Backyard fallout shelters, once secretly built across America in the 1950s during the Cold War, are making a comeback, thanks to the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Backyard fallout shelters, once secretly built across America in the 1950s during the Cold War, are making a comeback, thanks to the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
The crisis, triggered by the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, led to a massive release of radioactivity into the atmosphere and has apparently raised renewed concerns among Americans about the possibility of similar radiation crises, if not atomic Armageddon, in their country.
Robert Vicino, the 58-year-old CEO and founder of Vivos, a company building nuclear bunkers in California, said the number of orders and inquiries his firm has received has increased tenfold since the crisis broke out at the Fukushima plant.
"We have about a 1,000 percent increase in immediate applications for memberships and accommodations in Vivos after the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan," Vicino said.
"People are afraid of earth-changing events. The central concern of our inquiries and potential customers is that we are seeing more intense and frequent Earth changes that may lead to more of what occurred in Japan," Vicino said, adding that talk about an approaching comet may also have prompted people to seek safe shelters.
Vivos basically sells berths in underground bunkers of various sizes that can house from about 80 to 2,000 people. It charges $50,000 (3.82 million yen) for a space for an adult in such a bunker. Children are half price.
The catastrophic nuclear accident in Japan has changed the views about disasters among Americans, Vicino said. It has reinforced the feeling that an even more severe calamity could occur at any time in the United States, according to the entrepreneur.
Brian Camden, the 55-year-old principal of Hardened Shelter, a Virginia-based company that has been building specially hardened structures for clients for 20 years, also said he has been receiving many more inquiries and requests for advice since the accident occurred at the Fukushima complex.
In the wake of the accident in Japan, traces of radioactive materials were detected along the U.S. West Coast. Immediately after that, the number of inquiries from people saying they wanted to build shelters to protect their families began to rise sharply, Camden said.
"We have a definite increase in inquires after the Japanese disaster. We are getting inquiries from citizens in Japan and the South Korean military. We sold a couple of products to clients in California. Most of them are worried about the radioactive cloud and eager to protect their families," Camden said.
Camden said the last time such a flood of inquiries came was when North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.
Fallout shelters began to spread in the United States more than half a century ago. The first surge in demand took place soon after U.S. scientists tested a thermonuclear device on Bikini Atoll in the Micronesian Islands in 1954, according to Kenneth Rose, an expert in modern U.S. history and lecturer at California State University, Chico.
The news that the test exposed Daigo Fukuryu Maru, a Japanese tuna fishing boat, to nuclear fallout spread anxiety about the "Ashes of Death" among Americans.
A second wave of anxiety about radioactivity came in the 1960s, when the Cold War reached its apex, prompting U.S. President John F. Kennedy to urge Americans to build shelters.
"The interest in shelters faded after the Cuban (Missile) Crisis. It frightened leaders in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but a concerted effort was made to reduce the tensions of the Cold War," Rose said.
Rose believes the current rise in demand for shelters is the first such phenomenon since the end of the Cold War. But it is difficult to find solid data to support his view because the number of fallout shelters is not known.
"No one knows how many shelters were built because people generally wanted to keep their shelters a secret," he said.