The Bomb Project
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ARTICLES + READING LISTS [Main Page]
http://www.firstpulseprojects.net/bombproject/Index.html
added June 26, 2002:

Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America
by Tom Vanderbilt
Princeton Architectural Press;
ISBN: 1568983050; (March 2002)

About the Author:
Tom Vanderbilt is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. His work has
appeared in Wired, ArtByte, Nest, The New York Times Magazine, and The
Nation. He is author of The Sneaker Book: An Anatomy of an Industry and
An Icon.

From Publishers Weekly:
Highlighting the Cold War era's obsession with what Vanderbilt (The
Sneaker Book) calls "constant protection from an invisible threat," this
is a fascinating political and cultural analysis of "cold war
architecture": a vast array of structures from missile silos to small
towns built to test the effectiveness of an atomic blast, presidential
fallout shelters, nuclear waste dumps, monoliths like the windowless
PacBell building in Los Angeles, and countless motels and diners named
"Atomic." The physical structures that resulted from Cold War ideology and
politics also had far deeper and extensive psychological and emotional
implications and ramifications: "the domestication of doomsday." Mixing
first-person narrative of his travels around the U.S. in search of Cold
War sites and objects with an extensive accumulation of provocative
historical facts ("the U.S. Air Force bombing raids on Tokyo exacted a
higher cost in lives and property" than the later atomic bombings),
Vanderbilt takes great pains to reveal the Cold War policies behind the
scattered remnants he encounters. Once-ubiquitous fallout shelter signs
were a result of the Kennedy administration's National Fallout Shelter
Survey, undertaken by "a mobile army of atomic surveyors (many of them
architecture students)." As far as blastworthiness is concerned, "the
toughest job is myth control," a NORAD civil engineer tells Vanderbilt
during his trip 4,400 feet underground to the North American Aerospace
Defense Command Center. This book certainly does its part in debunking the
"Duck, and Cover" mindset.

[Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.]

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http://www.thebombproject.org

The Bomb Project is a comprehensive on-line compendium of nuclear-related
links, imagery and documentation. It is intended specifically as a
resource for artists, and encourages those working in all media, from
net.art, film and video, eco-intervention and site-specific installation
to more traditional forms of agitprop, to use this site to search for raw
material. The Bomb Project has gathered together links to nuclear image
archives (still and moving), historical documents, current news, NGOs and
activist organizations as well as government labs and arms treaties. It
makes accessible the declassified files and graphic documentation produced
by the nuclear industry itself, providing a context for comparative study,
analysis and creativity.