(See Cover)
In Miller's Cafeteria, in downtown Denver, four young women met for the afternoon coffee break—and almost immediately began talking about what weighed heaviest on their minds. Said Louise Epperson, a bank clerk: "I'd just as soon be killed as come out of a shelter and see the country desolated.'' Gail Pitts, an account executive with a public relations firm, felt differently. "I want to be around when it's all over," she said, "but I must admit I don't care too much about the idea of a fallout shelter. Still . . ." The third girl, Barbara Walz, an oil company receptionist, had a specific concern: "It's the children who give me the most worry. With my husband in one place and me in another, and the children at school, we really have no control." Marion Booth, office manager for a public relations firm, has no children. "But," she said, "I have to think about my husband and mother. We have a good basement in our house, and I'm thinking of fixing it up as a shelter."
By then, Denver's working girls were deep in a conversational subject that has taken over the U.S.—survival under atomic attack. At cocktail parties and P.T.A. meetings and family dinners, on buses and commuter trains and around office watercoolers, talk turns to shelters. Almost everyone—man, woman and child—has an opinion. Those opinions differ wildly. Many feel that blast and fallout shelters are cowardly. "They would convert our people into a horde of rabbits, scurrying for warrens, where they would cower helplessly while waiting the coming of a conqueror," said Major General John B. Medaris (ret.), former chief of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Others believe that other moral values are at stake. Said Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath. president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations: "It is the morality of men and affairs which challenges us, not the morality of moles or other underground creatures, slithering in storm cellars."
Partisans on the other side are equally outspoken. They range from Chicago's Syndicated Lovelornist Ann Landers, an all-out advocate of home shelters, to President John Kennedy. Said Kennedy in a July 25 television speech to the nation: "To recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age without our citizens' knowing what they should do and where they should go would be a failure of responsibility." In the coming months, he said, the U.S. Government would undertake to "let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of attack."