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As part of a campaign to reduce the United States' vulnerability to nuclear
attack, President Kennedy advised Americans to build fallout shelters.
President Kennedy's letter in the September issue of Life
magazine set off a wave of "shelter mania" which lasted for about a year.
At this time, the Soviet Union also unexpectedly exploded the largest nuclear
device in history, equal to 57 million tons of TNT. The Soviet Union had
voluntarily stopped testing nuclear devices three years before, and Khrushchev
had assured President Kennedy in June 1961 that the Soviet Union wouldn't test
nuclear devices if the United States didn't.
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