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Deel je verhaal via onderstaande knop (dat kan anoniem als je wil). Als je een mooi beeld hebt dat past bij het verhaal, voeg dat toe. Je kan ook je verhaal koppelen aan een van de Koude Oorlog monumenten in de lijst. Dat is extra mooi, want dan plaatsen we de verhalen bij die monumentale objecten. Zo krijgen wij een beter beeld van wat de Koude Oorlog en de monumenten hebben betekend voor ons land.

WAAROM DOEN WE DIT?

Ook een oorlog die hier nooit heeft plaatsgevonden verdient het om herinnerd te worden en doorverteld aan toekomstige generaties. Want er is veel te leren van de Koude Oorlog. Daarom willen we de monumenten van de Koude Oorlog, zoals atoomschuilkelders, luchtwachttorens, en kazernes bewaren voor de toekomst. Verhalen zorgen ervoor dat we deze toekomstige monumenten beter kunnen duiden.

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Koude Oorlog Monument | Koude Oorlog Verhalen

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Deel je verhaal via onderstaande knop (dat kan anoniem als je wil). Als je een mooi beeld hebt dat past bij het verhaal, voeg dat toe. Je kan ook je verhaal koppelen aan een van de Koude Oorlog monumenten in de lijst. Dat is extra mooi, want dan plaatsen we de verhalen bij die monumentale objecten.

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When Will Security Go Back to Normal? | Philosophy Tube

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Switzerland is well-known as one of the safest countries on earth and as a prime example of efficiency and efficacy. One of the central reasons that such a country exists is the development of a culture based on protection, which is supported by the presence and production of national security.

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Exhibition. Oct 16, 2005–Jan 2, 2006. SAFE: Design Takes On Risk, the first major design exhibition at MoMA since its reopening in November 2004, presents more than 300 contemporary products and prototypes designed to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances, respond to emerge…

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What comes to mind when you think of nuclear fallout bunkers from the Cold War? Maybe a small underground concrete hole filled with canned goods from the 1960s that could fit a single family? Well, in Sweden, they built large bunkers that could fit thousands of people. And they were extremely fancy.

The 1958 film "Vi går under jorden" (We Go Underground), which is available on YouTube, has been uploaded in Swedish, but even if you don't speak the language, it's pretty clear what's going on-at least once you understand that the video is showing underground bunkers and not something else entirely, like a church or a school.

The underground bunker was built underneath an old girls' school in Stockholm and featured hobby rooms for sewing and other crafts, classrooms for students, as well as a large gymnasium. Viewers are also shown a large theater.

There were art classes and even art adorning the walls, presumably a choice to make the living spaces feel more comforting after the people above ground had been turned to radioactive dust.

The 2018 paper Urban Catastrophe and Sheltered Salvation by Peter Bennesved & Fredrik Norén helps give context to the film within Swedish culture at the time. The authors explain that Sweden's social welfare state, sometimes called The People's Home, meant that technology and creature comforts in the bunker would be provided for the wellbeing of the people above and beyond mere survival:

These activities were supposed to connote tradition and Swedishness according the ideas of the People's Home and thus make the shelters' integration into modern life seem less arbitrary. Simultaneously, the [Civil Defense Board] also made sure to maintain the economic argument. The range of activities displayed showed that this was not underground space wasted. In fact, from the realistic and natural imagery, it seemed as if it was already in good, practical use.

And that's precisely what's so jarring for viewers today.

There was even an archery range and gun shooting range, to keep up those marksmanship skills since Swedes would be expected to keep fighting it out with the Soviets after the nuclear missiles between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been exchanged. In fact, Sweden still takes civil defense very seriously on account of being so close to Russia.

The 1958 film also showed large underground garage for working on cars. And if you're wondering why you'd want an underground garage for cars in a nuclear bunker, there's actually a good reason: They were used for peacetime activities and helped justify the expense of the shelter.

Below, we see a photo of an underground auto garage in Stockholm in 1955 that was billed as a great resource for peacetime, which could quickly be converted into a large shelter if war ever came.

In 2018, the government of Sweden published a pamphlet title " If the war comes," and sent it to every Swedish household. The pamphlet included information on what to do when you hear air raid sirens and preemptively explained that any news about resistance stopping to an occupation would be false.

"Resistance shall be made all the time and in every situation. It depends on You - Your efforts, Your determination, Your will to survive!" the pamphlet explained.

