Steuart Pittman, a Washington lawyer who was appointed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to create enough fallout shelters to protect every American in the event of a nuclear attack, and who resigned in frustration three years later amid heated debates over the feasibility, the cost and even the ethics of such a program, died on Feb. 10 at his family farm in Davidsonville, Md. He was 93. The apparent cause was a stroke, said his wife, Barbara.

Mr. Pittman was appointed the nation’s first civil defense chief for nuclear war preparedness at the height of the 1961 Berlin crisis, when words like fallout, megaton and radioactivity became alarmingly familiar to every American schoolchild.

Kennedy’s predecessor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had made fallout shelters the responsibility of an agency that managed emergency and natural disaster planning.

But Mr. Pittman, appointed assistant secretary of defense for civil defense soon after Soviet and American tanks faced off in Berlin and the wall dividing East and West Berlin started going up, had one mission only. It was to give 180 million Americans access to shelters stocked with enough food, water and medical supplies to get them through the first week or two after a nuclear attack, when exposure to radioactive fallout was most perilous.