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Feature Fixated on Impending Nuclear Attack While Fantasizing About Life Within Both Mental and Physical Fortresses

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Feature Fixated on Impending Nuclear Attack While Fantasizing About Life Within Both Mental and Physical Fortresses 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 United States 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 Fallout Shelter 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 Cold War. 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 continuity of government 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 Soviet Union (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.
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