![]() ![]() ![]() Fowler’s book Fallout published in the Toronto Star detailed in ghoulish detail the catastrophic horror that awaited a city struck by an atomic bomb.īuildings would be vaporized and their citizens incinerated or condemned to a slow and painful death. Naturally, the Soviets’ ability to instantly and completely destroy anything with a given 35 square kilometre radius spooked the United States and Canada. In fact, the blast was stronger than all of the conventional explosives used in the entire second world war combined. bombs that levelled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The 27-ton thermonuclear device was about 1,500 times more powerful than the U.S. It was the most powerful manmade explosion in history. It wasn’t such a farfetched idea at the time. In October 1961, the Soviets detonated the “Tsar Bomba” over the Novata Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Sea. Plan of the Regency Acres fallout shelter, Globe and Mail, Jan 17, 1959 One of the prevailing fears of the time was that the Soviet Union would drop an atomic bomb somewhere over the United States (maybe even Canada,) obliterating a city and raining toxic radioactive ash over the surrounding hundreds of kilometres. ![]() The shelters at Regency Acres were the first to be offered as a standard feature of a new home in the Greater Toronto Area. The set-up “should allow a family to remain relatively comfortable for the seven to 14-day danger period,” the Globe and Mail reported. ![]() For entertainment, a clockwork record player and “appropriate reading material” would also be provided. Safe from the toxic ash raining down from above, a family of five sequestered inside would sleep on folding cots and subsist on filtered water and canned food. The 3.3 x 2.4 metre rooms had 30-centimetre thick walls, a filtered air system, and a rolled steel door with a thick rubber gasket. would install a reinforced concrete bunker in the basement of any of the 20 styles of home available in the subdivision. In 1959, the builders of Regency Acres, a 700-home subdivision in Aurora, Ontario, offered something no other homebuilder in the country could: a private, family-sized nuclear fallout shelter.įor an extra $1,500 on top of the sale price, Consolidated Building Corp. ![]()
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