The War Game

Atomic bomb shelter pass

The Power of Decision (1956)

Death wears bunny slippers

In Nuclear Silos, Death Wears a Snuggie | Danger Room | Wired.com

Survival town

A great promotional newsreel from 1955 about "Survival Town", a full-set town model in the Nevada desert on which the US government threw an atom bomb in order to study what happens. They created scenes of daily life with mannequins and even stocked the fridges to analyze radiation levels afterwards.

There's also a two-part color video on Youtube that goes into much more detail about the setting up of the town and the subsequent blast which is rather interesting too. Of course it's all in super-patriotic fifties newsreel speak and music background! More reading and photos in the Weburbanist article.

Blown To Smithereens: The Secret Story Of Survival Town | Design + Ideas on WU

How to survive an atomic bomb...

Wow, that comes in handy. Don't forget to print it out and keep it in your purse all the time. At leat you can use it to shield yourself from the rays, so be sure to print it on really thick paper...

Holy shit, that stuff exists...2 person nuclear shelter

Long time no post,
but here I am back, finally posting from work.
I first saw this playing Fallout 3 and even then i thought "amazing", but hey, what do you know - this things really exist.
Imagine sitting in there while the wolrd outside goes down, realizing after a couple of hours that you will not be able to go out FOR THE NEXT MILLION YEARS?

Comfort the dying

This old public service announcement of the city of Portland doesn't euphemize regarding a nuclear attack: they actually propose to "place newspaper over your head" and "comfort the dying".

mappeal: Comfort the dying

Jericho

Did we honestly never have a post about the great TV show Jericho so far? Pffshh Jesus, I thought that's why we're here! Jericho was running in only two seasons in 2006 and 2008 and got canceled for good after the very short second season. It's about a small town in the aftermath of a nuclear war and after several bombs detonate over large American cities, disrupting the country.

One of my favorite scenes from that season is posted above, I'm really sorry for spoiling it all if you don't know the show yet (if that's the case don't watch the video, he he). High points in the series are around the climax of season 1, when all-out-war with another community ensues.

Alas, Babylon, 1959

Alas, Babylon is a novel by American writer Pat Frank, first published in 1959. It takes place in small community in Florida which is spared the nuclear bomb attacks and subsequent fallout. This novel leaves out a few of the more grueling effects, namely radiation disease and nuclear winter, but what's more important is the depiction of life in the small town after it's separated from the rest of the country, and there the novel really shines. (Jericho and Battlestar Galactica, we caught you copying huge portions of the plot here.) This comes from the same period as A Canticle For Leibowitz and On The Beach, both of which are also excellent.

In Fort Repose, a river town in Central Florida, it was said that sending a message by Western Union was the same as broadcasting it over the combined networks. This was not entirely true. It was true that Florence Wechek, the manager, gossiped. Yet she judiciously classified the personal intelligence that flowed under her plump fingers, and maintained a prudent censorship over her tongue. The scandalous and the embarrassing she excised from her conversation. Sprightly, trivial, and harmless items she passed on to friends, thus enhancing her status and relieving the tedium of spinsterhood. If your sister was in trouble, and wired for money, the secret was safe with Florence Wechek. But if your sister bore a legitimate baby, its sex and weight would soon be known all over town.

Permissive action links

Funny how sometimes you actually learn something from playing video games: One mission in the Fort Constantine level in Fallout 3 involves the launching of a nuclear ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missile, the launch code for which is "00000000". As it turns out, the so-called "Permissive Action Links" (another word for security locks to prevent unauthorized launches) for the nuclear arsenal of the United States were kept at all zeros until 1977. Another stunning account of Bruce Blair, whose Nuclear Recollections I have posted about recently.

Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark (Episode #1: The Case of the Missing “Permissive Action Links”) - Bruce G. Blair, Ph.D.

Nuclear recollections

Dr Bruce Blair recounts his past as a missile operater for nuclear ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missiles). It's strong, scary stuff.

It's nerve-wracking because it's easy to make a critical mistake. If we decoded a message incorrectly and dialed a single wrong digit into the computer that targeted our missiles, we might attack and destroy cities instead of rural missile silos in Russia. We could have easily killed millions of civilians by mistake.

