We’ll All Go Together When We Go

Abstract

In the mainstream American bunker imaginary, the communal shelter repels by its very nature. Indeed, for all its ideological basis in the defense of freedom from the forces of communism, the communal shelter works primarily to express ambivalence towards the bunker fantasy and the shelter society per se. Consequently, it is the space within the bunker fantasy that most readily affords critical articulations of the cost and dangers of nuclearity. That critical affordance comes nearly always at the price of negativity: in the American nuclear imaginary no one is safe when sheltering outside of his own home. Critical public-shelter texts argued that the only way to imagine a resolution to the crisis faced by the world of the early 1960s was through the form of the bunker fantasy.