feature fixated on impending nuclear attack while fantasizing about life within both mental and physical fortresses. Positing life in the Life Underground bunker as livable (even exciting) was a vital mechanism of militarizing American society Building the Bunker Society in the face of an expanding nuclear threat. It also set the terms for a long-running Ameri- Joseph Masco can fantasy about achieving an absolute and total form of security. Figures 1 and 2, hat are the long-term psychological for example, are Federal Civil Defense Ad- Wconsequences of living within a nu- ministration (FCDA) proposals from the clear culture? What fears are now so in- mid-1950s for the next generation of public grained in American life that we can’t seem schools. The nondescript ground-level to live without them? How, in other words, building depicted in figure 1 pales in com- has nuclear fear remade everyday American parison to the underground bunker with its society as permanently insecure, even as carefully diagramed spaces filled with bunk the has become the most beds, escape hatches, offices, and infirmary. powerful military state on earth? Similarly, the above-ground swings and Of the many astonishing cultural slides in figure 2 seem no match for the achievements of the atomic revolution in playful imagination of the hidden, window- the United States, let’s consider the transfor- less spaces below, which promise order, mation of the underground, windowless self-sufficiency, and insulation from the uni- room into a site of both global power and verse of danger above. There is no sign here social dreaming. In the nuclear age, the of the reality of nuclear war, of the scorched room with no view, often buried and hard- and barren radioactive landscape, or the ex- ened against attack, became a place where treme trauma of life in a postnuclear envi- futures were both held hostage and re-imag- ronment. Indeed, even as civil defense pub- ined. Here, the critical relationship between licly promoted the security of the bunker, citizens and the State was remade, reorgan- Rand Corporation nuclear strategist Herman ized within a crucible of nuclear fear. This Kahn was trying to calculate at what point turn inward toward built spaces stocked the “survivors would envy the dead.” with state-of-the-art technologies and com- modities presented a utopian vision of an invulnerable America closed off from the New Fortresses for outside world but still functioning perfectly. the Mind and Body One of the first and most powerful effects of the bomb was to transform the United The atomic bomb created fundamental States into a special kind of bunker society, military, social, and psychological contra-

Joseph Masco Life Underground 13 Figure 1. FCDA plans for Group for 240 Persons. The nondescript ground-level school building pales in comparison to the underground bunker with its carefully diagrammed spaces. (U.S. National Archives)

dictions that long-standing concepts of “se- ture, all underground. For example, in curity” could not resolve. Instead, federal 1958 the Rand Corporation offered a de- authorities sought to manage nuclear fear tailed plan to relocate four million New rather than eliminate it, to structure Ameri- Yorkers to deep underneath Manhattan can perceptions of the bomb to enable (Rand 1958:7): support for a potentially long . To this end, the nuclear state embraced the The shelters were to be excavated 800 feet profound contradictions nuclear weapons below the surface, using conventional ex- posed by normalizing a nuclear state of cavation and mining techniques. They emergency and then simply calling the re- were to be almost completely isolated sult “national security.” By the late 1950s, from the surface, with air purified and en- for example, the federal government was riched with oxygen as in a submarine, not only feverishly building thermonuclear with water tapped from the Delaware weapons and the means to deliver them Aqueduct system of tunnels and treated (or around the world, it was also considering a in an emergency, drawn from internal stor- massive investment in fallout shelters age), and with power provided from diesel across the United States, a program prom- generators vented to the surface but iso- ising an entirely new national infrastruc- lated from the shelter proper. Occupants

