The fallout shelters, marked with metal signs featuring the symbol for radiation – three joined triangles inside a circle – were set up in tens of thousands of buildings nationwide in the early 1960s amid the nuclear arms race. “The only thing I can think is, I would run,” said Sabrina Shephard, 45, of Manhattan. New Yorkers who were asked this week about where they would seek shelter during a missile attack said they had no idea. And it’s a necessity for individuals and families to talk about and develop their own plan of what they would do.” “City officials should be talking about what their citizens should do if an attack happened. The false alarm is the time to talk about what to do in such an emergency, Redlener said, because most of the time people don’t want to talk about it. Students bolted across the University of Hawaii campus to take cover in buildings. Parents huddled in bathtubs with their children. Drivers abandoned cars on a highway and took shelter in a tunnel. The state had set up the missile warning infrastructure after North Korea demonstrated that its missiles had the range to reach the islands. People weren’t sure what to do Saturday when Hawaii mistakenly sent a cellphone alert warning of an incoming missile and didn’t retract it for 38 minutes. There’s a threat, but it’s a different type of threat today.” had nuclear warheads pointed at each other that would devastate the world. “We’re not facing what we were facing 50 years ago, when the Soviet Union and the U.S. Irwin Redlener, head of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. And conventional wisdom has changed about whether such a shelter system is necessary in an age when an attack is more likely to come from a weak rogue state or terrorist group rather than a superpower. Relics from the Cold War, the aging shelters that once numbered in the thousands in schools, courthouses and churches, haven’t been maintained. Modern nuclear threats are more likely to take the form of smaller, isolated bombs. Even when the shelters started popping up in the tens of thousands in the early 1960s, the concept had its critics. The main command center of a Cold War-era fallout shelter in New Orleans.
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