Fifty years of heritage (edition 7) Published March 17, 2011 By Eric M. White 910 AW/PA YOUNGSTOWN AIR RESERVE STATION, Ohio -- Each Thursday in 2011, the 910th AW/PA office will republish a historic article or highlight from the archive along with a brief commentary. In the case of articles, we will publish exact copies of the originals, so any grammatical or typographical errors are intentional reproductions. Each week will feature a different year in Youngstown Air Reserve Station (YARS) history, beginning with 1957 and ending with 2007. Editor's note: The next several heritage pieces will feature Cold War related articles from our 1961 collection. We are missing but searching for base magazines dated 1962-1966. The following article from the October 1961 Blue Tiger Rag is a continuation of heritage piece 6 and will be published in three installments. The article discusses Cold War civil defense strategies of the Soviet Union. WHAT IS RUSSIA DOING ABOUT CIVIL DEFENSE (part 2) Some Soviet leaders have indicated that the Soviet Union intends to make extensive use of subways as shelters. There are subways in operation in Moscow and Leningrad. This year the Kiev subway will begin operations. These subway systems are fairly deep. The Moscow one could shelter, on lower platforms or tunnels, from one to two million persons or twenty to forty percent of the city's inhabitants. The Soviet basement shelter is a special area of the basement of an apartment house of public building designed to meet criteria specifications. It has a roof of reinforced concrete supported by steel or reinforced concrete beams, capable of withstanding the collapse of the building above, is fireproof, completely underground and capable of being hermetically sealed. Its basic equipment includes airtight double metal doors of the bulkhead type, a filter ventilation unit, one or more emergency tunnels, toilets, water, heating, telephones, and possibly bottled oxygen. Depending on the building, it may occupy the entire basement or only part of it. It is divided by interior walls into compartments. The recommended capacity of such a shelter is 100 to 150 persons. It may be designed to withstand between 10 pounds pressure per square inch and 100 pounds pressure per square inch. According to Soviet manuals, such a shelter would be expected to survive the blast "at some distance" from ground zero. In addition, Russian publications speak of field and emergency shelters, mostly of the fallout type and usually less permanent. They are to be built by the population when the Soviet Government announces a "threatening situation" alert. These would consist of various types of earth-covered trenches, dugouts, galleries, or tunnels in mountain sides. Their walls would be made of precast concrete, wood metal sheeting, or other handy materials. These shelters are to be built in both cities and rural areas, but especially the latter. They would hold from 25 or 60 persons; perhaps have heating and a simple ventilation system but not running water. They may or may not have metal doors. For the most part, they do no appear to be designed for long-term occupancy. Shelters cannot be hermetically sealed; the people using them are instructed to wear their gas masks during an attack. One-family shelters of a similar sort may also be built in suburbs at the cost of the families concerned. Russian publications also have stressed the use of gas masks, protective clothing, and chemical warfare decontamination kits. No such equipment has been issues to the general public, but there has been wide training in their uses.