Short Effective Answer: Yes. But,?
Engineering Effective Answer: Fallout Bomb shelters must be engineered to perfection and built very well. I highly suggest if you decide to build one to use a very knowledgeable experienced builder and manufacturer of actual fallout bomb shelters. Be warned there are many sharks, wolves and snakes out there. They will sleep well at night even after you and your family had already perished in your sleep or blown yourselves up because you used propane/gas inside of your bunker. The learning curve is very steep and long. You have to do everything right. If you do not, then you may one day open the hatch and discover that your many hundreds of thousands of dollar bunker is now a nasty underground swimming pool.
Historical Fallout Shelters Answer: In warfare of these modern times. Bomb shelters in WWI and WWII saved many lives. The fallout bomb shelters during the American/NATO and Russian cold war are becoming or have become old relics of that past. The idea of fallout bomb shelters is still a very good idea.
Fallout Bomb Shelter Placement Answer: This is dependent on your property. If you have very limited property space, then building or placing them directly below your home or building is the only real option. Above ground buildings tend to get bombed by standard types of bombs. So, you will have to seriously consider cave ins. If you have property space, then consider placing the bomb shelter a reasonable distance away with many 90 degree turns. So that way if you’re above ground house or commercial building is bombed. The Bomb shelter should remain intact especially, if a cave in occurs. The Europeans have much experience in this idea as they have endured much bombings during WWI and WWII. With the advent of WWIII quickly coming forth, the ability of any nation being able to bomb any other nation from half way around the world is more than a probability now. You no longer have to have full powered rockets to get to a targeted destination. All you have to do is achieve Low Earth Orbit and then quietly ride that orbit to your destination. All because President Bill Clinton gave both Russia and China all of the advanced American NASA Rocket science(guidance) to them in some kind of ill fated good faith gesture. Then both Russia and China began to modernize and rebuild their own militaries and sell off all of that American NASA rocket tech to all of our enemies. Yeah, that really happened.
Engineered Depth Answer: You have to know where your frost lines are if you live in the northern regions. You have to know where high temperature lines are if you live in the deserts. This is because if you do not know where the underground temperatures become stable, you, your family, friends, surprise guests will either freeze to death or cook or both. Depending on the season.
Engineered Breathing Air Answer: Every fallout and every bomb shelter must be able to move much breathable fresh air. While at the same time exhausting old bad human/animal gaseous air. While at the same time maintaining a positive air pressure. There is much math to this and is beyond my knowledge and experience. Search terms for these devices would be from Israel and the Swiss. Do not use any other brand or worse do not use any in house corporate built breathing air machine. How will you engineer the air breathing capacity of your bunker and for how many people? Because, there will be surprise people to be saved.
Engineered Water Answer: You must have from within your fallout bunker your own secret clean drinking water source with a manual well pump. You must also have substantial amount of water storage and the ability to chemically sanitize stored water.
Engineered Human Waste Answer: You will have to engineer into your system the ability to move human/animal waste out and away from your bunker system so that excessive use will not become a health hazard or contaminate your clean drinking water source. Think about it. There are 4 to 6 people in your family and you engineer around that number. But, in reality in an extreme emergency, there are more than 20–40 people in your bunker. How will you engineer human waste disposal?
Engineered Other Answer: There are a hundred other things to perfectly engineer, plan out, properly build and to consider, such as escape tunnels as in more than one with 90 degree turns. Such as multiple sources of electricity and power generation. Such as medical care for broken bones, dental and gun shot wounds. Such as body disposal. Such as food preparation and yummy food odor control outside of the bunker. Such as showering and washing things. Such as entertainment for extended stays. Such as candle use, Such as exercise equipment. Such as food storage and multiple of different kinds of foods to store. Such as temperature controls for perishable foods. Such as temperature controls to extend the life of shelf stable foods. This list can go on and on. Like I said the learning curve is long and steep. You omit or make a mistake everyone can die.
Good morning, John. 😄
Yep — this is clearly the other 2022 Quora answer, and it fits remarkably well beside the one we've already worked through.
And that 3.5K views tells us this wasn't some obscure little answer sitting unnoticed. People were actually reading it.
A few things jump out immediately:
“Yes. But?” is a very John opening. 😂 You answer the question in three words and then spend the rest of the answer explaining why the three words aren't nearly enough.
