The fallout shelter, which is primarily an icon from 1950s (the Atomic Age) was used to protect people from the radiation expelled from a nuclear explosion. One of the first literary mentions of a fallout shelter was in Farmham’s Freehold by American Author Robert Heinlen who built a fairly extensive shelter for himself in the Colorado desert. The book, published in 1984 followed the adventures of a family living in a shelter and detailed very specificially the details of building one.
Rod Serling once presented a very famous Twilight Zone episode that featured one man building a fall out shelter. His neighbors make fun of him but when the big one hits they all want in the shelter and there is not quite enough room. The cartoon series “The Simpson’s” also did a parody of this Twilight Zone episode from the sixties. This episode was called Bart’s Comet and featured a comet hurling towards earth. Ned Flanders builds a shelter and lets everyone in, with the end result that he must leave the shelter so that others may live.
In A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apolalyptic science fiction novel by Walter M. Miller, Jr. published in 1960 survivors hid in a Catholic desert in a California monastery and form a cult of monks devoted to preserving the surviving pieces of man’s history and knowledge.
In 1984 a very scary docudrama called Threads – Nuclear War depicts what happens after people retreat to a bomb shelter and then emerge back into the world later. It depicts people dying, mutating and banging old canned goods with rocks to open them so they can eat food.
One very odd film but very popular film about fallout shelters was Blast From the Past. This was a romantic comedy about a nuclear scientist and his wife and son who enter their shelter curing the 1962 missile crisis and do not emerge until 1997.
For the past six years gamers have been playing the Fallout series of computer games that depict civilization living in underground vaults to protect itself against an atomic blast.
Bomb shelters have also been featured prominently in literature. In the book Metro 2033 by Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, survivors of a nuclear blast make do in shelters made from underground subway systems in Saint-Petersberg and Moscow.
In the 2006 movie The Road (based on a book by Cormac McCarthey, survivors of a nuclear cataclysm end up finding food to survive in an abandoned bomb shelter; even if you do not survive a nuclear blast it is always a good idea to keep the larders of the shelter well-stocked for starving survivors who may stumble upon your stash!