Australian state broadcaster SBS produced a documentary in 2019 about Swedish preppers, and included footage from the 1958 Swedish film, which they translated to English, providing more context for what's going on in the movie. The Australian documentary explains that 3,400 people could fit inside that one bunker. Again, when you compare that to the kinds of fallout shelters that Americans were encouraged to build on their own, it's astounding.

The U.S. actually had an extensive debate in the early 1960s about whether the government had any responsibility to build enormous underground bunkers that could house the population of entire towns and cities. The January 12, 1962 issue of Life magazine featured an illustration on its cover for a "community shelter" that would be built underneath a bridge.

Many of the illustrations in the issue of Life were pretty dystopian, which isn't a surprise, given the subject matter. In fact, this one appears to have people in severe distress, with the underground shelter in a standing-room-only situation. See that guy on the right holding his hand up and calling out? It's not clear what's going on there, but it doesn't look good.

You could argue that the illustration is just being accurate, since the world above ground would presumably be a barren wasteland after a nuclear bomb was dropped. But when you contrast it with the way that people are smiling and going about their lives in the 1958 Swedish film, it's clear there was another message being sent by the U.S. government here: You'll want to build your own shelter so you're not stuck in some dingy underground facility with a bunch of strangers.

One 1963 study by Michigan State University found that only 1.4 percent of Americans had their own nuclear fallout shelter, and just 5 percent told researchers they had a plan to build one in the future. More than half of Americans in 1963 said they had no plan to ever build one.

You can watch the entire 11-minute film "We Go Underground," on YouTube.

The bunker from this 1958 film has since fallen into disrepair, following the cuts to defense spending after the Soviet Union dissolved in the early 1990s. But ever since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which started in February of 2022, Sweden has again been taking civil defense much more seriously. Sweden has even applied to join NATO, along with its neighbor Finland, which likely means there could be upgraded nuclear bunker facilities in their future.
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Sweden's Nuclear Bunkers Were Extremely Fancy During the Cold War - Paleofuture

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What comes to mind when you think of nuclear fallout bunkers from the Cold War? Maybe a small underground concrete hole filled with canned goods from the 1960s that could fit a single family? Well, in Sweden, they built large bunkers that could fit thousands of people. And they were extremely fancy.

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Zivilschutz Was wurde aus Deutschlands Atomschutzbunkern?

Im Kalten Krieg war die Angst vor einem Atomkrieg riesig. Der Staat baute Bunker, auch Privatleute buddelten um ihr Leben. Längst haben die Schutzräume ausgedient - manche der 2000 Anlagen kann man besichtigen.

Die Luft ist klamm, es riecht nach Keller - massive Betonwände, niedrige Decken, dicke Belüftungsrohre, gedämpftes Licht. Im Atombunker unter dem Vorplatz des Hamburger Hauptbahnhofs empfängt René Rühmann 25 Gäste des Vereins Hamburger Unterwelten: "Der Bunker ist jetzt verschlossen. Wenn sich jemand unwohl fühlt, sagen Sie Bescheid."

Das Relikt aus Stahlbeton ist 170 Meter lang und etwa 17 Meter breit, es reicht über drei Etagen, die unterste in zwölf Metern Tiefe. An der Oberfläche sieht man nur zwei unauffällige Treppenabgänge und einen Litfaßsäulen-artigen Turm mit Antenne und Auswurfklappe. Im Bunker, so stellte man sich das zu Zeiten des Kalten Krieges vor, sollten bis zu 2700 Menschen Schutz finden. Ein klaustrophobischer Albtraum.

Gebaut wurde der Tiefbunker Steintorwall, so die offizielle Bezeichnung, bereits im Zweiten Weltkrieg und entkam der durch die Westalliierten verfügten Vernichtung, weil es im ausgebombten Hamburg einfach zu viele Obdachlose gab. Später wurde er erst zum Bunkerhotel, dann zu einem Lager der Deutschen Bahn. Bis er sein Bunker-Revival erlebte.

Die Kubakrise führte die Welt 1962 nah an den atomaren Abgrund. Ab 1965 wurde der Bunkerbau in ganz Westdeutschland vorangetrieben. Auch in der DDR entstanden Schutzanlagen - beide deutschen Staaten, vom Westen wie vom Ostblock zum potenziellen Schlachtfeld eines möglichen Atomkriegs erkoren, igelten sich ein. Hamburgs Betonkoloss wurde von 1964 bis 1969 zum Atomschutzbunker umgebaut.

