Canned Water and the Survival of a Nation

Canned Water from the Cold War Museum's Collection

One of the most iconic images from the Cold War are fallout shelters. Depending upon where you live, work, or where you go to school you may very well have a fallout shelter in your building. The house I live in is from 1897, and around the 1950's the owners added a basement and a fallout shelter. These fallout shelters represented the optimism of nuclear war, and the will of a nation to survive the unsurvivable.

In a MAD (mutually assured destruction) situation, the only way to "win" is to survive. The idea was to crawl into a well stocked shelter before the bombs hit and stay underground until it was safe to move to unaffected areas. Things would then carry on as before and the country who had the most people survive would be the "winner". We know now, and they did back then as well, that there were no real winners in a nuclear war; only survivors.

A common misconception was that the shelter was supposed to protect you from a nuclear explosion. This is untrue because even shelters that were designed to withstand a nuclear attack would be destroyed by a direct hit. Rather, the shelter's main purpose was to protect its occupants from fallout and contamination.

A Simple In Ground Fallout Shelter

So what does canned water have to do with the survival of a nation? When you think about it the strongest, most impenetrable shelter is useless without provisions. Not only did you need a shelter, you needed to stock your shelter with enough food and water to last at least two weeks. In home shelters, this usually meant canning extra food and buying a little extra at the grocery store. In larger municipal shelters, the officials would stock these shelters full of government issued food, medical supplies, sanitary needs and water. Even those houses that did not have a shelter would usually store some food and water in case the unthinkable would happen.

Northland Center Mall, Michigan



There were many ways to create a shelter in your home, from a simple lean-to in the basement to a fully constructed underground shelter with two exits (one exterior, one interior), room enough for your entire family plus provisions for two or more months. In one of the more memorable scenes from the made for TV movie "The Day After", you see the father shoveling dirt and using sandbags in front of the basement windows in order to close off the basement to the outside. While he didn't have a prepared shelter, the father followed emergency instructions that can be found in many of the pamphlets given out to the public. The family is shown as having more than enough food, Steve Guttenberg's character produces his own food in order to stay in the shelter with them.

I don't think I would be doing it this calmly...



Not everyone had a shelter during the Cold War, but those that did were preparing for an uncertain future. There is a reason why the most common artifacts from the Cold War are pamphlets and shelter supplies; these things were needed to survive. People today look at the advice in these pamphlets and immediately write them off as nonsense. They look at the drab packaging of the food and say that it looks disgusting. During the Cold War, though, these pamphlets were distributed and widely read. The food was purchased and stored for the family. When I show off my collection I have people pick up some of my pamphlets and tell me that they read them and because of them they kept extra food around, or cleaned the basement every once in awhile in case they had to stay down there. They laugh when they see the canned water because their mothers would make them drink it when the shelter supplies were rotated, and it tasted slightly metallic.

No one really knew what would happen if there was a full on nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In fact, even today we cannot truly comprehend a MAD situation. We will never know if these shelters would have worked the way they were meant to and if the recommended food quantities were enough to sustain the family. Many of the home shelters have been turned into rec rooms, storm shelters and laundry rooms. Municipal shelters are now storage rooms, meeting rooms and classrooms. Let's pray that they stay that way.