14 anthropology NOW Volume 1 • Number 2 • September 2009 Figure 2. FCDA plans for Group Fallout Shelter for 240 Persons. The above-ground swings and slides seem no match for the windowless spaces below which promise insulation from danger above. (U.S. National Archives)

would be assigned berth in a large dormi- Isolated from the surface as in a submarine. tory, would receive two cold meals and This effort to build in the imagination an un- one hot meal per day, and would draw derground city, hardened against nuclear at- fresh clothing, take showers, and exercise tack, would be physically realized in the on a rotational basis. Some 91 entrances command and control centers for U.S. nu- were planned and distributed according to clear forces. The general public, however, population, so that every point in Manhat- would focus more on constructing psycho- tan was within 5 to 10 minutes walking logical defenses in the nuclear age than on distance of an entrance; elevator design actual shelters. Nuclear civil defense was, characteristics currently employed in New in this regard, an extraordinarily powerful York should permit about a fourth of the means of defining the boundaries of both people in the buildings themselves to security and threat for the public, while reach the street every 5 minutes. The en- training citizens to think about nuclear war trances were sloped tunnels and had 500- in specific ways. psi blast doors both at the top and at the The civil defense projects of the 1950s bottom; provision could be made to col- formally positioned the bunker as a new lapse any single tunnel if the upper door American frontier space, populated by a gave way. new kind of citizen defined by the constant

Joseph Masco Life Underground 15 preparation for nuclear attack. This new Cold War subject was designed to be im- In 1957, the Gaither Committee mune to panic but nonetheless motivated by brought together the leading nuclear fear. Thus, just as Cold War military military-industrial planners in technologies were being hardened to sur- vive nuclear attack, civil defense efforts the country to contemplate the sought to engineer a new kind of citizen- benefits of a national fallout soldier, one who was emotionally equipped shelter program in response to to support the nuclear state. Hardening both the Soviet nuclear program. technologies and psychologies against the bomb was a dual project of the early nu- clear state—making the nuclear bunker a new site of nation and state building. The rized society, in which America was de- embrace of stone and steel and concrete as picted as both powerful and vulnerable. This protective shield transformed the window- ideology continues to inform U.S. national less bunker into both a technological chal- security culture to this day. The elevation of lenge and a utopian space. And via the the bunker into an icon of state power and promise of the bunker, the logical outcome social responsibility played a critical role in of nuclear war—the destruction of the na- psychologically preparing and orienting tion state in a radioactive firestorm—was Americans for escalating militarism. denied and a different future horizon In addition to reconceptualizing schools, opened up. government buildings, and mass transit sites As Americans contemplated life under- as future shelters, the Cold War state con- ground in the early Cold War period, a new structed a new infrastructure of buried mili- kind of social intimacy with mass death was tary facilities in support of nuclear weapons deeply installed in U.S. national security systems and for culture. As the military built multiply redun- operations. Simultaneously, officials re- dant technological systems for fighting a cruited private citizens to the shelter proj- nuclear war (including always-on-alert ect, asking them to build home shelters or bombers, missiles, and submarines), the civil risk death or permanent injury in the com- defense program sought to build a society ing nuclear conflict. In this crosscutting em- capable of withstanding the internal pres- brace of the bunker as the future of the na- sures of living within a constant state of tion, a new kind of national security culture emergency and facing a new kind of totaliz- emerged—one that reorganized everyday ing destructive force. Cold War planners ex- life as permanent warfare. plicitly merged nuclear fear with the ideol- In 1957, the Gaither Committee brought ogy of American Exceptionalism. In doing together the leading military-industrial plan- this, they engineered a new kind of milita- ners in the country to contemplate the ben-

