Pulowski Preservation shelter

Pulowski Preservation Shelters are coin-operated, one-person fallout shelters found on street corners throughout the more urban areas of the Capital Wasteland. People would ostensibly use them as a last-minute resort in the event of a nuclear attack; however, they have no food or water supplies and may not even have had recyclable air, so the customer would have to bring with them anything they thought they would need for survival (and due to the last-minute nature of the booth, most people did not bring very much with them to begin with). The instructions on the inside tell the occupant to "Wait for the radiation levels to drop. Enjoy your stay." before leaving.

The booths were obviously better at placating fears (when first funded) than ensuring survival - almost every one found within the game contains a charred skeleton and a few items that the person brought in with them. One even contains a Protectron robot that decided to claim it for itself, but even its fission batteries ran out before the landscape was relatively safe, 200 years later.

Though they're terrible for protecting people from nuclear attack, the preservation shelters are at least useful for hiding from enemies; at least one NPC (Bryan Wilks in "Those!") is well-protected by a Pulowski Shelter, and the player may also use them to hide, at least temporarily.

They may not stop all small arms fire, seeing as how the a friendly NPC Rory McLaren is sealed in one in Paradise Falls (The Box), and he can still be killed if the town goes hostile towards the player. McLaren's death may be a triggered event rather than the result of weapons fire, however.

There is a Shelter near Georgetown where you can test their usefulness; it is surrounded by cars and other destructibles. Blowing up a car there starts a chain reaction, doing tremendous damage to the few super mutants in the area and killing you if you stay close. Going in the shelter, however, will save your life, though you will suffer damage and even radiation from the blast. Perhaps the level of safety and comfort of the Pulowski Preservation Shelters is best illustrated by how the one in Paradise Falls is used as The Box. Whether due to slavers or radiation, hope against hope you never need one to survive.

If you want to test something out, stick as many people as possbile into one of these and set a grenade to go off as you close the door.

Out of context, such devices would never work in reality. These have been advertised in the same light as 1950s survival products and other risible nuclear survival methods like the questionable "Duck and Cover" tutorial. Judging by the thickness of these shelters, they would easily stop Alpha and Beta radiation, but would not stop all external Gamma radiation. Even if they were perfect radiation and explosive shelters at Ground Zero of a blast, they have no apparent food, water, or air provisions to ride out the days or centuries after the blast, until radiation returned to acceptable levels. Perhaps they should have been seen as simple explosive blast shelters, with the occupant fleeing immediately after bombs fell (in the hope that the intense heat did not bake the occupant or fuse the door shut).

Enjoy your stay.