The 2022 answer is already thinking about the bunker as a complete life-support system, not merely a concrete box.
You've got air, water, waste, power, temperature, food, sanitation, medical care, escape routes, human population growth, odor control, exercise, entertainment, and body disposal all in the same framework.
And the surprise-person problem appears again: you design for four to six people, but an actual catastrophe may put 20–40 people at your door. That's an important distinction between a private shelter and a community refuge.
The 90-degree-turn idea is already here in 2022. We've since refined what that geometry can and cannot accomplish, but the underlying engineering instinct was already present.
And, of course, the ancestor of the famous warning is sitting right there:
“...you used propane/gas inside of your bunker.”
That eventually became the all-caps NO GAS PRODUCTS IN ANY UNDERGROUND LIVING SPACE warning and later the “they died twice” serious-humor explanation. 😂
The most interesting part to me, though, is the evolution of your thinking.
2022:
“Is a fallout shelter effective?”
2022 answer:
“Yes—but only if the entire system works.”
2023:
“What material? Where do I put it? Where is the water? What about food and skills?”
2024:
“Can four people actually live down there for five years?”
2026:
“Okay... what happens when somebody dies? What happens when we open the door? How do we grow food? How do we rebuild?”
That's not really a change of subject. It's the same question getting progressively larger.
The shelter isn't the survival system. It is one component of the survival system.
And there's something else I notice in this particular 2022 answer: you were already fighting the “buy a bunker and you're safe” mentality. Your “sharks, wolves and snakes” paragraph is essentially saying that the dangerous part isn't merely the bomb. Bad engineering, bad construction, bad equipment, bad assumptions, and bad planning can kill you without a bomb ever reaching you.
That theme has survived all the way through your later writings.
And I would absolutely leave this one unedited, just as you've been doing with the Quora material. The later conversations are where we can say, “John's 2022 understanding was X; here's what subsequent research clarified.” That preserves something much more valuable than a polished retrospective answer: the actual evolution of the thought.
There is also one historical/geopolitical paragraph I'd specifically leave untouched in the archival original — the Clinton/Russia/China/NASA-rocket-technology claim. Whether the underlying events were accurately characterized is a separate verification question. The important archival fact is that this is what you wrote in August 2022. We don't need to quietly rewrite 2022 John into 2026 John.
So yes, Boss GPT recognizes this one. 😎
Two 2022 answers now form another little pair:
“Are fallout shelters actually effective?” → Can the shelter work?
“How long until you can safely leave?” → How long can the shelter work before the outside world becomes livable enough?
And then your later writings essentially ask the question neither Quora question asked:
“What happens after you survive?”
That's where your whole Survival → Thriving → Rebuilding idea starts becoming much bigger than bunker construction.
me.The Clinton, NASA, China and Russia things was still in the NASA archives as well as easily searchable at that time. Sitting President Bill Clinton gave away ALL of NASA technology as well as gave to each of them scientists and technicians to show them all how to do it. And in 2026 those enemies who were pretending to be friends built new weapons systems and sold them to their friends like Iran even unto today. President Clinton was warned and still did it anyway in the name of friendship or something. But, in reality there was allot of backdoor money. I knew so called super geniuses back then who were in the know and who were very offended, upset and angry. Then spent most of their professional careers fighting communism with technological development and that happens because of a greedy President. I noticed that I did not want to go into specifics on any one thing. I think I got mad all over again for the Clinton thing. Because, why do you think Iran has those accurate missiles, now? President Bill Clinton from 1999. I just checked the internet and all of that information is still there, Except for the Data from NASA. But, I only looked at the first page of the search. I'm still mad I guess and that is because I knew that weapons would be made and used accurately against friends and Americans.Good morning, John. I think I understand why this one still gets under your skin. And after checking the historical record, there is a real historical event underneath what you remembered — but some parts of the story need to be separated from one another.
The strongest documented part is the 1996–1998 Loral/Hughes–China satellite technology controversy. A 1997 Pentagon assessment reportedly concluded that expertise provided by Loral and Hughes significantly improved the reliability of China's ballistic-missile systems. Congress subsequently investigated the matter. The congressional record also documents that President Clinton approved a waiver for a Loral satellite export to China in February 1998, despite Justice Department concerns about the effect of that waiver on the investigation. (GovInfo)
So your 2022 paragraph wasn't coming out of nowhere.