16 anthropology NOW Volume 1 • Number 2 • September 2009 efits of a national fallout shelter program in proaching the computer screen as world. As response to the Soviet nuclear program. In missiles, radar systems, and command cen- addition to declaring (and inventing) a terri- ters became buried in hardened military fa- fying “missile gap” between the United cilities across the globe, windowless bunker States and the (leading to a sites came to link earth, sea, air, and eventu- massive arms buildup in both the late Eisen- ally space, as data points on technologically hower and Kennedy Administrations), the mediated screens. The core example of this committee recommended a crash shelter new system was the North American Aero- program that would cost as much as $55 space Defense Command (NORAD), lo- billion over five years. The Committee was cated deep within Cheyenne Mountain in explicit in the value of the program: The Colorado. Authorized in 1958, NORAD shelter system was designed not only to tracked all flying objects over North Amer- save lives as the bombs began to fall but ica, a job that became increasingly impor- also to communicate to the Soviet leader- tant as intercontinental missiles and satel- ship an American “will to live,” and thus lites joined bombers as forms of Soviet win, either a cold or hot war. Civil defense military power. was theatrical as well as practical, a means NORAD was the most advanced bunker of sending signals out into the world from facility of its time and perfectly illustrates underground bunker spaces, both real and the passions of the Cold War nuclear proj- imagined. The bunker linked public, private, ect. The central facility is buried 2,400 feet and military domains in a formal contem- deep inside a mountain of almost solid plation of nuclear war. granite and is supported by 1,319 steel springs (each three feet in diameter and weighing more than 1,000 pounds), de- Moving Underground signed to absorb the shock of nearby nu- clear detonations. NORAD was simultane- It is difficult for us to assess today the in- ously the most isolated and the most credible energy and creativity that went into connected site in the United States. Secured building American apocalyptic technolo- behind 25-ton blast doors (see Figure 3), the gies, and the difficult, ongoing social work facility was both locked down and net- of normalizing a permanent war economy worked to radar systems, computers, and in the United States. Consider the extraordi- eventually satellite surveillance systems, as- nary national infrastructure built in support sembling enormous data sets of moving ob- of nuclear war. In the first decade of the jects tracked in real time on a giant central Cold War, the nuclear state moved under- screen (see Figure 4). This central screen ground, supported by a new concept of was the lens for viewing nuclear threat command and control that focused not on throughout the Cold War, a powerful tool seeing the world directly but rather on ap- for orchestrating U.S. military deployments

Joseph Masco Life Underground 17 Figure 3. Deep within the Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, NORAD was secured behind 25-ton doors. (U.S. National Archives)

and achieving Mutual Assured Destruction. the computer screen, creating a “closed NORAD was designed as the ultimate world” system of mutually reinforcing ide- panopticon—a form of surveillance en- ologies, metaphors, and technologies. NO- abling crew members, invisible to the world RAD is thus both a technological system in their hardened underground bunkers, to and a model of an idealized world, one watch all of North America and provide an where the points on the global map are pre- early warning of nuclear attack. selected for their value and importance and The windowless bunker provided a new all other forms of information are ignored. kind of vision, one that amplified the ability Over time the “closed world” vision natu- to recognize dots on a giant screen as friend ralizes these preselected data points as the or foe in the minute-to-minute orchestration world itself, forgetting the messy complexity of the balance of nuclear terror. This repre- of cultures, politics, and ecosystems. Like sentation of the world as data points is the concept of “collateral damage” (the un- among the most profound technological intended violence of warfare), the kinds of evolutions of the nuclear age. As Paul Ed- information not convertible into dots on a wards (1996) has argued, the Cold War con- screen (culture, intentions, mistakes, tech- cept of Soviet “containment” found a per- nological malfunctions) were rendered in- fect technological metaphor in the form of visible in favor of a machine-to-machine as-

