objects of nuclear nostalgia in the culture. In the 1999 film Blast from the Past, for example, the family shelter became the perfect premise for a romantic comedy. Adam Webber (played by Brendan Fraser) is sealed away in his family’s bomb shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis and emerges into the bustling modern world of the 1990s. Having grown up on a television diet of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, Webber’s efforts to find love render the fallout shelter a harmless time capsule of Cold War kitsch. Players of the first instalment of blockbuster video game Fallout (1997) took control of a “vault dweller,” similarly emerging from a bunker, to seek adventure.

Recent events have brought back images of family shelters, and today’s sobering shelter TikToks are whipsawing public consciousness again. It’s hard to predict what this latest paradigm shift will bring, with the situation in Ukraine being so fluid. What’s clear is that visuals of fallout shelters still shake us. Removed from carefully curated government pamphlets or movie sets, self-documented social media provides an uncensored and devastating look at the human costs of conflict through bunker life. The question is: will these new depictions of bunker life encourage this generation to create a world where nuclear fallout shelters can return to objects of harmless fiction once again?

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