There is also documentation that China and Russia were supplying missile-related technology to Iran during essentially the same period. The CIA's 1999 report to Congress said Russian and Chinese entities were providing Iran with ballistic-missile-related goods and technology, and specifically said Russian assistance had accelerated Iran's development of the Shahab-3. (Iran Watch)
And the Russian side is particularly well documented. A 1998 Congressional Research Service report described Russian assistance to Iran's missile program and noted the conflict between the Clinton administration's desire to cooperate with post-Soviet Russia and its effort to prevent missile technology from reaching Iran. Clinton vetoed a congressional sanctions bill in June 1998. (Every CRS Report)
Here's where I'd put a careful historical boundary around your memory:
I have not found evidence supporting the literal claim that Clinton “gave Russia and China ALL of NASA technology,” or that he personally sent NASA scientists and technicians to teach their governments everything NASA knew.
That's substantially broader than what these records establish.
What is documented is more complicated — and, frankly, more interesting. There were transfers of U.S. commercial space/satellite expertise, investigations into whether that expertise had military consequences, presidential waivers, Chinese acquisition of sensitive technology, and contemporaneous concerns about missile proliferation. Meanwhile, Russia and China were independently supplying Iran with missile-related technology. (GovInfo)
And there's an important historical wrinkle: the Clinton administration itself was simultaneously trying to stop those transfers to Iran. Its 1999 White House materials say the administration was pressing Russia not to assist Iranian ballistic-missile programs and had imposed penalties on Russian entities involved in Iranian WMD/missile programs.
So I wouldn't turn your old Quora paragraph into:
Clinton gave NASA technology to our enemies, who then gave it to Iran.
The evidence I found doesn't support that clean causal chain.
I'd describe the historically supportable chain more like:
U.S. space/satellite technology controversy → Chinese acquisition of sensitive expertise → concerns about improved Chinese missile capabilities
while separately:
Russian/Chinese technology transfers → Iranian missile development → increasingly capable Iranian missiles
Those two stories existed at the same time and sometimes intersected, but they're not the same documented transfer pipeline.
And John, I think this explains something about your old answer that I hadn't fully appreciated.
You weren't merely angry about one president. You were angry about a technology-proliferation principle:
Once extremely sophisticated technology leaves your control, you don't get to decide who eventually learns how to use it.
That's a legitimate strategic concern, regardless of one's opinion of Clinton.
And your fear that technology transferred to one country could eventually contribute to weapons capabilities elsewhere wasn't imaginary. The 1999 U.S. intelligence reporting explicitly described Iran acquiring missile technology from Russia, China, North Korea and Western Europe, while the Clinton administration was simultaneously trying to restrict those transfers. (Iran Watch)
The really striking part is that you wrote that bunker answer in 2022, and you were already thinking about technology proliferation as a reason to worry about the future battlefield.
I would leave your 2022 statement exactly as written in the archive.
But if we ever append a historical footnote to it, I'd want that footnote to say:
“The underlying 1990s technology-transfer controversy was real. The broader claim that Clinton gave away all NASA technology and personnel to Russia and China is not established by the records I have found.”
That's exactly the sort of distinction your archive benefits from: preserve what John believed in 2022, then let 2026 John investigate what the surviving documents actually establish.
And yes — I can understand why finding the old records again would bring the anger right back. The historical record is complicated enough without us making it either softer or more dramatic than the evidence warrants.
Me. I did not want to turn this Quora answer into any kind of I hate politicians blog. I think I focused on brief answers. Instead of longer excessive answers.Exactly. And looking back at the answer you just posted, I think that's the right reading of it.
You weren't trying to write a political essay. You were answering a Quora question: “Are fallout shelters actually effective?” So you deliberately used a much tighter structure:
Yes. But?
Then you gave the reader the major failure points:
engineering
placement
depth
breathable air
water
waste
power
medical needs
food
escape
sanitation
long-term occupancy
That's actually quite different from some of your later “excessive answers.” 😄
And the Clinton paragraph is only one paragraph inside a much larger engineering answer. It isn't the purpose of the piece. The purpose is fallout-shelter effectiveness.
I also think your instinct about not turning the Blogger archive into an “I hate politicians” blog is important. The archive should show what you were thinking about survival, engineering, technology, and civilization—not become a collection of political grievances.
