The desire to protect oneself and one's home is characteristic of any living being. Actually, it is written in all of us at the level of instincts. The first dwellings of people were the burrows of large predators and caves. People killed and ate their old owners, and they themselves settled in their dwellings. And so that no one did the same with the new owners, they used various methods of protection: from banal stones or skins blocking the passage to organizing shifts at night.
The years passed. People's dwellings were becoming more modern and more comfortable. However, more and more attention was paid to security issues. The main reason for this was the fact that the dwellings had to be protected not from animals, but from people like the inhabitants themselves.
Defensive structures have come a long way from adobe fences to huge fortresses with all the necessary attributes: moats, drawbridges, watchtowers and the obligatory flag on the highest roof. However, even this was not enough. Particularly "careful" owners equipped their penates with underground storerooms for storing all kinds of goods and secret passages in order to escape if something happened.
It should be noted that the level of development of construction equipment made such defensive structures very expensive. In fact, they could be afforded either by state structures or by very rich individuals, who in the entire history of mankind can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
This went on for a very long time - until the beginning of the 20th century, until humanity was faced with several interesting positions that progress provided to it. First, thanks to the second industrial revolution, the cost of construction work has decreased by about an order of magnitude. Secondly, the new tactics of warfare put an end to the fortification; really, why storm all sorts of fortresses when you can just bypass them? And, thirdly, wars have become more large-scale, and, if earlier, a bullet or a shell could be received in the immediate vicinity of the theater of operations, now a "gift" from the enemy could be easily delivered even to an inhabitant of the deep rear.
All of the above has created the preconditions for the emergence of such a phenomenon as civil defense. To protect the population, they began to build various types of shelters and shelters, and among the population itself they began to conduct explanatory work on how to act in case of danger. And everything seemed to be correct and true, however, the appearance of weapons of mass destruction and the improvement of their delivery systems introduced some adjustments to the process …
Surprisingly, the emergence of nuclear weapons coincided with the next "round of development" of the consumer society. And the consumer society is the kind of thing to which the Spanish proverb is best applied, that the sleep of reason gives rise to monsters. So many things have not been invented, made and sold with stories about the threat of global destruction of humanity from a nuclear war.
Ahead of the entire planet, naturally, was the society of developed capitalism. Projects for individual and family shelters, portable shelters from the damaging factors of a nuclear explosion, protection of cars and houses from light radiation, and so on. Under the trend of "protection from the Soviet nuclear hazard", both traditional personal protective equipment (all sorts of suits and gas masks) and all kinds of new items were sold: car paint to protect against radiation, reflective films for glass, cosmetics from light radiation … It seems ridiculous and naive, however, it is just worth looking at the posters for gun shops in the 1950s USA to be convinced that such frenzy really took place.
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Meanwhile, in the United States, a civil defense commission has been working for several years, and various exercises have been conducted to train responses to nuclear strikes and mass evacuations of the population. The results of these exercises resulted in the so-called Holyfield Report, more than 3,000 pages long, from which it followed that all these measures would be, to put it mildly, insufficient. Even if everything goes smoothly with evacuations and shelters, then what to do next? It is banal to create food supplies that would not be exposed to radiation, and to establish their supply system after nuclear strikes was beyond the power of even such a developed economy as the American one. Actually, it was then that the thought that the wars "on a wide scale" had come to an end began to creep into the hot heads of people like Eisenhower, Teller, Blandy and the like, and, most likely,nuclear weapons will never be used …
Which, in fact, was proven just a few years later. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis struck like a bolt from the blue. The leadership of the two superpowers made grandiose political concessions to each other (these concessions were simply impossible in the "pre-nuclear era" - then it would definitely cause a war), just to prevent a possible conflict.
However, among the ordinary man in the United States, these events caused a serious commotion. Actually, the idea to massively build individual bunkers came from that period. The three largest construction companies in the United States have made more money in six months than they have in the last decade designing and building houses with reinforced concrete shelters. At that time, there was even a joke among American builders about the fact that the average Yankee house was plywood on top, but reinforced concrete on the bottom. Food producers did not stand aside either. McDonald's, for example, in 1962 alone "raised" more than $ 2 billion in dry rations for the maddened inhabitants. At the same time, by the way, powdered juices were invented and sold superbly. Weapons and communications sellers did not miss their chance either. For example, don't be the Cuban missile crisis,nobody would have heard of the Motorola company, which amassed its capital by selling radios "capable of working after a nuclear war." And how much realtors have earned selling housing in the Texas or Colorado wilderness (bombs will definitely not fall there, because there is nothing there), it is better not to remember …
But, everything ended well. Common sense won out, proving once again that "a bad peace is better than a good war." However, echoes of this paranoia sometimes reach our time - either the next Tom Cruise will build himself a new house with a bunker, then something else will happen. But it is already clear to everyone: no matter how you try to hide in a shelter, sooner or later you will have to leave it, and the desert will wait for you outside. Maybe it's easier not to bring the situation to the point of hiding?