A NEW YORKERS GUIDE TO CIVIL DEFENSE
decaying corpses sprawl in the sun. Anyone able to offer help from the “outside” would do so at great risk of personal contamination. In any case, the disruption of communication and electrical systems due to the bomb’s electromagnetic pulse would make outside help or contact all but impossible.
Those waiting inside the shelter begin to experience acute radiation sickness. Young children and the elderly will quickly die from dehydration caused by diarrhea and lack of water. Shelters will have poor toilets, if any, and air vents must remain sealed to keep out the lethal radiation. The temperature inside the shelter will soon rise to intolerable levels just from the accumulation of body heat. The stench will be unbearable and yet, opening the door—even to get rid of the dead—would subject the living to serious radiation threats. Life’s normal traumas would continue, too. Birth, colds, fever, infection, broken bones, strokes, heart attacks and death. We manage to cope with these events in the course of our daily lives—but what about in the close, hot confines of a small damp hole, in total darkness day after day after day?