Bunker-Know-how für Heimwerker

Viel Sinn hatte das eigentlich nicht. "Es gibt kein Bauwerk, das diesen Waffen standhalten könnte", sagt René Rühmann. Zumindest keinem direkten Treffer. Bei einem Nahtreffer in ein paar Kilometern Entfernung wäre das Gebäude aber möglicherweise funktionstüchtig geblieben - auch wenn es sich mächtig geschüttelt hätte. Über den Sitzreihen sind deshalb weiche Kopfstützen aus Schaumstoff angebracht, "damit man mit dem Kopf nicht aneinanderschlägt".

Trotz aller Absichtserklärungen war es weder geplant noch möglich, genug Schutzplätze für die gesamte Bevölkerung bereitzustellen. Die Regierung setzte deshalb auch darauf, Privatleute davon zu überzeugen, ihre eigenen Keller zu Bunkern auszubauen.

Mit öffentlichen Kampagnen warb der Bundesverband für den Selbstschutz (BVS) für sogenannte Hausschutzräume: So ein Privatbunker, erfuhr man, lasse sich auch prächtig als Party- oder Hobbykeller nutzen. Das Thema bediente wachsende Ängste, bald sah man das auch auf dem Sachbuchmarkt. Titel wie "Der kluge Mann baut tief!" vermittelten Bunker-Know-how für Heimwerker.

Doch die Deutschen ließen sich nicht so recht für den Bunkerbau begeistern, Partybunker blieben selten. Die Friedensbewegung zog die Bemühungen durch den Kakao: "Tierschutz ist für alle Tiere, Zivilschutz ist für die Katz."

Pläne hatten die Behörden schon: Mindestens zwei Wochen sollten die Überlebenden eines Atomschlages im Bunker ausharren, dann zurück an die Oberfläche und mit Bussen aus der Gefahrenzone gebracht werden. Klingt verrückt, aber die Verstrahlung durch eine Bombe ist tatsächlich weit weniger langfristig als beispielsweise durch die Havarie eines Atomkraftwerks.

Es fährt ein Bus nach Nirgendwo

Indes: Wer hätte da eigentlich wohin fahren sollen? Auf dem Höhepunkt des Kalten Krieges gingen Militärstrategen davon aus, dass die Großmächte über das atomare Arsenal verfügen, die Erde mehrfach komplett unbewohnbar zu machen; Schätzungen divergierten zwischen 20 und 80 Mal. Man nannte das Nuclear Overkill - das Amtsdeutsch fand für diesen Irrsinn gewohnt elegant den Begriff "Mehrfachvernichtungskapazität".

Der Kalte Krieg verging, die Blöcke zerfielen, der Overkill blieb. Und doch ist die Welt heute anders, die Bedrohungen haben sich verändert. Großflächige Bombardierungen mit der Möglichkeit zur rechtzeitigen Warnung der Bevölkerung - dieses Kriegsszenario lag laut Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe (BBK) dem Konzept der öffentlichen Schutzräume zugrunde. Von so etwas geht inzwischen niemand mehr aus: "Bei den heutigen Schadenszenarien mit lokalen Unglücksfällen oder Terroranschlägen ohne Vorwarnzeit können die öffentlichen Schutzräume keine Schutzwirkung entfalten", heißt dazu es aus der Zivilschutzbehörde.

Nach Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts vor über 25 Jahren hatten die Bunker ausgedient. Als mit der Attacke auf das World Trade Center am 11. September 2001 der islamistische Terror den Westen erreichte, wurde endgültig klar, dass vor den modernen Formen der bewaffneten Aggression kein Bunker mehr schützen würde. Etwas zynisch formuliert: Was bringt ein Bunker unter dem Bahnhofsvorplatz, wenn sich am Bahnsteig ein Selbstmordattentäter in die Luft sprengt?

Erst im Mai 2007 entschied die Innenministerkonferenz, das Konzept flächendeckender öffentlicher Schutzräume aufzugeben und dafür kein Geld mehr einzuplanen. Für die Bundesrepublik wurden die mehr als 2000 Bauten zu Altlasten, derer sie sich entledigen wollte.

"Ist unter Ihnen jemand mit Platzangst?"

