Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (review)

In Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt offers multiple perspectives on the legacies of the cold war; this book is part travelogue, part architectural history, part policy analysis, and part editorial on the influence of nuclear weapons on American society. Vanderbilt writes that his focus is "the dueling sciences of protection and destruction in an age when war went from a marked event to an underlying condition, when the city went from protective enclave to strategic target" (p. 39). His inquiry into visible (white) and unmapped (black) spaces exposes a cross-selection of sites that the nation is only now beginning to fully comprehend.

In seeking to understand the interplay between war and space during an invisible conflict, Vanderbilt literally took to the highway to uncover the nation's hidden nuclear landscape. While traveling across the country, he visited several black spaces, legacies of the cold war. He witnessed the destruction of a Minuteman II silo in North Dakota and explored the ultimate survival city, the bombed buildings scattered across the Nevada Test Site. He toured the 112,000-square-foot bunker complex hidden beneath the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, meant to house the entire U.S. Congress and selected staff. The bunker's utilitarianism contrasts sharply with popular images of luxurious hidden government shelters. Vanderbilt describes this space as "a factory; survival its product" (p. 139).

An even more stark and forgotten cold war relic greeted Vanderbilt when he visited President John F. Kennedy's rudimentary fallout shelter off the coast of Palm Beach, Florida. Located on a tiny island created out of dredge spoils, and constructed in 1961, the shelter offered limited conveniences for the first family.

Besides observing the spaces designed to protect political leaders, Vanderbilt visited the ultimate cold war black landscape: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, the command center for the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Here, disagreements occurred between air force officials and Rand Corporation civilian planners about the degree to which the site required hardening.

Upon leaving Cheyenne Mountain, Vanderbilt visited the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The final resting place for weapons production equipment, laboratory apparatus, and contaminated clothing, the WIPP represents the future of black spaces and cold war legacies. Space miners literally dug in the underground salt bed to create empty chambers waiting to receive the nation's low-level contaminated nuclear paraphernalia for the next three decades. This tomb departed from previous sites Vanderbilt explores, for government planners needed to design the means to communicate the nature and function of the WIPP to whoever might locate it ten thousand years in the future. Thus, the WIPP combined black and white spaces, hiding the dangers of transuranic wastes from the public and warning future generations of the threat within the buried labyrinth.

Vanderbilt ably argues that the very nature of the cold war, which generated and depended upon a culture of secrecy, kept these locations from popular scrutiny. That no direct military confrontation took place between the two superpowers contributed to amnesia about a largely unseen and little understood underground landscape. Vanderbilt makes a good case for the preservation of cold war architecture and facilities. He believes that these sites should be viewed not only as relics of the cold war but also as reminders of the cultural paranoia, security obsession, and wastefulness that gripped the nation not so long ago. The only commentary missing from Vanderbilt's narrative concerns the Pentagon's plans to expand the invisible landscape to the ultimate military high ground, the Moon.

Vanderbilt does not discuss the technologies of building black spaces or specifics of the technologies based in these locations. He instead focuses on the cultural and political meanings of the sites and the weapons systems used there. In taking this perspective, he reveals the manner in which America's invisible landscapes were created and maintained during the cold war.

There are minor criticisms to be made of Survival City. The transitions...