18 anthropology NOW Volume 1 • Number 2 • September 2009 Figure 4. The representation of the world as datapoints is among the most profound technological evolutions, but it omits the messy complexity of cultures, politics, and ecosystems. (NORAD Command and Control, U.S. National Archives) sessment. Nonetheless, by 1965 the power own terms or of their own choosing; in- of NORAD was not only defensive, but it stead, they were taught how to think about was also offensive in its ability to coordinate nuclear crisis and their own role in manag- the use of the 31,000 nuclear weapons in ing it. The project of “civil defense” in the the U.S. arsenal, demonstrating the extraor- 1950s was less about the protection of citi- dinary power of the windowless bunker in zens and cities than about the emotional the nuclear age. training of the populace, and the psycholog- Life in the hardened bunker quickly be- ical conversion of U.S. citizens into Cold came a site of Cold War fantasy for both War Warriors. Developed with the help of military leaders and citizens. For the mili- advertising experts, psychologists, and mili- tary it presented a vision of the globe as a tary planners, civil defense was primarily a totally knowable and controllable space. means of instilling nuclear fear, and a coded For citizens, the windowless bunker be- response to it, within the U.S. population as came a privatized dream space—where part of the larger Cold War effort. This took time spent waiting for the bombs to fall and the form of the largest federal media cam- the radioactive clouds to clear could be a paign in U.S. history. Relying on news - source of renewal not ruin. Citizens, how- papers, magazines, radio, television, and ever, did not approach the bunker on their film, civil defense was designed to teach

Joseph Masco Life Underground 19 U.S. citizens just enough about the dangers Dangers facing you: The bomb produced of nuclear war to mobilize their support but heat of several million degrees—a good not enough to produce terror or a public deal hotter than the temperature on the movement to end to the Cold War project. surface of the sun. This heat travels at the speed of light. A megaton explosion could kill an unshielded man 8 miles from The Bunker as ground zero. A 20-megaton explosion New American Frontier could kill an unshielded man 20 miles away. It could blister and cripple the bod- Cold War civil defense was above all an ex- ies of unsheltered people well beyond that. traordinary national conversation about collective death. The media campaign At the speed of light. As part of the larger ef- forced citizens to consider a postnational fort to mobilize the public for nuclear war, state of being and eventually, as the power civil defense authorities increasingly re- of nuclear arsenals grew, the possible end sponded to these gruesome facts by seeking to life on planet Earth. Civil defense was an first to naturalize, and then to romanticize, unprecedented national project as federal shelters. Life in the bunker was depicted as authorities sought simultaneously to mobi- quintessentially American, a new frontier lize and naturalize nuclear crisis within the experience where the resilient citizen could United States. They did so by teaching citi- outwit a dangerous world with grit, skill, zens to fear an imminent global nuclear at- and moral determination. tack each minute of the day while also At the height of the fallout shelter debate, arguing that such a threat could be ap- the Federal Civil Defense Administration proached as just another form of potential (FCDA) produced photographs (see follow- crisis, alongside floods, fires, and earth- ing pages) documenting ordinary Americans quakes. The domestic form of the “balance in their home bunkers. These images repre- of terror” presented a constant problem of sent the fallout shelter as pure dreamspace, emotional and informational calibration to not only privatized but also part of a pas- Cold War planners. In one widely distrib- toral landscape. The FCDA presents each uted civil defense pamphlet from 1959 ti- shelter in a photographic sequence, begin- tled “Ten for Survival: Survive Nuclear At- ning with a view from ground level looking tack,” for example, readers learned that at the owners descending into the shelter “survival” is simply a question of knowing entrance, followed by a view from the win- “what to do and how to do it.” But this dowless interior. This sequential structure promise that “knowledge is survival power” underscores the break between the world is paired with a description of nuclear war above and the bunker below. In each case, that overwhelms ducking and covering as a the shelter hatch begs to be locked down mode of protection: tight, sealing the inhabitants below in their

