I headed to a nondescript backyard in the San Fernando Valley to meet DJ Walt, a child of the Cold War and one of Southern California's most perceptive chroniclers.

So there is so much Cold War history hiding in plain sight across Southern California.

Unless you were invited in this backyard for a barbecue, you would never know that there is a fallout shelter in this backyard.

You would not know that.

In fact, you probably want to keep that information away from your neighbors because you never know where you have to keep them out of your bomb shelter.

That's right.

You know, here we are in a fairly ordinary part of the San Fernando Valley.

And here in this backyard, I don't side the back door of this house.

Is this a fallout shelter?

Yeah.

What that says to me, Nathan, is that the Cold War was not fought on the battlefield thousands of miles away.

It was fought in your backyard and in your kitchen and in your parent's bedroom, in your brother's high school classroom.

And here is ground zero for one warrior's attempt to beat the odds in the face of nuclear holocaust.

Now, we've looked at these plans curiously.

This bunker, this shelter is not on any of the plans.

We can find even ones up to the 1990s.

And this is might be the original landscape plan.

Exactly.

What is your theory as to why it wouldn't appear on the plans?

I'm speculating, and it's pure speculation.

Right away.

That this particular fallout shelter not at all like what someone might build from plans found in Popular Mechanics, was clearly designed to be a hardened space to protect this family.

Well, I'm mean, but I'm going to take a look inside.

I'll go.

Let me let me open this here.

And.

Well.

That's heavy.

That is not built out of aluminum.

That's got to be steel.

Solid steel.

Are you going to join me.

Or, Not for me, sir.

Okay.

I guess I just carefully step in here.

Imagine the, cartel raid sirens are blowing, you know?

I mean, don't take your shot.

Right.

The ICBMs are only 12 minutes away.

Wow.

All right.

This shelter is a real good idea.

If we should ever have a nuclear war, we could get a heavy fallout.

Even though we were not anywhere near the target area.

What did you see down there?

Well, there's an antechamber.

There's a wine rack.

And then there's a big steel door that opens into, I guess, what's the main shelter with four beds.

Bunk.

Two bunk beds.

There's a toilet seat, some pipes, including, you know, these that are sticking out.

They must be connected to what's sticking out of the ground here.

But, I mean, more importantly than what I saw, sort of what I felt.

Was.

Horrible.

It's eerie.

Just the thought of spending months down there haunts me.

You know, the terrible psychological isolation and not knowing what was going on up here.

Because all you might have is a Am radio.

Who knows if that even would receive through these thick concrete walls.

You might be cut off from all news until you open this hatch and looked out and saw what a sea of ash.

These were built not necessarily to survive a direct blast.

This is designed to keep your family safe in the hours and days and weeks after the bombs have fallen.

And presumably, you'd have supplies stocked down there.

That would be the game plan.

But again, how livable is this space as well?

Design as it might be?

Yeah.

You know, growing up in the Los Angeles area, I felt the Cold War in my gut.

The air raid sirens that went off the ducking covered drills under my elementary school desk.

TV programs like Twilight Zone that portrayed the effects of a nuclear war, and the fact that I had buddies and friends from high school whose fathers might have worked in defense industries where they could never tell their family what they did or what they made, or how it worked.

The veil of secrecy covered so much of our lives that I tend to think the Cold War turned the entire nation into a continent sized area.

51 secret, locked down space where things that couldn't be spoken about had to be done.

But despite this veil of secrecy, you had a pretty good sense.

Why Southern California would be such a prime target for a Soviet nuclear strike.

You saw the fact of that.

Every Sunday, L.A. times, the ads for workers at Convair and in Northrop and North American and Douglas, the list goes on of the important defense contractors clustered here, literally right around us here and in Northridge.

I had every reason to know living where I did between downtown L.A. and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, that I was pretty near somebodies ground zero.

What a terrifying thought for a boy to behold.

If you had your eye on what was going on around you, if you read the newspaper, which I did.

You knew the risks.

You knew the risks of a small crisis turning into a big crisis, turning into an all out war.

Decades after the end of the Cold War.

This still conjures up some some thoughts or feelings.

It brings up fears that I had as a child.

It brings up a certain degree of anger I had as a as a young adult.

Recognizing that some people were more worthy than other people to survive the war.

It saddens me, too, to think that someone invested so much in this thing.

But it also maybe hardens me a little bit.

Never used.

Never used.

So maybe mutually assured destruction.

Maybe the balance of terror, as immoral as it is, as immoral as it was.

How do you use.

After our visit, we uncovered the original building permit for the shelter, revealing its owner, Billy Pelton, an Air Force captain and Western Airlines pilot.

His son, Richard remembers that he had ties to aerospace giant Lockheed.

And as it turns out, Pelton didn't have to worry about his neighbor discovering the bunker because it was engineered by the man next door who'd built a shelter of his own.