We were usually still processing checklists when a warble tone signifying an incoming missile attack would be heard on our loudspeaker. We would hurriedly, sometimes frantically, strap into our chairs. In the real world, we would expect a violent shaking of our capsule mounted on giant shock absorbers. But in the mock run we were blasé and continued to race through the checklists.

We knew there was a system to the madness. The drill led us inexorably up the ladder of escalation, from a minor fire or incident to a full-blown order to unleash all 50 missiles. We had been conditioned, like Pavlov's dogs, to expect certain war orders to flow in a certain sequence, culminating in the launch of all 50 missiles. It was classic conditioned reflexes with absolute psychological certainty that it would all end in a hypothetical all-out nuclear war.

Nuclear Recollections - Bruce Blair's Nuclear Column - CDI

Self-made fallout shelters

GOOD magazine shows some pictures from the book Waiting for the End of the World by photographer Richard Ross, who spent five years traveling and photographing the interiors of bomb shelters.

Picture Show: Waiting for the End of the World | GOOD

Mothership Zeta

Shit, you would think the last thing the thoroughly savaged post-apocalyptic Earth of Fallout 3 would need is an alien invasion, but here comes Mothership Zeta, the fifth and last downloadable add-on scenario for the game, due out on 3 August 2009.

Fallout: Welcome to the Official Site - Mothership Zeta

Evasion seat

Last weekend I visited the recently opened museum of the former atom bunker of the German government near Marienthal / Bad Neuenahr. The bunker (built between 1960 and 1972) is located about 20 km near the former capital Bonn in a strategical location constructed to enable quick evacuation of the German government in case of a full-scale nuclear attack. The bunker, titled "Ausweichsitz", literally "evasion seat (of the government)", was constructed to house 3000 people for 30 days, in order to keep the German government in a functioning state even when under nuclear attack. For this purpose around 900 offices and 950 dormitories were available in the bunker, plus support systems including 5 canteens, power plant, factory, spare parts storages etc. The bunker tunnels spanned a total of 17km underground and covered 85,000sqm of usable space. Today only a small portion of the bunker is still preserved in the museum, 99% were deconstructed in the phase after the decommissioning of the bunker in 1997.


A visit to the bunker is a veritable Fallout experience, however it's pretty astounding how naive and rudimentary these facilities were planned (all in good German bureaucracy and orderliness, of course). Take the "decontamination chamber" for instance, pictures below, which is located right after the heavy entrance gates. Decontamination consists of two shower rooms, one with regular showers and then another one with "acid" showers. Through a small window with a manually operated wiper, nuclear doctors are watching if everybody has showered well enough...it makes you wonder if this is all there is to dealing with a nuclear catastrophe on a major scale? Same goes for the sick bay, complete with exactly one operating table and one cupboard.


There were more problems with the bunker. For once, it didn't even satisfy the NATO standards for construction which called for at least 200m of rock cover. The Marienthal bunker reached a maximum of 115m, which wouldn't have withstood a direct hit of a hydrogen bomb and the resulting shifts in the bedrock. Also, the whole business of an atom bomb emitting an EMP strike and thus rendering useless most circuits was apparently forgotten, too. I'm not getting into the problem of why bother..? if the whole of Europe is a nuclear wasteland anyway. The whole project cost a large amount of millions in construction, maintenance and ultimately dismantling, and can be termed a conceptional disaster, showpiece to the madness of the Cold War.

Still, the museum is worth a visit and holds a couple of interesting exhibits, such as a "explosion-proof portable phone", vintage posters, and a great Command Center complete with old-school situation map. So a visit is highly recommended if you can find the place. I'm definitely going again soon to catch some more pictures. Unfortunately my camera broke, so I'm using pictures from the (much recommended) web site of the museum for now (see link below). While there, be sure to download the original Bunker Gate siren ringtone!


Ausweichsitz der Verfassungsorgane der Bundesrepublik Deutschland - Historie

Check out the thermal damage caused by a nuclear explosion

This little widget allows you to check out the blast radius of different sizes of nuclear bombs on any given location. It uses Google maps, so make sure to check out your hometown, too. Would be too bad if you camped inside the blast-radius, wouldn't it?

Ground Zero: Google Maps and Nuclear Weapons

Survival under atomic attack

1950’s Civil Defense Film to prepare civilians for military attack with nuclear bombs.