A place to go for shelter from the bombs of bombing in times of war. In the 50s, in the United States, bomb shelters were a growth industry, due to the widespread belief that Nuclear War was possibly nigh; they were stocked with survival gear and rations for The Day After the Russkies dropped the H-Bomb on your patch of suburbia. There was a "socialist" version: public fallout shelters in cities. Shelters never got much use; the Cuban Missile Crisis was as close as Fear got.