The Castle Bravo nuclear test detonation of the most powerful thermonuclear device ever tested by the United States in 1954 in the N. Pacific, Image source: US Department of Energy, source: Wikimedia Commons

The Nuclear War of 1963

The mushroom cloud rose into a red twilight sky. A warning siren wailed in the distance. It was 1963, I was 5 year old little boy pushing my favorite toy firetruck down the driveway of our brick ranch-style suburban home on the outskirts of Charlotte. I knew what this meant — we’d have to move into the fallout shelter dug into the backyard and remain there for weeks, maybe months, until there was an all-clear siren. We had enough canned foods and water stored in the underground shelter to last for just a week or so because nobody believed this would happen.

My Ride in 1963 when I was 5 years old and the frightening dream of nuclear war began — Fortunately it was just a bad childhood daydream and nothing (other than my psyche) was injured. Image source: Creative Playthings online catalog)

In the daily headlines and discussed around the dinner table during my childhood:

CIA reference photograph of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile in Red Square in 1962 source:Wikipedia

The following is a collection of fallout shelter images I found searching online that capture what I vividly recall from my early childhood when my family lived in the deep south (ie Jackson, MS and Birmingham, AL) within range of a strike of medium-range nuclear missiles placed in Cuba by the Soviet Union triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis and hastening…