SALT LAKE CITY—Saturday’s alert message in Hawaii warning of a ballistic missile threat may have been a false alarm, but it highlighted fears over what could come of very real, ongoing tensions between the U.S. and North Korea.

In the event of a nuclear attack, some believe the U.S. never should have abandoned its Cold War-era approach to civil defense.

“America has a great sword, they say, but no shield,” said Paul Seyfried, president of Utah Shelter Systems, a company that manufactures steel shelters and concrete bunkers to protect against hazards like blasts and fallout. “We really have no civil defense in this country, and so far we’ve been just really lucky that nobody’s called our bluff.”

Seyfried said the number of individual shelters his company produces pales in comparison to the numbers needed across the country to adequately protect the population from nuclear threats.

“The government needs to put their ‘big boy pants’ on and they need to do a shelter program much like the Manhattan Project,” Seyfried said.

Community fallout shelters are a ‘relic’

Utah Division of Emergency Management spokesman Joe Dougherty said many of the large-scale community fallout shelters that existed during the Cold War have either been scrapped or have not been maintained, following an extended period in which tensions seemed to de-escalate between the world’s nuclear powers.

“The specific planning for fallout shelters kind of went by the wayside in favor of personal preparedness,” Dougherty said.

Now, the state’s emergency managers encourage a larger and more spread-out population to prepare themselves for all hazards — not just nuclear weapons.

“That preparedness is going to carry over into any other incident we could have in our state,” Dougherty said. “People should have an emergency kit for these types of situations. If you need to evacuate, if you need to shelter where you are, are you ready to do that? And really, that’s a question every Utahn can ask themselves.”

While framed in the context of a potential terror attack, the state maintains a page full of tips and recommendations for families in the event of a nuclear blast.

Among the individual recommendations are suggestions like not using conditioner because it has the potential to bind radioactive material to hair, and going as far below ground or as deep into a large building as possible in the event of a nuclear detonation.

“Any building is going to provide you protection, and I think maybe the important thing is for people to realize to get inside and stay there as long as possible,” Dougherty said.

Shelters and the future

Seyfried said he wouldn’t dare predict what the future holds, but preferred to be ready, equating the situation to wearing a seat belt and hoping to avoid a crash.

“The fact of the matter is that the technology exists to protect ordinary citizens from the effects of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons,” Seyfried said.

For roughly the cost of buying a new boat, Seyfried said a family could install a shelter that would fit their needs.

“This is designed to be buried in a 20-foot-deep trench,” he said of one of the shelters. “These will survive within a quarter mile of the crater edge of a 1 megaton ground burst, or directly beneath an air burst nuclear weapon of any yield.”

He said he believed governments should invest more in shelters to protect against the potential hazards of biological and chemical weapons attacks, nuclear blasts and fallout, and electromagnetic pulses (EMP).

“We need to start focusing on defending our own people here at home,” Seyfried said.

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