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.
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.
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