Should Russian-fearing, God-fearing Americans have shotguns in their private fallout shelters to shoot neighbors who might try to join them when the nuclear bombs fall on Columbus, Indiana?
That question is not high on the list of discussion topics at local churches or around the tables at area coffee shops these days, but back in the early 1960s the debate flourished.
The Cold War with the Soviet Union was escalating daily and the arms race was producing thousands of nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles every year. The world was clinched in gut-wrenching, insomnia-producing fear of total annihilation.
Partially to promote “civil defense readiness,” and partially to soothe public anxiety by offering something concrete (no pun intended) that everyone could do, President John F. Kennedy went on television the evening of Oct. 6, 1961, and told Americans to start building public fallout shelters.
The shelters would have enough food and water to sustain those not vaporized by the initial explosion for at least two more weeks. By then, theoretically, the worst of the radiation poison would be over and everyone could emerge, either to live on or to die a bit more slowly in the toxic wasteland that was left.
Many individual Americans, however (as well as hundreds of companies trying to cash in on the hysteria), were way ahead of the president. Since the mid-1950s, individual families, and sometimes groups of neighbors, had been building private fallout shelters in their backyards or in a corners of their basements.
The building of these shelters usually required permits from local governments, and the first three such permits in Bartholomew County were issued the week prior to Kennedy’s speech.
Dr. and Mrs. Robert M. Reid received a permit to build and equip a shelter in the basement of their home in the 2700 block of Lafayette Avenue. Lewis J. Jenn of Indianapolis was awarded a permit for a shelter in a home to be built at Grandview Lake. A third permit was OK’d for Horizon Homes to put a shelter in a model home being built in Forest Park addition.
Dr. Reid, a local gynecologist, was president of the Bartholomew-Brown County Medical Association, a group that had been advocating private shelters as a way to safeguard against radiation sickness during and after a nuclear attack. The Reid shelter was built to government civil defense specifications and would house 10 people — the couple, their two children and Mr. Reid’s father, who lived in the home. That left room for five others they might choose to invite in during a nuclear attack. The shelter was 324 square feet — 12.5 by 27 feet — with an 8-foot ceiling. It had a hand water pump and a toilet.
Mr. and Mr. Reid are now deceased — he in 1998 and she in 2009 — and their children no longer live in Indiana.
I have no idea how many other private fallout shelters were built — with permits or otherwise — during the height of the craze in the decade of the ’60s. I also have no idea how many of those shelters were equipped with shotguns to fight off neighbors who might try to join the owners. I do know the subject was hotly debated in some churches — and, I assume, within the families of those deciding whether to use lethal force to safeguard their shelters from others.
In the spring of 1962, during my junior year at Hauser High School in Hope, I attended Moravian Youth Fellowship meetings nearly every Sunday evening with friends. (I was not a Moravian, but I devoutly believed the cutest teen-aged girls went there.)
The minister, the Rev. Earl Shay, often engaged us in discussions about moral and ethical complexities and how they might be answered by Christians. For several weeks, discussions centered on shotguns in fallout shelters. In the words of a later era: “What would Jesus do?”
Was killing a person who was just desperately trying to save the life of his or her family morally and religiously acceptable, if that family’s safety might put at risk the well-being of the shelter owner’s family?
Some among us said, “Yes” — your obligation to your own family’s welfare is a sacred calling. Killing is never right, but killing for a higher purpose is a lesser of evils.
Others said, “No” — murder is murder. Situational ethics and situational morality are no more than selfish ways to sidestep our higher selves and do the wrong thing. Jesus would have welcomed the stranger, even at the risk of his own life.
I wish I could tell you that the Moravian Youth Fellowship group settled this issue for everyone, once and for all, more than 50 years ago. We didn’t; neither did society, in general.
Heartfelt opinions on both sides of the dilemma separated devout Christians. Those diverse beliefs in opposing moral paths also divided families — many of which were building or deciding whether to build a private shelter.
That is one reason most of the basement shelters eventually became family room extensions and most of the backyard shelters turned into storage spaces by the end of the 1960s.
Saving one’s self from the evil of the world is rarely a clean-cut and precise process — nor is sorting out our higher selves as communities from our base instincts as individuals.