20 anthropology NOW Volume 1 • Number 2 • September 2009 submarine-like security, locking the inhabi- personal response to the international nu- tants within a special kind of fantasy space: clear crisis. The grandparents and daughter militarized, privatized, post-nation-state. simply enjoy the time together in this win- Figure 5 presents the arresting image of dowless underground space. The canned the suburban home on a seemingly peace- goods and medical kits become a register of ful, sunny day, with a father and daughter good parenting in this advertisement, which slowly descending into a circular hatch cut also suggests that time spent in the bunker neatly into the lawn. Framed to enhance the can be quality family time. sky and grass, while underscoring the dra- Figures 7 and 8 repeat this pictorial struc- matically unhurried nature of the father- ture but with more humor and a reposition- daughter descent into the earth, the photo- ing of the shelter as a place to get some graph registers a preternatural calm, belying peace and quiet, away from the troubles of the context of nuclear war that necessitates the world above. In the first image, the smil- this shelter project. Figure 6 then shows the ing male owner pops his head out of the neatly ordered family space below, com- carefully hidden shelter entrance, present- plete with air purifier, stove, and bunk beds, ing a covert space surrounded by a thicket already populated by three generations of of trees and shrubs. On the inside we see happy shelter inhabitants. The father can him in relaxed pleasure, legs crossed lying sleep in this image precisely because he has on a bunk bed enjoying a magazine, a slight put forth the labor to build a shelter as a smile on his face, the very picture of con-

Figure 5. Family Fallout Shelter Residential Exterior (U.S. Figure 6. Family Fallout Shelter Residential Interior (U.S. National Archives) National Archives)

Joseph Masco Life Underground 21 FIgure 7. Hidden Fallout Shelter (U.S. National Archives) FIgure 8. Hidden Fallout Shelter Interior (U.S. National Archives)

tentment. Here the fallout shelter is pre- global politics, and replaces it with the cool sented as a privatized retreat, as much bach- forward-thinking bunker logics documented elor pad as survival kit. But the hidden in Figure 10. The mother here sorts her stock entrance to the bunker sends a double mes- of preserved food, revealing months of labor sage: It is a secret retreat (a place to gather already invested in preparing for a post- one’s thoughts in private) and a regional nuclear future. The FCDA sought to divide secret—an implicit recognition of the value up shelter responsibilities by gender and age of the shelter at a time of nuclear crisis, within the family structure, tasking men with when less prepared Americans might be shelter construction and organization, scared into violent acts of appropriation. In- women with food and first aid, and children deed, one of the immediate concerns of the with studying nuclear effects (to keep their shelter debate involved how to cope, not parents on track). The family farm could be with the bomb or a Soviet invasion, but with incorporated into civil defense as well, par- traumatized neighbors reduced to a violent ticipating in a larger FCDA campaign for state of panic. food recovery, including shelters for cattle. Figure 9 presents the family fallout shelter These two images merge the survivalist nar- as pure dream space. As clouds gather on rative of self-preservation and independence the horizon, a farming family moves into characteristic of American frontier heritage their hidden shelter space, dwarfed by grass with a pure pastoral image of the farming and sky. This image magnifies the drama of landscape as cover for the windowless life the world outside the shelter, the enormity of below. The iconography of a family alone in

22 anthropology NOW Volume 1 • Number 2 • September 2009 Figure 9. Rural Family Fallout Shelter Exterior (U.S. National Archives) the wilderness, preparing for the tough win- ter is deployed here to make the fallout shel- ter a uniquely American space, bringing to- gether the rural, the pastoral, and the radioactive in one conceptual drama. Each of these shelters is also a privatized enterprise, stocked largely with purchased commodities, from generators to radios, bunk beds and flashlights. The fusion of shelters and consumer capitalism was es- Figure 10. Rural Family Fallout Shelter Interior Food Storage (U.S. National Archive) sential right from the start. President Ken - nedy asked each American to prepare for nuclear war by finding or building a shelter. the shelter campaign, families were always He also proposed a $400 million national depicted together, in good health and happy shelter program one year before the Cuban underground when war broke out. These Missile Crisis, energizing a new industry in conceptual designs start to explain why store-bought shelters. The FCDA sought to families were depicted this way: The FCDA enhance the allure of the shelter by spon- was attempting to relocate the American soring a national campaign to design multi- family to the nuclear bunker—to make the use rooms, good for sitting out a nuclear bomb the source of family life rather than war or for use in the pre-attack everyday. In the destruction of it.