Die Anlagen wurden der Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben (BImA) übergeben, die meisten verkauft, viele zurückgebaut. Der größte Teil befand sich in kommunalem Besitz, von den 216 Anlagen im Bundesbesitz sind laut Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe (BBK) nur noch acht formal in der sogenannten Zivilschutzbindung. Aber auch diese Anlagen seien nicht mehr einsatzfähig, sagt BBK-Sprecher Wahid Samimy.

Wieder andere, wie am Hamburger Hauptbahnhof, sind tatsächlich noch begehbar, werden von Vereinen betreut und als Museen und Dokumentationsstätten erhalten. Ausgedient haben sie alle. Gut so: Der Bunker war eine hilflose Scheinantwort auf den schlimmsten vorstellbaren Horror.

Unter dem Vorplatz des Hamburger Hauptbahnhofes haben die Besucher inzwischen den Schleusenbereich im untersten Stockwerk erreicht. "Ist unter Ihnen jemand mit Platzangst?", fragt Rühmann. Dann zieht die Hydraulik die luftdichten Stahltüren zu, mit einem dumpfen Rumsen fallen sie in die Rahmen.

An den Bunkereingängen befinden sich Zählplatten, auf die alle Besucher beim Hereinkommen treten, eine sogenannte Dosieranlage. Der Bunkerwart, der den Knopf zum Schließen der Türen gedrückt hätte, konnte den Eingangsbereich nicht einsehen. Ein an die Zählanlage angeschlossenes Display hätte ihm automatisch gemeldet: "Alles schließen!"

Wenn das Soll erreicht, der Bunker also voll gewesen wäre, hätte der Wart den Knopf gedrückt. Der Bunker wäre abgeriegelt, egal wie viele Schutzsuchende noch draußen gestanden hätten. Der Hinweis an den Türen "Finger weg. Quetschgefahr" ist verharmlosend. Viele hätten wohl schon im Gedränge vor dem Bunker ihr Leben gelassen, sagt Sören Kempe, Mitglied bei Hamburger Unterwelten und heute der Mann an der Schleuse. Wer so eine Tour erlebt hat, wünscht sich die Bunker nicht zurück.

Zivilschutz wird in Deutschland heute völlig anders verstanden. Im Jahr 2002 richtete die Bundesregierung die Koordinierungsstelle Nachsorge, Opfer- und Angehörigenhilfe (Noah) ein. Ihre Aufgabe ist pragmatisch, wie BBK-Sprecher Samimy erklärt: "Sie bietet nach schweren Unglücksfällen, Terroranschlägen und Katastrophen im Ausland, bei denen Deutsche betroffen sind, eine akute und längerfristige psychosoziale Versorgung an." Klingt, als ginge es hier wirklich um Hilfe. Und nicht um nur scheinbare Sicherheit.

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Atomschutzbunker: Der Zivilschutz im Kalten Krieg

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Im Kalten Krieg war die Angst vor einem Atomkrieg riesig. Der Staat baute Bunker, auch Privatleute buddelten um ihr Leben. Längst haben die Schutzräume ausgedient - manche der 2000 Anlagen kann man besichtigen. Die Luft ist klamm, es riecht nach Keller - massive Betonwände, niedrige Decken, dicke Belüftungsrohre, gedämpftes Licht.

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Doomsday prepping is no longer a fringe obsession. The survivalist movement, which was long stereotyped as made up of gun-wielding, right-wing older white men, is evolving.

According to John Ramey, the founder of a popular how-to prepping website called The Prepared, young, urban-dwelling women are his fastest-growing audience. The site experienced a 25-fold boost in traffic the week COVID shut down parts of the U.S.

Author Melissa Scholes Young attended a survivalist training camp to research her new novel, "The Hive," which features a character who is a prepper.

While prepping has its roots in American individualism and self-reliance, it's also big business. Some of the ultra-wealthy are going so far as to invest in multi-million dollar bunkers. Prepping companies like Judy have sprung up. It sells survival kits (known by preppers as "bug out bags") and was endorsed by the Kardashians on Instagram. Between 2017 and 2025, Allied Research Marketing projects that the global market for "incident and emergency management" will jump in value from $75.5 billion to $423 billion.

What's behind the growing popularity of the prepper movement? And is the community built on an ethos of "survival of the fittest" accessible to all?

Bradley Garrett, John Ramey, and Melissa Scholes Young join us for the conversation.
Like what you hear? Find more of our programs.

