Full Description
Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the spectre of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie and television stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies, award-winning author David L. Pike's continues his decades-long exploration of the meanings of modern undergrounds. Ranging widely across disciplines, this volume finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts, plumbs the bunker's stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present. Although the Cold War ended over 30 years ago, its legacy looms large in anxieties around security, borders, and all manners of imminent apocalypse. Treating the bunker in its concrete presence and in its flightiest fantasies while attending equally to its uniquely American desires and pathologies and to its global impact, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s proposes a new way to understand the outsized afterlife of the bunkered decades.
Contents
Introduction: The Bunker Fantasy before and after the Bunkered Decades
Part 1. America 1962: The New Mutants and Where They Lived
1: In the Basement: Shelter, Suburbia and the Nuclear Family
2: Back to the Cave: Tribalism and Feral Humanity
3: The Private Supershelter: Survivalism and Self-Reliance
4: We'll All Go Together When We Go: Shelter and Community
5: Mountain Deep: Government Supershelters
Part 2. America 1983: The New Survivalism and Where It Hid
6: How to Survive the 80s
7: Men's Action Fictions
8: Nuclear Realism
9: Feminist Bunker Fantasies
Conclusion: Cold War Space and Culture since the Cold War
