Underground rooms of the Cold War which, at times of heightened paranoia like the Cuban missile crisis, families constructed and stocked to allow them to survive imminent nuclear holocaust, extending civil defense preparations for tornadoes or conventional weapons into a new age. Civic buildings also altered cellars and posted signs. Although many shelters never went beyond planning, they stimulated debates over inclusion and exclusion recalled in a 1962 song by comedian Shel Silverstein, “I’m Standing Outside of your Shelter Looking in.” In subsequent decades these shelters faded into embarrassment and oblivion; a 1999 Hollywood comedy Blast from the Past, ridiculed a Cold War family who spent decades hiding in one. Nonetheless, echoes of this bomb-shelter mentality recur in propaganda of survivalists, messianic Christians and even apocalyptic interpretations of Y2K.