Featuring 170 striking photographs, Abandoned Cold War Places is a fascinating visual history of the relics left behind by both sides from the late 1940s to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Now a 6-part mini-series called Why the Rest of Us Die airing on VICE TV! The shocking truth about the government’s secret plans to survive a catastrophic attack on US soil—even if the rest of us die—is “a frightening eye-opener” (Kirkus Reviews) that spans the dawn of the nuclear age to today, and "contains everything one could possibly want to know" (The Wall Street Journal). Every day in Washington, DC, the blue-and-gold first Helicopter Squadron, codenamed “MUSSEL,” flies over the Potomac River. As obvious as the Presidential motorcade, most people assume the squadron is a travel perk for VIPs. They’re only half right: while the helicopters do provide transport, the unit exists to evacuate high-ranking officials in the event of a terrorist or nuclear attack on the capital. In the event of an attack, select officials would be whisked by helicopters to a ring of secret bunkers around Washington, even as ordinary citizens were left to fend for themselves. “In exploring the incredible lengths (and depths) that successive administrations have gone to in planning for the aftermath of a nuclear assault, Graff deftly weaves a tale of secrecy and paranoia” (The New York Times Book Review) with details "that read like they've been ripped from the pages of a pulp spy novel" (Vice). For more than sixty years, the US government has been developing secret Doomsday strategies to protect itself, and the multibillion-dollar Continuity of Government (COG) program takes numerous forms—from its potential to evacuate the Liberty Bell from Philadelphia to the plans to launch nuclear missiles from a Boeing-747 jet flying high over Nebraska. Garrett M. Graff sheds light on the inner workings of the 650-acre compound, called Raven Rock, just miles from Camp David, as well as dozens of other bunkers the government built for its top leaders during the Cold War, from the White House lawn to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado to Palm Beach, Florida, and the secret plans that would have kicked in after a Cold War nuclear attack to round up foreigners and dissidents and nationalize industries. Equal parts a presidential, military, and cultural history, Raven Rock tracks the evolution of the government plan and the threats of global war from the dawn of the nuclear era through the War on Terror.

“A vivid reminder of the ever-present threat of a global apocalypse that formed the backdrop to the Cold War. This is an excellent book.” —History of War Medieval castles, the defensive systems of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the trenches and bunkers of the First World War, the great citadels of the Second World War—all these have been described in depth. But the fortifications of the Cold War—the hidden forts of the nuclear age—have not been catalogued and studied in the same way. Paul Ozorak’s Underground Structures of the Cold War: The World Below fills the gap. After the devastation caused by the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the outbreak of the Cold War, all over the world shelters were constructed deep underground for civilians, government leaders and the military. Wartime structures were taken over and adapted and thousands of men went to work drilling new tunnels and constructing bunkers of every possible size. At the height of the Cold War, in some countries an industry of bunker-makers profited from the public’s fear of annihilation. Paul Ozorak describes when and where these bunkers were built, and records what has become of them. He explains how they would have been used if a nuclear war had broken out, and in the case of weapons bases, he shows how these weapons would have been deployed. His account covers every sort of facility—public shelters, missile sites, command and communication centers, storage depots, hospitals. A surprising amount of information has appeared in the media about these places since the end of the Cold War, and Paul Ozorak’s book takes full advantage of it.

Since prehistory, bunkers have been built as protection from cataclysmic social and environmental forces, and as places of power and transformation. Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears- from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn't take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere. In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. From the 'dread merchants' hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now, an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus. The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us, in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it's in our minds.

For almost five decades, the United Kingdom made plans for a nuclear attack that never came. To help their citizens, civil servants, and armed forces prepare, those in power designed and published a variety of booklets, posters, and how-to guides. Most infamous among these was the Protect and Survive campaign, but just as fascinating are lesser-known materials prepared for the United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation and the Royal Observer Corps, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. From terrifying images issued by central government, to local councils' sometimes amateurish survival guides, 'Nuclear War in the UK' is a look at the way Britain's authorities reacted to the Soviet nuclear threat.

Tracing the partnership between architects and American civil defense officials during the Cold War.

Why some Americans built fallout shelters—an exploration America's Cold War experience For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy—"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time—forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being. Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism, what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Tracing the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national resolve, or rather encourage political and military leaders to think in terms of a "winnable" war? Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail—including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon—One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.

"...explores the fascinating subject of Spokane's backyard bunkers, basement hideaways, and public fallout shelters..." --Cover.

Underground facilities are used extensively by many nations to conceal and protect strategic military functions and weapons' stockpiles. Because of their depth and hardened status, however, many of these strategic hard and deeply buried targets could only be put at risk by conventional or nuclear earth penetrating weapons (EPW). Recently, an engineering feasibility study, the robust nuclear earth penetrator program, was started by DOE and DOD to determine if a more effective EPW could be designed using major components of existing nuclear weapons. This activity has created some controversy about, among other things, the level of collateral damage that would ensue if such a weapon were used. To help clarify this issue, the Congress, in P.L. 107-314, directed the Secretary of Defense to request from the NRC a study of the anticipated health and environmental effects of nuclear earth-penetrators and other weapons and the effect of both conventional and nuclear weapons against the storage of biological and chemical weapons. This report provides the results of those analyses. Based on detailed numerical calculations, the report presents a series of findings comparing the effectiveness and expected collateral damage of nuclear EPW and surface nuclear weapons under a variety of conditions.