Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to build backyard shelters while governments exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the specter of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms of fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Bunker fantasies stratified class, region, race, and gender and created often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present day. A substantial Introduction defines “bunker fantasy” and the meanings of shelter and security since the end of World War II. The five chapters of Part 1 taxonomize the primary and sometimes overlapping forms taken by the bunker and its fantasies during its first heyday in the years around the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: the basement or backyard shelter, suburbia, and the nuclear family; the cave, tribalism, and feral humanity; the private supershelter, survivalism, and self-reliance; the community shelter, infrastructure, and urban bunkerism; and the government supershelter, paranoia, and paternalism. The four chapters of Part 2 treat the new bunker fantasies that emerged around 1983, the closest the world had come to nuclear war since 1962, in general popular culture, men’s action fiction, nuclear realism, and feminist science fiction. A conclusion briefly discusses the legacy of these decades in today’s anxieties around security, borders, and apocalypse both real and imagined.
Star Trek : paradigme juridique et laboratoire du droit