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Doomsday prepping is no longer a fringe obsession. The survivalist movement is evolving.While prepping has its roots in American individualism and self-reliance, it's also big business. Prepping companies like Judy sell survival kits (known by preppers as "bug out bags").

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In Nederland bevinden zich vele fysieke resten van de Koude Oorlog, een tijd waarin de wereld was verdeeld tussen Oost en West. Het 'Rode Gevaar' leidde tot de bouw van een geheime infrastructuur, zowel militair als civiel, zowel bovengronds als ondergronds. Onderdeel daarvan waren de noodzetels voor de rijksoverheid, die in dit rapport uitgebreid zijn onderzocht.

De minister van OCW heeft de Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed gevraagd kennis op te bouwen over het erfgoed van de Koude Oorlog en te gaan werken aan een beperkt aanwijzingsprogramma.

Colofon

Auteur: Kees van Leeuwen
Opdrachtgever: Ben de Vries (RCE)
Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, december 2020

Bekijk ook de gelijknamige video op ons You Tube kanaal.

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In geval van nood. Ondergrondse noodzetels voor de rijksoverheid tijdens de Koude Oorlog

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In Nederland bevinden zich vele fysieke resten van de Koude Oorlog, een tijd waarin de wereld was verdeeld tussen Oost en West. Het 'Rode Gevaar' leidde tot de bouw van een geheime infrastructuur, zowel militair als civiel, zowel bovengronds als ondergronds. Onderdeel daarvan waren de noodzetels voor de rijksoverheid, die in dit rapport uitgebreid zijn onderzocht.

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refreshing and singularly unique documentary style

it's after 2am in the morning here and I actually signed up just to applaud the quality of the documentary and it's significance to the thoughts it may engender in you on the legacy that we leave behind and lastly to admonish a review of 1 star.

this is a singularly unique documentary and well worth your time to view and review it in your own mind.

the music is interwoven throughout the piece and until the end credits roll you find that you were unaware of the music though you'll find yourself scanning the credits for the music section as it adds so much to the piece.

peace out. David.

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Suggest an edit or add missing content

By what name was Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (2010) officially released in Canada in English?

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Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (2010) - IMDb

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refreshing and singularly unique documentary style it's after 2am in the morning here and I actually signed up just to applaud the quality of the documentary and it's significance to the thoughts it may engender in you on the legacy that we leave behind and lastly to admonish a review of 1 star.

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Episode 114

In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They would be there on assignment.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the nation's only permanent underground repository for nuclear waste. Radioactive byproducts from nuclear weapons manufacturing and nuclear power plants. WIPP was designed not only to handle a waste stream of various forms of nuclear sludge, but also more mundane things that interacted with radioactive materials, such as tools and gloves.

WIPP, which is located deep in the New Mexico desert, was designed to store all of this radioactive material and keep us all safe from it.

Eventually, WIPP will be sealed up and left alone. Years will pass and those years will become decades. Those decades will become centuries and those centuries will roll into millennia. People above ground will come and go. Cultures will rise and fall. And all the while, below the surface, that cave full of waste will get smaller and smaller, until the salt swallows up all those oil drums and entombs them. Then, all the old radioactive gloves and tools and little bits from bombs -all still radioactive- will be solidified in the earth's crust for more than 200,000 years. Basically forever.

Storing something safely forever is a huge design problem; in fact, the jury's still out on whether WIPP has solved the basics of the storage problem at all. In February of 2014, a leak was detected at WIPP which exposed several workers to radiation and WIPP has been closed since. The Department of Energy now predicts that it could be up to three years before WIPP is fully operational again.

We know these facts because we can look them up and read the news in a shared language. The problem that the aforementioned panel was convened to address was how to communicate this information to people 10,000 years in the future.

This WIPP site is going to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, though this panel was only responsible for keeping this place sufficiently marked for humans for the next 10,000 years-thinking beyond that timeframe was thought to be impossible.

Though 10,000 years in the future is still fairly inconceivable. 10,000 years ago, the biggest new technology spreading across the planet was farming. Culturally, we share almost nothing with people alive back then. Who knows the world will look like 10,000 years from now?

The panel began by thinking about language. But language, like radioactive materials, has a half life. Beowulf, from only 1,000 years ago, is incomprehensible today.

The panel also considered symbols, which seemed like they might be more universal. A smiley face seems to have a global appeal. And face logos have already been used as warnings.

