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During the Cold War years, the fallout bunker was buried deep in the American mind. At a public and private level, in the interlocking languages of politics and pop culture, the prospect of total nuclear annihilation embedded itself in the discourse, as an ever-present possibility, even an outright likelihood. A few weeks after the destruction of Hiroshima, Bertrand Russell spoke of the probability, in the coming years, of the absolute obliteration of humanity and its works. “One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.,” he wrote, “which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to be built afresh—a process taking (say) 500 years.” Twenty-four years later, in an interview with Playboy, he had not encountered much in the way of cause for increased optimism: “I still feel that the human race may well become extinct before the end of the present century. Speaking as a mathematician, I should say that the odds are about three to one against survival.”
In his book One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, Kenneth D. Rose writes about the Cold War–era proliferation of detailed scenarios of nuclear annihilation in major newspapers and magazines:
Like other genres, the nuclear apocalyptic, whether found in a specialty or mainstream publication, had certain conventions that were observed by its practitioners […] Descriptions of radiation sickness, blindness, terrible burns, gaping wounds, and missing limbs proliferate, and the authors conjure up gruesome images of corpses strewn about homes, workplaces, and sidewalks. When the bombs finally stop falling, the nuclear apocalyptic will emphasize how life has been reduced to a low, primitive state in which each day is a grim struggle for survival. Disease, dementia, lawlessness, and hunger are constant companions. In many nuclear apocalyptics, an occasional artifact from the past will surface to remind survivors of all that they have lost. Finally, depending on the author’s view of nuclear war, the survivors will either begin building a new tomorrow, rising phoenix-like from the ashes, or hopelessly resign themselves to an endless era of darkness and barbarity.
In July 1961, with Khrushchev threatening to negotiate a new peace deal with East Germany, thereby declaring Berlin a “neutral” city and forcing the US Army to withdraw, John F. Kennedy delivered a speech, broadcast on national television, that redoubled the American public’s fears of nuclear war. “We do not want to fight,” he said, “but we have fought before.” In the event of a Soviet attack, “the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved—if they can be warned to take shelter, and if that shelter is available….The time to start is now,” he said. “In the coming months, I hope to let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of attack. I know you would not want to do less.” After the speech, Congress voted to allocate $169 million for the construction and stocking of fallout shelters in public and private properties across the country.
The number of families who went on to build shelters was relatively low, but the trend was seen, among cultural critics of the time, as indicative of the fearful self-enclosure of the new suburban middle class. Writing in The New York Times in 1961, the anthropologist Margaret Mead suggested that anxieties about nuclear war and urban crime had caused a mass retreat to the suburbs, where middle-class Americans were hiding from the world and its darkening future. “The armed, individual shelter,” she wrote, “is the logical end of this retreat from trust in and responsibility for others.”
I have some sympathy for the builders of bunkers, the hoarders of freeze-dried foodstuffs. I understand the fear, the desire for it to be assuaged. But more than I want my fear assuaged, I want to resist the urge to climb into a hole, to withdraw from an ailing world, to bolt the door after myself and my family. When I think of Vicino’s project, his product, what comes to mind is exactly Margaret Mead’s judgment of what it means to secure oneself inside a shelter: a withdrawal from any notion that our fate might be communal, that we might live together rather than survive alone.
The bunker, purchased and tricked out by the individual consumer, is a nightmare inversion of the American Dream. It’s a subterranean abundance of luxury goods and creature comforts, a little kingdom of reinforced concrete and steel, safeguarding the survival of the individual and his family amid the disintegration of the world.
“Burying your head in the sand,” Vicino told me, “isn’t gonna save your ass that’s hanging out.” He was, he said, paraphrasing Ayn Rand—his point being, I supposed, that not purchasing a place in one of his facilities amounted to an unwillingness to face down the reality of the world. But it struck me as an odd image, an odd analogy to use, given what he himself was advocating for. Because as far as I understood him, what he was arguing was this: it was no use burying your head in the sand if you didn’t also bury your ass along with it.
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The following day I returned to xPoint. Neither Vicino nor Jin was in evidence, and there was no sign of the Lexus. Outside the corrugated iron shipping container was an unmanned red jeep with decals on its doors advertising a local Fox News station, and I inferred that Vicino had gone tooling around the prairies with a TV reporter, perhaps adjusting his sales pitch to the particular anxieties of a South Dakota conservative cable news–viewing demographic. I parked beside the jeep and set out to wander the site, but then quickly realized it was far too vast to even begin to explore on foot and returned to the car. I drove for forty minutes or so, stopping now and then to unlock a cattle gate, and once or twice to get out and observe the delirious spectacle of the endless grass-covered vaults, the hexagonal fronts—an architecture less proportionate to the physical than to the psychic dimensions of human beings. I clambered up onto the top of one of these, to survey the immensity from a higher vantage. Yesterday, Jin and I had stood on top of another of these structures, and my growing apprehension of a military-industrial sublime had been casually undermined by Jin’s solemnly informing me that he’d recently taken a shit on the roof of one such vault, although “probably not this one.”
I sat down now on the sparse grass of the roof and looked out across the infinity of green, surreally ruptured by the vaults. The thought occurred to me that it was here, in what was then the southern part of the Dakota Territory, that Laura Ingalls Wilder spent much of her childhood, and where she set several of her Little House novels. This was not just a prairie I was looking out over, therefore, but the prairie: the fertile source of America’s dream of itself as a nation of entrepreneurial pioneers, settlers of a wild land. I was looking out over a country born in savagery and genocide, built on the ruins of a conquered native civilization, and the bunkers seemed to me like the return of a repressed apocalypse. It was as though the land itself had extruded them as an immune response to some ancient antigen. It was so quiet here I could hear the soft buzzing of electricity in the power lines above me, the brittle snap and hum of technological civilization itself. I thought about America’s twin obsessions with a frontier past and an apocalyptic future, and of how these were ominously fused like the Janus-faced calf at the Pioneer Museum. What was Vicino offering in this place, after all, other than a return to the life of the old frontier, a new beginning in the wake of the end, one that retained as many consumer-facing luxuries as possible?