It all started in Japan in the 1940s, in the immediate aftermath of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when images of hibakusha (Japanese survivors of the bomb) and of cities reduced to rubble first emerged. Since then, Japanese popular culture has always kept the atomic bomb front and center, from genbaku bungaku (atomic bomb literature), to the recognition of Godzilla (1954) as an atomic text, to the global success of anime films such as Akira (1988) and the work of Studio Ghibli.
Each nation had its own unique cultural reaction to the bomb. In the U.S., the Federal Civil Defence Administration, founded in 1951, set out to convince Americans that if the bomb did drop, they could survive the fallout. Over the course of a decade, the agency attempted to quell public anxiety over nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union through public education campaigns, school room drills, and exercises.
Nearly half a billion FCDA civil defence booklets depicted the All-American family in their fallout shelter—creating a key visual focal point for early conversation about nuclear war in the U.S. Decidedly suburban, heteronormative, and middle class in nature, this visual of white American families carefully lining shelter shelves with canned goods or taking their children by the hand as they walked toward their underground refuges broadcast a clear government-sanctioned message: A family that is together, well organized, and ready could survive the next war. Of course, the messaging had as much to do with domestic politics as with preparedness, reinforcing traditional ideas about marriage and family values.
Overlooking complex questions of class, race, and sexuality, this doctrine of DIY survival also shifted responsibility away from the state. Putting the onus on the individual might have been a cheap and attractive policy for the government, but the notion of a nation of shelter builders taking survival into their own hands could only go so far. With the development of the hydrogen bomb and the knowledge that nuclear fallout caused cancer and cardiovascular disease, by the 1960s the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the bomb began to question whether nuclear war was winnable in a traditional sense.
The anti-nuclear movement grew out of this, and with it, pop culture images of the family fallout shelter took a turn for the cynical. In a 1961 episode of the Twilight Zone, a quiet dinner party turned into a community tearing itself apart as fictional suburbanites scrambled to get access to the only fallout shelter in town. In the run up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Saturday Review covered a town hall meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, which descended into chaos when a community member threatened to shoot anyone who approached his private shelter.