That design was one of several offered by a graphic design company in Virginia.īlakeley never thought of his role in the sign's design as a big deal, even though his name was on all the patents. He picked the three yellow triangles in the black circle as it represented the international symbol for radiation. “So, he wanted something simple,” says Smith, ”sturdy something reflective - like a green street sign that you might see driving down the interstate.” “I think he had a sense,” says Smith, “of the chaos and the confusion that might result from a nuclear blast.” The signs - long out of use - can still be found across the country at schools and other buildings designated as public shelters by the government, in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike.īack in 1961, Blakeley was asked by the US Army Corps of Engineers to come up with a design for the new fallout shelter program.īlakeley was “a midlevel bureaucrat in the Army Corps of Engineers,” says Harrison Smith, an obituary writer for The Washington Post.īut he was a Marine veteran and had taken part in some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II and the Korean War. The man responsible for the sign, Robert Blakeley, died on Oct. One of the most chilling symbols of the Cold War has to be the black-and-yellow aluminum sign, indicating a nuclear fallout shelter.
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