When I was a kid back in the early ’60s, I had mixed feelings about the fact that my dad clearly was not going to build us a fallout shelter. The reason he wasn’t was because we, meaning my folks, were among the majority of Canadians who were convinced that a bomb shelter wouldn’t do a lick of good in the event that some fool, or some fool’s robot, pushed the button.

On the other hand, it almost goes without saying, having a bunker would have been Way Cool.

I’ve written before about the big, grey tower in the playground of Wrigglesworth Public School that had an air-raid siren on top of it, which occasionally bawled for awhile during pre-advertised tests. This was the school next to mine, but actually closer to where I lived. It was reassuring at the time, but it just seems stupid today, and it’s annoying now too because it made us look stupid, believing all that politically generated guff.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has a quaint film from its 1960s archives on the Web, all bright-eyed kids “preparing to save the country from nuclear disaster”, as the narrator earnestly explained. They’d been selected from across the country for a trip to fabulous Arnprior, Ontario, to learn the basics of civil defence – Geiger counters, first aid, search and rescue tools, the works.

The same archive page has the McCallum family, who spent a week in a fallout shelter at the CBC’s invitation, to emerge, “relieved but tired”, to the scowls of assembled anti-bomb protesters. There’s also a clip on the just-plain-crazy Diefenbunker, built for then-prime minister John Diefenbaker and his Cabinet just outside Ottawa. There’s a website for this too, but it’s not much better thought out than the bunker was.

Run past Parliament as an army signals facility, the $20-million hide-out was part of a “Continuity of Government program”, but no one was supposed to know that 500 elected officials and civil servants would be cowering there while the electorate fried like bacon.

Unfortunately for national security, a journalist flew over the site and counted 78 toilets still in their packing cases. The signals facility was only supposed to have a staff of 150. It was Canada’s first radioactive leak.

The Diefenbunker wasn’t decommissioned until 1994, once Canadian officials had been to Berlin to make absolutely sure than the Wall had come down and the Soviets had indeed retired from active threat duty, like it said in all the newspapers. The local municipality bought the bunker and turned it into a tourist attraction. And there’s a baseball diamond – above ground, of course.

From 1961 the CBC website has a short piece on Tocsin B, a simulated attack coordinated by the Emergency Measures Organisation and broadcast nationwide. “Tocsin” is a native word for an alarm, which they used to sound by hammering on hollow hills, but if you ever visited Dali House you’d know that.

You have to love the attack simulations they concocted: Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Niagara Falls were completely destroyed – 2.5 million people dead, including Diefenbaker, killed in his lame fallout shelter.

Government officials and politicians were pleased with the exercise. Some citizens complained that their air-raid siren didn’t go off, others that theirs went off and just kept on going.

Fallout shelters were just too expensive anyway, so most Canadians just went out and got some beer cause Saturday was coming up – you know, Hockey Night in Canada, eh? Eventually the government got fed up too and asked what the score was.

A Canada Emergency Measures Organisation manual called “11 Steps to Survival” said fallout shelters ought to be be stocked with 14 days’ worth of food, including two jars of cheese, 14 cans of milk, 14 individual packages of cereal, two cans of meat, chewing gum, two packages of cookies, two cans baked beans and two pounds of hard candy. Fourteen days – that’s planning!

Switzerland apparently went nuts, with an huge network of fallout shelters. They toughened up their government buildings and schools and ensured enough food for everyone for two years.

In Canada we never had any of the “duck & cover” drills that those lucky American schoolkids had while Dwight Dubya Eisenhower was in charge. (Eisenhower and Diefenbaker: two stout German names.)

But fewer than 200,000 home shelters were built across the United Snakes. Americans were counting on public shelters, and many a church basement was packed with rations and sandbags, and eyes turned to the massive grain silos in the Midwest, one of which they calculated could hold 8,000 people (assuming it wasn’t full of grain).

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency came out with a brochure, not back in those glowing atomic days, but in 1984, that outlined a number of “pre-attack” defensive measures, thus offering the reassurance of advanced warning.

It said, “If a nuclear explosion occurs, immediately check for burning materials throughout the building. Stamp out smouldering curtains. Throw out smouldering furniture. Then return to the shelter area in the building.”

Wait, you forgot! “If a weapon detonates nearby, turn off controls for gas to prevent possible fires.”

Now get to the shelter and stay there “several days to two weeks”, until the radiation has decreased to an acceptable level. That should give you plenty of time to run an election and set up a hierarchy of managers to take care of ventilation, sanitation, law and order and monitoring the radiation outside – presumably someone willing to stick his head out the door every morning.

That was 1984 (somebody had been reading Orwell), and a scrounge around the Internet turns up plenty of folks still sitting in the dark with their knees knocking.

You can get fallout-shelter brochures from AlpineSurvival.com, and army rations too. Their “Smartroom” utilises steel walls, “tri-filter biochemical nuclear filtration” and a “biolet self-composting toilet”, though its hexagonal components (the survival trick is in the geometry, apparently) don’t look much bigger than a good-sized shower. But then Smartroom isn’t just for the nuclear holocaust. The brochure actually includes bird flu among the threats from which this baby will protect you.

Bruce Beach’s “You Will Survive Doomsday” booklet is not so much exhaustive as exhausting, using up an inordinate amount of the world’s word supply in dispelling 23 myths about what happens in a major nuclear attack and what you can do about it if you aren’t actually incinerated.

In its good-news-bad-news manifesto, “our nuclear survival group”, as Beach calls his friends, scoffs at the following notions: Most people would be quickly killed by the blasts, thermal radiation or radioactivity; you can build an adequate shelter in your basement; radiation sickness is not contagious so there’s no danger helping the afflicted; there is no such thing as a fallout pill; there would be dangerous radioactivity for thousands of years; and life after doomsday won’t be worth living.

Myths or not, this is not good bedtime reading. Nor is SurvivalBlog.com, which is mostly about guns – ammunition handloading basics, long-term underground storage of guns, etc – but it does have a lot of things everybody needs to know, like what SHTF stands for: Schumer Hits the Fan, and, no, I didn’t stick around long enough to find out who Schumer is.