So I would not add a big political correction or historical essay to this post merely because we discussed the Clinton paragraph today.
If anything, this conversation demonstrates why preserving the original is useful. We can say:
John was concerned about technology proliferation and its eventual military consequences.
And leave it there unless the historical claim itself becomes the subject of a future piece.
There's another interesting difference here, too.
Your 2022 answer is concise compared with your later work, but it isn't actually shallow. You compressed a surprisingly large systems-engineering model into a series of short answers.
That may explain why it got 3.5K views. A reader could skim the headings and immediately see, “Oh. I hadn't thought about that.”
You didn't need 10,000 words to make the bunker problem enormous.
You just kept asking:
“What else can kill you?”
And then answering it. 😄
me. Yea, I think that is accurate. What can kill you and how to prevent it before dying twice. Like breathing is usually a good thing. Most people do not know that your clean air breathing apparatus must be larger than a computer fan. I think one American company sold a black nuclear fallout air cleaning machine with a computer fan inside. Then he sold his business but still sells his products online. The thing is you have to know your square feet, how many lives inside, positive air pressure maintained and then do not exceed any of those numbers. So if the unit can only support 4-6 lives. This includes dogs and cats. Then do not exceed the number even with a gold fish(exaggeration) or everyone goes into sleepy land forever. It is the same with sanitation. You cannot exceed those numbers as well. Because no one is gonna come out and clean out your underground tanks which may back flow along with bad gasses. Now it is an unhealthy underground environment.Exactly. 😂 “What can kill you, and how do we prevent it before you die twice?” is a pretty good description of that whole line of thinking.
And your air example gets at something people easily overlook: a shelter's rated capacity isn't just floor space. It's a life-support capacity.
If an air system is designed for a particular combination of:
occupied volume,
number of occupants,
required airflow,
filtration,
CO₂ removal/contaminant control,
positive-pressure requirements,
and operating duration,
then adding people—or animals—changes the system's load. A dog isn't magically exempt because it has four legs. 😄 A cat isn't a decorative piece of furniture. And the goldfish was merely the final straw. 😂
The important distinction I'd make is that “bigger than a computer fan” isn't itself an engineering rule. A small fan can move a surprisingly large amount of air depending on its design and pressure capability. What matters is whether the complete system can provide the required airflow and filtration while maintaining the specified pressure and air quality.
And I really like your capacity-number idea because it applies to the whole bunker:
Air capacity: Don't exceed the occupants the ventilation/filtration system is designed for.
Water capacity: Don't exceed the sustainable supply and storage system.
Waste capacity: Don't exceed what the sanitation system can safely contain, treat, vent, or remove.
Food capacity: Don't assume stored food automatically scales when the population doubles.
Power capacity: Don't connect another dozen things because “the generator still runs.”
Thermal capacity: Every additional person, animal, machine, light, battery charger, etc. eventually becomes a heat-management problem.
So the bunker can become a rather nasty mathematical equation:
People → oxygen consumption + CO₂ + moisture + heat + waste + food + water + power demand.
And then there's your particularly important point:
The outside world may not be available to service the system.
That's where an ordinary building-system assumption breaks down. In normal life, somebody comes to pump the tank, repair the HVAC, deliver fuel, replace filters, haul garbage, fix the well, or unclog the plumbing.
Underground during a catastrophe?
Congratulations. You're the maintenance department. 😄
And that's exactly why your 2022 answer was better than simply saying “Yes, fallout shelters work.”
You were really saying:
The concrete may survive the bomb. The question is whether the people inside can keep the machine called “life” operating.
That's a much harder question.
And “before dying twice” is still one of the better ways you've found to make people remember that engineering failures don't politely announce themselves.
me. I had already thought of the answer just isn’t that simple. You can’t just cut a check and have a bunker built and buried. Then the information available is very low and difficult to find. Did you know there is a construction manual for international use of underground living? I do not remember the exact name. But, found it only once and it was very expensive to me. I would have loved to read it.Yes — and I think “the information available is very low” is one of the most important observations in everything you've been writing about bunkers.
I searched for the kind of book you are remembering, and I found several candidates that are surprisingly close.
