Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America

235 Pages·2010·4.29 MB·English

by  Tom Vanderbilt

Praise for Vanderbilt’s Survival City
“This is a crucial and dazzling book. Masterful, and for me at least,
intoxicating. It reminds us of the absurd and sinister ways humans
have attempted to ensure their survival, and, without ever oversim-
plifying, it manages to be a ridiculously entertaining read. Amid the
ruins of a different era in postwar national defense, its stepchild of
abject paranoia, Vanderbilt—the perfect guide—finds levity and
humanity.”
 Dave Eggers, Author, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
“A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life.”
                                 Greil Marcus, Bookforum
“This is a fascinating political and cultural analysis of ‘cold war
architecture’: a vast array of structures from missile silos to small
towns built to test the effectiveness of an atomic blast, presidential
fallout shelters, nuclear waste dumps . . . and countless motels and
diners named ‘Atomic.’”                   Publishers Weekly
“Part travelogue, part architectural history, part policy analysis, and
part editorial on the influence of nuclear weapons on American
society. . . . Vanderbilt not only takes the reader on a tour of cold
war black spaces, he offers convincing arguments for preserving
these sites.”                         Technology and Culture
“An admirable journey and an appeal for more detailed geographical
studies of the Cold War and its global histories.”
                         Environment and Planning Journal
“Survival City, by taking us on a tour of important places we’ve prob-
ably never been, is both a call to preserve Cold War history and a
valuable reminder of the continuing impact of nuclear weapons on
the American cultural and physical landscape.”
                           Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America
Reprinted courtesy Survival in a Nuclear Attack: Plans for Protection from Radioactive Fallout (State of New York, 1960).

Survival City:
Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America
tom vanderbilt
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, London
© 2002 Princeton Architectural Press
All rights reserved.
University of Chicago Press paperback edition 2010
Published by arrangement with Princeton Architectural Press
Printed in the United States of America
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5
isbn: 978-0-226-84694-1 (paper)
isbn: 0-226-84694-6 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vanderbilt, Tom.
Survival city : adventures among the ruins of atomic America / Tom Vanderbilt.
p. cm.
First published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-84694-1 (alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-84694-6 (alk. paper)
1. West (U.S.)—Description and travel. 2. West (U.S.)—History, Local. 3. Vanderbilt,
Tom—Travel—West (U.S.) 4. West (U.S.)—Social conditions—20th century. 5. Cold War—
Social aspects—West (U.S.) 6. Nuclear weapons—West (U.S.)—Testing—History—20th
century. 7. Landscape—Social aspects—West (U.S.) 8. Cold War—Social aspects—United
States. 9. United States—Social conditions—1945– 10. National characteristics, American. I.
Title.
F595.3.V36 2010
978—dc22
2009045733
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION
Looking for Dr. Strangelove: The Cold War as Archaeology. . . . . 6
CHAPTER 1
Dead City: The Metropolis Targeted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
CHAPTER 2
Survival City: This is Only a Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
CHAPTER 3
The Domestication of Doomsday:
New Buildings for the Perilous Atomic Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
CHAPTER 4
The Underground City:
The Architecture of Disappearance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
CHAPTER 5
Twentieth-Century Castles:
Missile Silos in the Heartland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
CHAPTER 6
The Secret Landscape: Some Cold War Traces. . . . . . . . . . . . 184
POSTSCRIPT
September 11, 2001 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
NOTES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Introduction
LOOKING FOR DR. STRANGELOVE:
The Cold War as Archaeology
But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a myste-
rious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself among
the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future
catastrophe.
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
I want to get to where the Cold War is still ending in America, so I set out
after sunrise one early July morning from Grand Forks, North Dakota,
bearing west on u.s. 2. After some 45 miles, I turn left on n.d. 1, then drive
another 45 miles down a road of typical Dakotan sparseness, so empty that
passing drivers wave with old-fashioned courtesy at the sheer novelty of
human company, or on the fair assumption they probably know you anyway.
I eventually reach Cooperstown, North Dakota, billed on a sign as “Tree City
u.s.a.,” a neatly arranged farming town that scrupulously adheres to its slo-
gan. I catch a glimpse of lawn that turns out to be the town’s municipal park,
barely visible beneath a thick canopy of oaks and elms.
Turning left on Main Street, I park in front of an unmarked, nearly empty
storefront, nestled between a theater showing Mission Impossible 2 and a
quaint apothecary. On the storefront window is a single ten-by-twelve color
photograph depicting what appears to be a tornado, brown and angry and
heaving with dirt and debris, boring into one of the state’s endless green hori-
zons. What it actually shows, if one steps inside and takes a closer look, is the
implosion of one of the state’s 150 Minuteman missile silos, the invisible
fortresses of the atomic age. For decades, they stood silent sentinel beneath
the whistling prairies, scattered across some 7,500square miles—from Valley
City, North Dakota clear through to the Canadian border. Only their three-
phase power poles and some small brown signs (attached to nearby “Stop”
signs or sometimes standing independently) bearing designations like “c-28”
and “d-15” gave evidence they were there. Like those inscrutable markings
B-52 Stratofortress tail at Muroc Dry Lake, California