1961 ... N.E.A.R.







National Emergency Alarm Repeater

... by 1961 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles can strike the US with less than 30 minutes warning. Civil Defense planners are looking for an efficient, no-brainer, way to alert the population to take shelter NOW! With the H-Bomb being the weapon of choice, and the resulting fallout levels being multiplied many times from olf fashioned, has-been A-Bombs: the what to do and where to go of population protection is becoming critical. 



 

1 comment:

sitarswami said...

In the mid-1970s a friend of mine was an electrical engineering student at UW-Madison and worked in one of the labs part-time. He found a storeroom of NEAR receivers (there were at least three varieties in the storeroom) and smuggled a few out. We did set one off and the noise was a terribly loud clacking. My version is the one pictured in Wikipedia. I had it plugged into an outlet for several years before I came home from work one day, smelt the remains of an eletrical fire & found the receiver on its side. Outwardly the receiver was fine, but the insides were fused. It's now an attractive bookend.