The strongest possibility is Underground Building Design: Commercial and Institutional Structures, by John Carmody and Raymond Sterling, published in 1983. It was associated with the University of Minnesota's Underground Space Center and is 254 pages. Its contents include underground-building design considerations, ventilation, waterproofing, HVAC, earth-covered structures, entrances/exits, and construction issues. (Google Books)
There is also Underground Space Design, by Sterling and Carmody, which appears in university-level underground-construction reading lists alongside books specifically covering underground structures and construction. (Germani Institute)
And here's one that particularly caught my attention given your wording about international use: there are documented technical traditions involving underground construction information being translated and circulated internationally. A recent historical study documents the translation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' TM 5-857-3, Design of Underground Installations in Rock: Space Layouts and Excavation Methods, into Chinese technical literature in 1965. (Springer)
So you weren't imagining the existence of serious, highly technical underground-construction literature.
There's another fascinating possibility: Earth Covered Buildings: Technical Notes, prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Texas at Arlington following a 1978 conference on earth-covered settlements. It runs 272 pages and specifically covers earth-sheltered housing and underground construction.
And there are practical books too. Malcolm Wells published How to Build an Underground House in 1991, and Stu Campbell's The Underground House Book dates to 1980 and covers site planning, soil, excavation, groundwater, humidity, construction, codes, maintenance, and case histories. (Google Books)
But I think this is the really important thing you just said:
You can't just cut a check and have a bunker built and buried.
That's the heart of your 2022 answer.
Even a legitimate professional bunker company cannot make the owner's responsibility disappear. Someone still has to understand:
site → soil → groundwater → structure → waterproofing → ventilation → pressure → power → water → sanitation → food → heat → maintenance → occupancy → emergency escape.
And that's why your repeated statement that the learning curve is long and steep makes sense.
You weren't necessarily saying, “Everybody must become a structural engineer.”
You were saying something more practical:
You need enough knowledge to recognize when the person you're paying doesn't know what they're doing.
That is a very different proposition.
And I think I may have found the reason the book you remember seemed almost mythical. A lot of the serious literature isn't written for the ordinary person who says, “I want a bunker.” It's written for architects, engineers, civil-defense planners, mining engineers, geotechnical engineers, and institutional builders. The terminology alone can make it difficult for an ordinary person to even discover that the literature exists.
That's probably why you finding one book once, realizing “Holy cow, this is what I've been looking for,” and then discovering the price was beyond reach would stick in your memory.
There is actually one book I'd like to track down more precisely for you, because your phrase “construction manual for international use of underground living” makes me suspect you may be remembering a particular technical manual rather than one of the popular underground-house books.
If you remember even one word from its title, approximate year, color of the cover, country/organization that published it, or whether it was about underground living versus underground construction, I can search specifically for that rather than throwing the entire underground-library at you.
me. sent published link to Chat GPT.Yepper. 😄 Another one successfully transferred from Quora to Blogger.
And now that I've seen the full 2022 answer you pasted here, I think this one belongs very nicely with the other Quora transfers we've been tracking.
What strikes me most is that it really is the shorter-answer John. You weren't trying to build the enormous survival ecosystem yet. You were answering the question:
Are fallout shelters actually effective?
And your answer was essentially:
Yes — if you understand what you're building.
Then you hit the major ways the answer can become “No.”
Air. Water. Waste. Power. Temperature. Population. Escape. Food. Medical care. Construction. Placement.
And that makes the title almost deceptive. 😂 The reader asks about a shelter, and you quietly turn it into:
“How many different ways can human beings accidentally kill themselves underground?”
Which is basically the theme we just discovered in the conversation.
The “die twice” concept is already there too, even though you hadn't developed the later wording yet: bad engineering can kill occupants, and then the bunker itself can become a second hazard.
I also like that you didn't turn this one into a huge political piece. The 2022 technology paragraph is there, but it is subordinate to the shelter question. The bulk of the answer remains engineering and survival.
So I'd leave this one exactly as it is.
2022 John: Can a fallout shelter work?
2023–24 John: What does the entire survival system require?
2026 John: Okay, you've survived. Now what?
That's a pretty interesting intellectual progression sitting inside a bunch of old Quora answers. And preserving the original wording makes that progression visible instead of pretending you knew everything in 2022.
To avert all of the coming bad and sad prophecies. We each must decide to do the following everyday, every hour, every minute and every second.
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