Joseph Masco Life Underground 23 Figure11. Fun-Room Fall-Out Shelter Design (U.S. National Archives)

Figures 11 and 12 document this FCDA ing and other modes of distraction. Figure effort to normalize the nuclear bunker as a 12 takes this argument about the value of part of everyday life—useful before, during, time in the shelter to its logical conclusion. and after nuclear war. Designed by the Los Designed by Marc T. Nielsen of Chicago, it Angeles firm of Dorothy H. Paul, Figure 11 presents the “Family Room of Tomorrow is a concept drawing for the “Fun Room Fall-Out Shelter.” Also a windowless, cin- Fall-Out Shelter”—a dual-use playroom and derblock bunker, the design includes both bunker. Instead of windows, the walls of this Stone Age wall paintings and a world map, shelter are painted with a playground scene as if to raise the question of what kind of to- of children in a park, running and climbing morrow the family will have—the prehis- trees—precisely the environment that toric or the modern? This design was shown would likely be scorched or radioactive af- in full-scale mock-up at a Chicago trade ter a nuclear exchange. Stations are set up show, where it met not with praise and ad- for book reading and for viewing films; miration but the anger of a crowd sickened board games are stacked along the wall. The by the assumption about what a nuclear “to- “fun” to be had here requires both faith and morrow” might look like. imagination, transforming the terror of a nu- Despite this effort to romanticize the clear war into an opportunity for game play- shelter and to construct it as a dual use

24 anthropology NOW Volume 1 • Number 2 • September 2009 Figure12. Family Room of Tomorrow Fall-Out Shelter Design (U.S. National Archives) room suited for all kinds of catastrophe as quently focused on the middle-class, subur- well as for entertaining guests, most Ameri- ban family living on the periphery of urban cans did not—indeed, could not—build nu- centers, creating and reinforcing an image clear bunkers. Instead, Figure 13 depicts the of America as an exclusively white nuclear most wide-ranging response to the bomb: family. This left unrepresented a vast popu- the duck-and-cover drill that every Ameri- lation of Americans while ignoring the pre- can schoolchild practiced for the forty years dominantly urban concentration of U.S. of official Cold War. Here, face down, inter- populations. Nonetheless, the FCDA cam- nalized in one’s own mind, and completely paign sought to link the shelter to a specific vulnerable to the world around, is the ulti- American narrative of frontier survival and, mate Cold War posture—a sightless, private in so doing, presented the bunker largely as bunker of the most pathos-driven kind. a commodified dream space rather than a The FCDA campaigns always offered citi- disaster zone. Via civil defense, federal au- zens the best-case scenario for nuclear thorities promoted an idea of an invulnera- war—in which the bombs explode well ble American—able to exist outside of time over the horizon—allowing Americans time and space—located within a new mythol- to get to their shelters and minimize the ogy of perfect national security. most destructive effects. The FCDA conse- Scientists and activists almost immedi-

Joseph Masco Life Underground 25 Figure13. Duck-and-Cover Drill (U.S. National Archives)

ately challenged this denial of death. They produce food) to wait out the radioactive critiqued the factual claims of civil defense, fallout for a few hundred years. Suggesting a helping to foment peace, civil rights, and 10:1 ratio of women to men to repopulate environmental movements. Perhaps the the human species, the erotics of the shelter most devastating critique of the bunker soci- produce immediate desire among the presi- ety came in Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film, Dr. dent and his all-male war council, as well as Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Wor- a renewed state of competition with the So- rying and Love the Bomb. At the end of the viets, this time to prevent, over the hundreds film, as the president and his war council of years it would take for surface radiation to are holed up in the closed world command decay, the development of a “mine shaft center known as the “war room,” a huge gap!” The nuclear bunker is revealed here as computer screen follows the path of U.S. pure masculine fantasy, participating in an and Soviet bombers on their final bombing erotics of death that is not subject to self- runs, detailing the now unavoidable out- analysis even as the bombs begin to fall. break of global nuclear war. Rather than producing despair, however, the president’s science advisor, Dr. Strangelove, suggests From a Secure, that the United States could now move a Undisclosed Location “nucleus of human specimens” to the deep- est mine shafts and prepare them (with nu- What has become of the Cold War bunker clear reactors for energy and greenhouses to society in the 21st century? In the days after

