In 1956, the DCD director himself called a nuclear attack on Washington “pretty near hopeless.” DCD had few options. The District of Columbia Office of Civil Defense (DCD) was formed in 1950 to ready the American capital for nuclear disaster. shelters were marked by luminescent black and yellow signs, stocked with provisions for hundreds of thousands of people and located in over a thousand public and private buildings throughout the city. An SS-4 missile - the type deployed to Cuba during the missile crisis - would have left a 1.5 mile radius of complete destruction.įallout shelters only protect occupants from fallout-the deadly radioactive dust resulting from a nuclear detonation-but not the blast itself. Had a nuclear bomb detonated over Washington during the early 1960s, most of Washington’s 760,000 residents would be dead, even those who made it to a fallout shelter.

However, since the capital was a primary target in the event of nuclear war and most shelters were located downtown, the city’s fallout shelters could not have saved Washingtonians in a direct attack. UPDATE: The exterior work was completed in November 2019, and when the scaffolding was removed, the sign remained.At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, the District of Columbia prepared hundreds of fallout shelters.

Photos taken on and property of Fallout Five Zero Stay tuned, as this sign might soon meet the fate of so many others in recent times… Fallout Five Zero has reached out to the City of Boston’s Property Management division, who manages the building, to try to learn the fate of the sign but currently there has been no reply. However, with the exterior work going on, it is unknown if the sign will remain up or be removed for good. Interior signs were also removed by the early 1990’s.ĭue to the building being a popular tourist attraction, this is one the most photographed remaining Fallout Shelter signs in the city (based on Google and Flickr entries). One exterior sign facing Quincy Market was removed a few years ago, and this exterior sign facing the Congress Street side of the building is the only remaining one.

Early fallout shelter signs