Mountain Deep

Abstract

Combining the resources and technical know-how of the private shelter with the pretense to social good of government sponsorship, the federal supershelter encapsulates the paradoxically public-private function of the bunker. Appropriated to ensure continuity of government in the event of a nuclear war, the funds, labor, and raw materials poured into these facilities are as real as can be. At the same time, of all permutations of the bunker space, the government supershelter continues to coalesce around it the more fantastic reveries both of those who know about it directly and of those who only imagine its existence. Since the end of the Cold War, many facilities have been sold, adapted, or abandoned; others continue to serve their military function, some secret and others public. The Cold War supershelter insinuated the advanced technology of modernity into the spaces of ancient myth, creating the form of an “ontological bunker,” a new state of being adequate to the life under the nuclear condition. In this imaginary, the most incomprehensibly and unpredictably destructive force of modern technology, deep mistrust of the government, and enduring fascination with its secret bunkered resources are rendered representable and conscionable by burying them within some of the most ancient spaces of that same world.