The Machine Gun at the Hatch

Thomas Merton, the shelter ethic, and a world told to stockpile

In the summer of 1961, a man in a Chicago suburb was digging a hole in his yard. On 25 July, President John F. Kennedy had gone on national television to talk about Berlin, about fallout, and about what an ordinary family could do to survive a nuclear war. The man had listened. He was building a shelter, stocking it, and planning for the one problem the civil defense pamphlets left out: his neighbors.

He told a reporter what he would do once the concrete set. He would “mount a machine gun at the hatch to keep the neighbors out.” Time printed the line on 18 August 1961, in a story headlined “Gun Thy Neighbor?” A Texas businessman in the same piece said he kept a tear-gas gun for anyone who reached his shelter before his family did.

Six weeks later, on 30 September 1961, a Jesuit answered. L. C. McHugh, SJ, a former ethics professor at Georgetown University, argued in America that a family that built a shelter held the first right to it, and that the traditional principles of self-defense allowed the owner to hold the door. To say a Christian must force a family into the fallout for the sake of a pleading neighbor was, he wrote, “the height of nonsense.“

The country argued for months. Billy Graham objected. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recounts in A Thousand Days that, inside the Kennedy White House, Robert F. Kennedy dismissed the whole public-shelter problem with a joke: the government could simply “station Father McHugh with a machine gun at every shelter.“

In Kentucky, a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani was already writing. In October 1961, The Catholic Worker printed Thomas Merton’s “The Root of War.” In November, it printed his reply to the shelter debate, “The Shelter Ethic,” later reissued as “The Machine Gun in the Fallout Shelter.” Merton refused the logic of every family for itself. He named what sat underneath the machine gun, and it was not prudence.

“At the root of all war is fear.“

Sixty-five years later, to the day, the hatch is back.

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Sixty-Five Years to the Day

On 30 September 2026, at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Pete Hegseth announced FORTRESS, short for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability. The initiative requires military installations in the United States to operate for at least 90 days without civilian power, fuel, water, or supply lines. He called it “a national insurance policy for the American homeland.“

The civilian version arrived in the same season. Newsweek recently mapped the governments now telling their citizens to keep emergency supplies at home, citing war, extreme weather, and cybersecurity threats. The map covers thirty-three countries, from the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and Poland to Japan, Taiwan, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia. France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Mexico, and the Netherlands ask for 72 hours of supplies. Sweden and Norway ask for about a week. Germany asks for up to ten days. The kit barely changes from country to country: non-perishable food, water, medicine, batteries, a flashlight, a radio.

Nobody is mounting machine guns. The governments are asking for soup and batteries. Yet the shape of 1961 is visible again: a public told, in effect, to prepare privately for a catastrophe that only public decisions can prevent.

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The Case for the Pantry

The strongest defense of preparedness deserves a full hearing, because it is a good one.

In the first days after a flood, a cyclone, or a grid failure, help arrives slowly. A household with water and food on the shelf does not compete with the elderly neighbor, the hospital patient, or the family with nothing for first responders’ attention. Every stocked pantry frees a rescuer for someone who could not stock one. Sweden builds its whole tradition of total defense on this idea: preparedness as a civic duty owed to others, not a private hoard. A can of beans is not a machine gun.

Merton would not have refused the water jug. The question he raised was never whether to keep supplies. It was what keeping them does to us, and what we stop doing while we keep them.

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The War with No Sound

In 1961, the threat came from the sky. People could picture it: the flash, the cloud, the fallout drifting downwind. The threat that most worries planners now makes no sound at all.

Hegseth’s own rationale for FORTRESS was that an adversary might take down the grid by cyberattack or sabotage. The same networks that move our paychecks, run our water treatment, schedule our surgeries, and deliver our groceries are now a battlefield. War and emerging technology are no longer separate subjects. A conflict can begin in a server room and end in a dark hospital, with no shot fired and no front line to point to.