Carl Sagan (who was invited to participate on the panel but had a schedule conflict) sent the WIPP panel a letter saying this whole marker problem was easily solved with the right symbol, and he knew just the one: the skull and crossbones.

But symbols can also shift over time. The skull and crossbones actually began not as a symbol of death, but a symbol of rebirth. The earliest uses of it are in religious paintings and sculptures from uh middle ages. At the foot of the cross where Jesus is crucified, there lies a skull with two bones in the shape of a cross, not an 'x.' The skull is supposed to be that of Adam.

A few centuries later, ship captains started to draw little skull and cross bones in their logs, next the names of sailors who had died at sea. Sailors came to associate the symbol with death.

Fast forward another century. Pirates realized they could use symbolism to terrify their targets into compliance. But there were several different designs besides the "jolly roger" that pirates used, including an hourglass, and a bleeding heart. The banner of Edward Teach (also known as "Blackbeard") had both.

Then, in 1720, a pirate named Calico Jack Rackham was captured and put on trial. The trial was the sensational story of the day, and everyone in England was talking about it. And it just so happened Calico Jack's symbol was the Jolly Roger, though in his case the bones were replaced with a pair of crossed swords.

After that trial, the skull and crossbones permeated culture as a symbol of danger. By the late 1800s, it was starting to be used as a symbol for poison. Then in the 1940s, the Nazis adopted it for their SS death head divisions.

The skull and crossbones came to be associated with danger and death around the world. But its meaning didn't truly become universal.

In the last few decades, the Jolly Roger has gone mainstream. Now you'll see it on backpacks, toddler onesies, and even on water bottles. So much for indicating poison.

Ruling out language and symbols, the panelists thought about using some visual storytelling. Panelist Jon Lomberg thought you could define the radioactive trefoil symbol with a sequence of events.

But if you read that comic strip from the bottom up, it looks like the man has found the fountain of youth!

Another panelist, a landscape artist and architect named Mike Brill, realized that they actually need to transmit information into the future. They just needed to make people scared of being in this dangerous place. He envisioned huge needles jutting up from the ground-a "landscape of thorns."

But there's no way of knowing that this ominous landscape won't become an attraction in itself and actually invite people to explore it.

The most hands-down 99pi favorite solution, though, didn't come from the WIPP brainstorm-rather, it came out of the Human Interference Task Force, a similar panel that was pulled together in 1981 for the now-defunct Yucca Mountain project. It was proposed by two philosophers, Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri.

Bastide and Fabbri came to the conclusion that the most durable thing that humanity has ever made is culture: religion, folklore, belief systems. They may morph over time, but an essential message can get pulled through over millennia. They proposed that we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation, which would be released into the wild to serve as living Geiger counters. Then, we would create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these "ray cats," the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.

This is all a lot of effort to protect people that our great great great grandkids will never know. All while people now, in our own time, are already harmed by the results of nuclear weapons manufacturing.

The town of Tallevast, Florida is a small, predominantly African-American community south of Tampa, Florida. In the 1960s, a beryllium processing plant was set up in the middle of town to manufacture components for nuclear bombs and build pieces of the Hubble space telescope. It turned out that this plant was never very good about dealing with its waste.**

Tallevast residents started noticing that a lot of people were getting diagnosed with cancer and other diseases including berylliosis, which you get from exposure to beryllium. Tallevast filed a lawsuit against the company that owns the plant, Lockheed-Martin. Lockheed spent years dragging out the suit.

Lockheed-Martin happens to be the parent company of Sandia National Labs, the corporation that runs the WIPP site in New Mexico.

Which kind of makes you wonder if the best way to protect people 10,000 years from now is to just make sure we take care of people alive today.

99% Invisible contributor Matthew Kielty spoke with Artist Jon Lomberg; archaeologist Maureen Kaplan; and Roger Nelson, the chief scientist overseeing WIPP.

ORIGINAL MUSIC provided by musician Emperor X. His song "Don't Change Color, Kitty" is guaranteed to get stuck in your head for the next 10,000 years. The song is just one piece of his brand new EP, 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories available now at Bandcamp.

