re: #35 mmmirele

I’m just going to point out that there is a fundamental difference between a bomb shelter and a fallout shelter.

A bomb shelter is designed to shelter you from a bombing. It may or may not do a good job of that.

A fallout shelter is designed to shelter you from nuclear fallout. It’s not designed to protect you from a bombing. And a lot of places have been designated as fallout shelters that are just basements in regular buildings.

We had a fallout shelter at my elementary school in California, but many years and years later I realized there wasn’t even a chance that we’d be existing if there was a nuclear weapon dropped on the naval weapons station just over the (not very big) hill from our house.

I don’t know of any fallout shelters around here (Mesa, AZ). I’d probably have to take shelter in my downstairs under the stairs closet, although to be perfectly honest, in a full on nuclear war, I doubt I’d want to live. I do know that if a weapon were dropped on Phoenix Mesa Gateway airport (former Williams Field), and I was sitting at my desk, it’s entirely likely that I’d be blinded by the flash because it’s right off to the southwest several miles. Yeah, I’m the kind of morbid who thinks about this sort of thing.

We have both fallout shelters and “protected spaces” (i.e. basically bomb and shrapnel shelters). That map I posted is just the fallout shelters. There’s probably as many “protected spaces” with similar capacity total. Both can handle conventional bombing just about the same, the difference is that the fallout shelters have significant resistance to CBRN warfare unlike the “protected spaces”.

A bomb shelter is less cumbersome to build, but given the expertise in tunneling shown in Gaza, well within the capability of the people in Gaza, provided the political will to create them and using in a way which retains protected status exists. It would knock off a decent chunk of the collateral casualty number. Yet, it isn’t done, and it must be asked “Why?”