In 1959, Melvin and Maria Mininson spent their two-week honeymoon in a backyard bomb shelter in Miami, Florida. As Gerald DeGroot writes,
The stunt [was] organized by the Miami firm Bomb Shelters, Inc…. Photos showed the couple collecting the items they intended to take into the shelter and kissing as they entered. A fortnight later they emerged, bleary eyed but satisfied that both their marriage and the idea of survival had been consummated.[1]
Life Magazine reported on the Mininsons’ honeymoon in their August 10, 1959 issue. (See images below.) Discuss this article in relation to Elaine Tyler May’s essay, “Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth.”
- Gerald DeGroot, The Bomb: A History of Hell on Earth (London: Pimlico Press, 2004), 284.
It might be a little flippant to compare the possibility of nuclear warfare with the stresses of maintaining a marriage, or the appearance of one, but the two certainly seem to have similar connotations, if this article is anything to go by. In her essay, May draws attention to the feelings of many young wedded couples that marriage has been a sacrifice in many ways and a source of fulfillment in others, and though it is not central to her point, she also mentions how one could see nuclear power as a similar trade-off; it won the war for the U.S., and created new possibilities in the field of energy generation, but it also threatened destruction. So combining into a single action the entrance into a marriage and the entrance into a bomb shelter makes the connection between the two more literal. In both, the participants have to stick to a small set of actions, each of which must be taken with the health of the entire group in mind. In a marriage, it may not always be possible to meet the societal expectation of a breadwinner/housewife dynamic if the couple are poor, and it might not be possible to set aside the time and effort for a bomb shelter in that situation. As with marriage, protection from nuclear war has high expectations to be met, and not everybody can meet them.