Was there ever a program or even any kind of encouragement to have children receive tattoos of their blood types in the USA during the "Cold war"?

by OMG__Ponies

The question is because of an /r/askreddit thread -

At the start of the Cold War, residents of Chicago were encouraged to tattoo their children's blood type in their arm pits in case of nuclear war? Redditors from Chicago, do any of you have such tattoos, and how did your parents explain them to you?

I couldn't find any information of any program or guidelines for such a thing.

restricteddata

The only in-depth discussion of these tattoos that I have seen is this one from CONELRAD Adjacent — the practice did exist but seems to have been relatively localized to only a few places in the US (not a national program) and not all that common. Still, it is a pretty interesting little bit of history. CONELRAD Adjacent in general is a great source for all of these kinds of Civil Defense minutiae/trivia; nobody else really works on it in my experience.