Thanks also to Steve Lerner, author of Sacrifice Zones; to Robb Moss, who has a film forthcoming about WIPP; Matt Stroud and Jordan Oplinger at The Verge; and Abe Van Luick at the Department of Energy.
**CORRECTION: A previous version of this written story stated that beryllium dust contaminated the town of Tallevast's water supply. While some Tallevast residents did contract berylliosis and other ailments from interacting with beryllium dust, this dust was not responsible for the contamination of Tallevast's water. Rather, Tallevast's water was contaminated by a different toxin called Trichloroethylene (TCE), which also originated from the beryllium refining plant. We regret the error.

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In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They would be there on assignment. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the nation's only permanent underground repository for nuclear waste.

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Knowledge regulation and national security in postwar America

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Knowledge regulation and national security in postwar America

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The first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge.

In this groundbreaking book, Mario Daniels and John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only-and not even the most important-regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era.

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Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America

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The first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge. In this groundbreaking book, Mario Daniels and John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945.

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The past 30 years have seen vast changes in our attitudes toward crime. More and more of us live in gated communities; prison populations have skyrocketed; and issues such as racial profiling, community policing, and "zero-tolerance" policies dominate the headlines. How is it that our response to crime and our sense of criminal justice has come to be so dramatically reconfigured? David Garland charts the changes in crime and criminal justice in America and Britain over the past twenty-five years, showing how they have been shaped by two underlying social forces: the distinctive social organization of late modernity and the neoconservative politics that came to dominate the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

Garland explains how the new policies of crime and punishment, welfare and security-and the changing class, race, and gender relations that underpin them-are linked to the fundamental problems of governing contemporary societies, as states, corporations, and private citizens grapple with a volatile economy and a culture that combines expanded personal freedom with relaxed social controls. It is the risky, unfixed character of modern life that underlies our accelerating concern with control and crime control in particular. It is not just crime that has changed; society has changed as well, and this transformation has reshaped criminological thought, public policy, and the cultural meaning of crime and criminals. David Garland's The Culture of Control offers a brilliant guide to this process and its still-reverberating consequences.

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The past 30 years have seen vast changes in our attitudes toward crime. More and more of us live in gated communities; prison populations have skyrocketed; and issues such as racial profiling, community policing, and "zero-tolerance" policies dominate the headlines.

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In recent years, a number of European countries abolished national border controls in favor of Europe’s external frontiers. In doing so, they challenged long-established conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality, and security in world affairs. Setting forth a new analytic framework informed by cons…

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Winner of the 2021 The Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History, sponsored by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).

Political Fallout is the story of one of the first human-driven, truly global environmental crises-radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War-and the international response. Beginning in 1945, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, scattering a massive amount of radioactivity across the globe. The scale of contamination was so vast, and radioactive decay so slow, that the cumulative effect on humans and the environment is still difficult to fully comprehend.

The international debate over nuclear fallout turned global radioactive contamination into an environmental issue, eventually leading the nuclear superpowers to sign the landmark Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963. Bringing together environmental history and Cold War history, Toshihiro Higuchi argues that the PTBT, originally proposed as an arms control measure, transformed into a dual-purpose initiative to check the nuclear arms race and radioactive pollution simultaneously. Higuchi draws on sources in English, Russian, and Japanese, considering both the epistemic differences that emerged in different scientific communities in the 1950s and the way that public consciousness around the risks of radioactive fallout influenced policy in turn. Political Fallout addresses the implications of science and policymaking in the Anthropocene-an era in which humans are confronting environmental changes of their own making.

About the author

Toshihiro Higuchi is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University.

" Political Fallout shows how the superpowers took it upon themselves to determine acceptable risks of nuclear fallout for the entire globe by turning values and opinion into statements of fact. An insightful analysis of how international governance and environmental regulation configured understandings of risk and pollution in the Anthropocene."

-Kate Brown, author of Plutopia and Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

"Higuchi has written a superb study that articulates the role of fallout in ways we have not seen before, showing us how state power shaped our understanding of environmental risks. It is clear that this Cold War story, while forgotten by most, still frames how we imagine the challenges of the so-called Anthropocene."

-Jacob Darwin Hamblin, author of Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism

" Political Fallout is an excellent book, both for academic readers and for a general audience... It is a must read for anyone interested in nuclear policies at both the national and international levels."

-Richard M. Filipink, Cold War History

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Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis - Toshihiro Higuchi

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Political Fallout is the story of one of the first human-driven, truly global environmental crises-radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War-and the international response. Beginning in 1945, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, scattering a massive amount of radioactivity across the globe.