26 anthropology NOW Volume 1 • Number 2 • September 2009 the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Cen- ter and the Pentagon in September 2001, Today, federal authorities one of the most theatrical people in the no longer ask citizens to go into country was Vice President Dick Cheney. Having spent much of his career thinking underground rooms made of steel about continuity of government plans for and concrete, but into bunkers nuclear war, Cheney issued his public state- of the imagination. ments from a “secure, undisclosed loca- tion.” Almost instantly a joke, it was funny precisely because most Americans could picture the windowless, underground We do not build nuclear shelters anymore. bunker (now outfitted with the Internet and This is not because the bunker society has video conferencing) that the vice president been outmoded, but because it has been so chose to speak from. Energizing the entire completely integrated into public life. Early Cold War system for nuclear crisis, Cheney Cold War civil defense was concerned pri- began to orchestrate from his buried control marily with militarizing the public and mo- center the start of a global military response bilizing citizens for a long wartime commit- that he called the “new normal.” The bunker ment. The long-term success of that project here was not the idyllic space imagined by has created a “national security culture” that the FCDA for citizens. Rather, it was the mil- is unprecedented in human history. Today, itarized bunker linked to global technolo- federal authorities no longer ask citizens to gies for war. go into underground rooms made of steel One of the Bush administration’s first and concrete, but into bunkers of the imagi- projects in the “war on terror” was to nor- nation. These conceptual bunkers free the malize a state of permanent crisis, using the national security state to operate in an un- legal, rhetorical, and emotional structures of contested field of global action. No state in the Cold War security state to radically history has given as much to “security” as change both foreign and domestic policy. the United States. Currently the United By calling what they were doing over the States has less than 5 percent of the world’s following years—multiple wars, unprece- population but outspends the entire world dented domestic surveillance, global rendi- combined on its military—nearly $1 trillion tions, the suspension of the writ of habeas in 2007. Yet this extraordinary military ex- corpus, and torture—“national security,” the penditure does not produce a sense of secu- Bush Administration was able to suspend rity; quite the opposite. law and moral order in the United States. The history of the Cold War bunker tells us why: the focus has never been on stopping violence but on preparing psychologically to endure it, which has created a perverse con-