And the list on the Newsweek map says it all. War sits beside extreme weather. Famine is not on the map, but it is on the planet. War, famine, and ecological destruction are not three crises but one: a human order that has forgotten its dependence on the earth and on one another.

Merton saw this coming. In October 1964, he read Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and filled his notebooks with it. He worried less about any single machine than about a society that builds its tools faster than it can think about what they are for.

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The Root

Fear is a teacher, and it teaches one lesson well: the neighbor is a threat. The man in the Chicago suburb did not hate his neighbors. He was afraid, and fear did the rest.

Merton pressed further. In chapter 14 of New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton writes that the fear at the root of war is “not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything.” Read the stockpile list again with that line in mind: food, water, medicine, light, a voice on the radio. It is a list of everything we fear losing. And Merton did not stop at the neighbor. The danger, he wrote, lies also in our hatred of ourselves.

The stockpile does not have to become the shelter ethic. It can, though, and quietly. My household. My 72 hours. My door. A family living paycheck to paycheck cannot buy ten days of food. A country where hunger is a season rather than a scenario does not appear on a map of nations advising their citizens to stock up. Preparedness, left to itself, follows wealth.

Merton’s answer was not to stop preparing. It was to refuse to permit fear to decide who counts.

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Ten Questions for the Shelter Door

Read the Newsweek map with Merton beside you, then sit with these. They work as well around a classroom or family table as they do alone.

1. Fear. When governments tell us to prepare for war, does that preparation calm our fear, or quietly build it up?
2. Acceptance. Is a stocked pantry an act of prudence, or a small, private way of accepting that war is coming?
3. Peace. If whole nations are preparing for catastrophe, who is working just as hard to prevent it?
4. The neighbor. If I have ten days of food and my neighbor has none, what does my preparedness mean?
5. Community. Do we prepare as households or as communities, and which does the advice assume?
6. Cost. Who can afford ten days of supplies, or three? Who is left off the map entirely?
7. The front line. If a cyberattack can shut down power, water, and payments without a shot fired, where does war now begin, and who are its combatants?
8. The invisible. Why do we find bombs easier to imagine than the silent failure of the systems we depend on every day?
9. The planet. Are war and extreme weather separate threats, or two faces of one broken relationship with the earth?
10. The interior. What would spiritual preparedness look like, besides the canned soup and the radio?

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Back at the Hatch

Nobody knows whether the man in the Chicago suburb ever finished his shelter. Most Americans never built one. A 1961 Gallup poll found that 93 percent had no plans to, and within a few years, hundreds of shelter companies went bankrupt. (On a side note, if you grew up in Michigan City, Indiana, in the 1960s and went ice skating, you saw one of these shelters.) The machine gun, as far as anyone knows, never fired.

The question he asked has outlived him. It stands at every pantry shelf, every border, every firewall: who gets in?

Merton answered it in 1961. The neighbor does.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

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Sources

• “Religion: Gun Thy Neighbor?” Time, 18 August 1961.
• L. C. McHugh, SJ, “Ethics at the Shelter Doorway,” America, 30 September 1961; republished by America on 5 April 2019.
• James T. Keane, Catholic Book Club column on McHugh and the fallout shelter, America, 8 August 2023, citing Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
• Thomas Merton, “The Root of War,” The Catholic Worker, October 1961, and “The Shelter Ethic,” The Catholic Worker, November 1961. Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.
• Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961), chapter 14, “The Root of War Is Fear.” The same passage appeared in The Catholic Worker in October 1961.
• National Park Service, “Kennedy, Rockefeller, and Civil Defense” (1961 Gallup figures and shelter-industry decline).
• “Map Shows Countries Urging Residents to Stockpile Food,” Newsweek, updated 29 October 2026.
• Reporting on the FORTRESS initiative announced 30 September 2026: The Daily Wire, The Hill, NewsNation, and Snopes.