at a barricade and strolled purposefully around the base.ĭuring the Cold War, the Office of Civil Defense assumed many of the responsibilities of its predecessor agency that marshaled resolve and resources during World War II. On the day I visited, National Guardsmen checked my I.D. It’s also an impressive site: It's cut into red sandstone into a hill on Papago Park Military Reservation. A relic from the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy, the bunker was built in 1956, and still has a slightly eerie Cold War aesthetic to the narrow hallways and beige paint on the walls. Joseph Flaherty Needless to say, the facility was built to survive the bomb. We have our water, so we can survive off utilities. He ticked off a dizzying list of the fallout shelter’s advantages: “We're on high ground. Robert Rowley, the director of emergency management for the county, noted, “Whoever decided this as a location back in the ’50s picked a really good spot.”Ī former deputy sheriff of Monterey, California, Rowley wore glasses and a crisp button-down shirt. “Welcome to the dungeon,” an assistant told me with a grin as we walked down a flight of stairs, headed underneath the mountain. But if missiles were in the air - North Korea just launched a trio the other day - and Phoenix was on the shortlist for nuclear annihilation, you could only hope to be inside the Maricopa County Emergency Management Office: a Cold War-era fallout shelter. Was this how it all ends: madman theory playing out in reality, with the entire world held hostage? Threats of “fire and fury” and an imminent plan to strike the waters of Guam had done the impossible, overloading my general anxiety to leave me numb, unable to comprehend if what I was witnessing was real. The week before, I’d watched a geopolitical back-and-forth that flirted in a shockingly casual way with nuclear annihilation. It's stopped raining, everybody's in the lane / And don't you know, it's a beautiful new day. All I could think about was a nuclear missile dropping out of the blue Arizona sky. But because of the context of my trip, the lyrics were unsettling. Ordinarily, the song felt upbeat: Sun is shining in the sky / There ain’t a cloud in sight.
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