Joseph Masco Life Underground 27 cept of security. Certain rituals of security to- nuclear roots can be formally reconsidered. day—the airport screenings that do not en- Perhaps it is even time for Americans to get hance security, the acquiescence to domestic out of the nuclear bunker once and for all, electronic surveillance, and the extraordi- begin demilitarizing, and re-enter the world nary sums of money spent on “de fense”— in all its bright and messy insecurity. work not to protect but to underscore, and even create, a sense of vulnerability. This evocation of risk is then acknowledged by Suggestions for Further Reading the security state as a call for more security (in the form of “preventative” wars, covert For key texts in the Cold War policy debates over actions, and greater secrecy), leading to an fallout shelters, see: The Rand Corporation, Re- escalating militarization of national life. port on a Study of Non-Military Defense (1958, The “war on terror” promises, in this way, Santa Monica: The Rand Corporation); Security to end the experience of terror, first by satu- Resources Panel of the Science Advisory Commit- rating national politics with forms of fear, tee (known as the “Gaither Report”) Deterrence and then by pursuing an ever-greater coun- and Survival in the Nuclear Age (1957, Washing- ton: U.S. Government Printing Office); and for a terterrorist response to them. The Bush ad- detailed history of the commission, see David L. ministration promoted the ideology of the Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and bunker into a full national security culture, the Cold War (1999, Columbus: Ohio State Uni- one that trained citizens to define “security” versity Press); and Herman Kahn, On Thermo - as a state project and to ignore the vast ma- nuclear War (1960, Princeton: Prince ton Univer- nipulation of public life conducted in the sity Press). name of “defense.” “National security” de- For a photographic history of Cold War manded docility from citizens while en- bunkers, see Richard Ross, Waiting for the End of abling policies that were in violation of any the World (2004, New York: Princeton Architec- concept of democratic governance and that tural Press). For an excellent cultural history of were deadly. Just as the fallout shelters the fallout shelter movement in the United would not have saved many Americans dur- States, see Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Under- ing a nuclear war (indeed, it would have ground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (2001, New York: New York University Press). For suffocated most in spaces that became visual analysis of the cultural work of atomic ru- ovens under the full force of nuclear war- ins in the US, see Joseph Masco, “Survival Is Your fare) this concept of “national security” has Business: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nu- been used to justify unprecedented sacrifice clear America,” Cultural Anthropology (2008, in terms of life, law, and capital since 2001. 23(2): 361–98); and Tom Vanderbuilt, Survival Perhaps now that the wreckage of the “war City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic on terror” is mounting up and becoming America (2002, Princeton Architectural Press). both visible and unavoidable to Americans, For a discussion of the politics of fear, terror, the concept of “national security” and its and panic in the early Cold War, see Guy Oakes,

28 anthropology NOW Volume 1 • Number 2 • September 2009 The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American maintaining a state-of-the-art nuclear arsenal af- Cold War Culture (1994, New York: Oxford Uni- ter destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August versity Press), as well as Jackie Orr’s assessment of of 1945. The United States increasingly built it- the long-term impacts of emotional management self through and around the bomb. During the campaigns on U.S. culture in Panic Diaries: A Ge- second half of the 20th century, one of every nealogy of Panic Disorder (2006, Durham: Duke three federal dollars went to the nuclear com- University Press). For a stimulating discussion of plex, making it the third largest federal expendi- the role of psychology in early Cold War planning ture, ranking just after the non-nuclear military and its larger effects on American society, see and social security; see Stephen Schwartz (ed), Catherine Lutz, “Epistemology of the Bunker: The Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of Brainwashed and Other New Subjects of Perma- US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (1998, Wash- nent War” in Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (eds.), ington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press). See also Inventing the Psychological: Toward Cultural His- Robert Higgs, “The Trillion-Dollar Defense tory of Emotional Life in America (1997, New Budget Is Already Here,” available online at: Haven: Yale University Press), pages 245–270. For http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article. a critical assessment of civil defense as perfor- asp?id=1941. For a chart of global military ex- mance, see Tracy C. Davis, The Stages of Emer- penditures put together by GlobalSecurity.Org, gency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (2007, see: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world Duke University Press). /spending.htm. For analysis of the Cold War technological For crucial filmic insights into the psychology system as ideology, see Paul Edwards, The Closed of the Cold War nuclear system, see Dr. World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying in Cold War America (1996, Cambridge: MIT and Love the Bomb (1964, Directed by Stanley Press). For a discussion of how gender roles were Kubrick) and Fail Safe (1964, Directed by Sidney positioned in early Cold War civil defense, see Lumet). For an example of bunker discourse Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: within the “War on Terror,” see Vice President Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties Cheney’s transcript at: http://www.whitehouse. (2000, Princeton: Princeton University Press); gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/ and for an analysis of gendered discourse in vp20011025.html. Cold War strategic thinking, see Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs (1987, 12(4): 687–718). For Joseph Masco is an associate professor of anthro- an assessment of the U.S. nuclear project in New pology at the University of Chicago. He is the Mexico, see Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Border- author of The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhat- lands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War tan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico New Mexico (2006, Princeton: Princeton Uni- (2006, Princeton University Press). versity Press). It is important to recognize that American so- ciety did not merely commit to building and

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