In poking around the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical reports archive, you come across some stupendous documents about how the world was going to deal with nuclear war. The marriage of the bureaucratic of the apocalyptic produces deranged offspring with very detailed models.

One 1960 Atomic Energy Commission report on a prospective 100-person post-apocalyptic “Group Shelter” is a case study of how to render an unthinkable future in the material language of the model railroad builder.

At one level, the report just describes a building that would have air intake and food and dining that could survive a series of nuclear blasts to provide shelter for a few weeks. At another level, it’s an insane fantasy of how to build an island of normalcy when the world has been destroyed. I’m reminded of BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography’s current project on Landscapes of Quarantine, which looks at the spaces that are used to contain prospectively dangerous people or things. Nuclear fallout structures invert the concept of quarantine: It’s not the world that needs to be protected from you but you that needs to be protected from the world. In effect, everything outside the space is disease.

Amidst the talk about withstanding blast pressure of 5000 pounds per square foot and reducing the radiation intensity relative to Out There by a factor of 10,000, we find little hints of the life that was expected to continue within.

The toilets permit “normal water flushing for maximum cleanliness.” Ah, just like home. “Facilities are provided for controlling and dispensing food and for heating soup, coffee, and baby bottles.” That line is about as close to a Hemingway six-word short story as it gets. (Fallout shelter with baby bottles. Used.) “The dining and recreation area is furnished with tables and benches, which may also be used for playing games of various kinds.” But no duck-duck-goose because “physical exertion would raise the body-heat output and increase the shelter temperature unnecessarily.” Thus, it makes sense to limit games to those “requiring little or no physical exertion” like bridge. Of course, “reading material and hobby craft can be utilized to occupy and relax the inhabitants.” Curling up with a book is pretty comforting, sometimes, right?

In the “Operating Manual” for the shelter, there are just the barest hints of the darkness that might encroach into the pinochle games.

As the people are admitted and the living community is organized, the group leader should consider the following sociological aspects affecting human behavior which may require action.

1. Weapons: During an extended period of living under the difficult conditions unavoidably present, there are likely to be psychological upsets among the occupants. Possession of weapons of any sort could be dangerous and perhaps disastrous.

Perhaps the understatement of the century? Living in a post nuclear America equals “difficult conditions”!

2. Beverages: Alcoholic beverages under some conditions are perhaps beneficial and unobjectionable. In the circumstances of living in close confines, care would certainly have to be exercised in the dispensing of alcoholic beverages…

3. Matches and Smoking: Again, the regulation of these items may depend in large degree upon the composition of the community.

In the event of nuclear holocaust, perhaps a smoke and a few dozen beers would be the rational human choices. At the very least, if you allow weapons into your shelter, you’d have to allow smokers a little nicotine.

4. Money and valuables: People entering the shelter can be expected to have brought whatever of their money and valuables they could salvage. Locked storages are provided in the shelter for use at the group leader’s discretion.

Looking back, it doesn’t seem like a serious enterprise to build models of fallout shelters complete with tiny little beds and lockers for diamond earrings and an astroturf covering. Yet we did it. Lee Clarke calls them “fantasy documents.” Because that’s the thing — these are not dystopian visions. In fact, they exclude just about everything that would actually happen in a nuclear war and focus (narrowly, narrowly) on the tiny little space that could still be controlled and normal. The building in the AEC report might not represent a perfect world, but relative to the world surrounding it, it would be an island of Eden.

Realistic? Nope. But what else were you going to do when faced with the possibility of the end of civilization but deal with it with the tools of bureaucratic normalcy. Hold conferences on designing for the nuclear city, have meetings on preparedness, build little high-tech hobbit holes where one could wait for better times. Faced with nuclear war, most people just wake up sweating and go check on their sleeping children. Within organizations, though, the questions lose their existential heft. They enter the hum-drum: It was someone’s job to imagine nuclear war and then design the best escape hatch and periscope for a post-apocalyptic shelter. Humans are amazing.

It’s in this context of the engineering of the post-holocaust that we have to consider nuclear power at this time. These bureaucratic visions of a world after nuclear war were the tamest expression of the fear of nuclear war. Studies came out about the effects of nuclear fear on schoolchildren. The kids said things like, “If I was in school when the bomb dropped and I hid under some wall or something, and I came out alive and came home and found my family was gone, disappeared with everything, who’d want to live anyway?”

The scientists who worked on the bomb project were well-aware that something new was upon the world as a result of their work. Oppenheimer was famously guilt-wracked. Others less so. Alvin Weinberg makes it clear, though, that his redemption went straight through atomic power. Talking about a (loss leader) price list that General Electric put out in 1964, he described his elation at the moral dimension of the commercialization of nuclear power.

I find it hard to convey to the reader the extraordinary psychological impact the GE economic breakthrough had on us. We had created this new source of energy, this horrible weapon: we had hoped that it would become a boon, not a burden. But economical power—something that would vindicate our hopes—this had seemed unlikely… [B]ecause we all wanted to believe that our bomb-tainted technology really provided humankind with practical, cheap, and inexhaustible energy we were more than willing to take the GE price list at face value.

Thus, the very people who might have been expected to rein in the corporate actors — GE and Westinghouse — from getting carried away with outlandishly low cost estimates were part of the same group. They really, really wanted nuclear power to work and on the cheap. How else to balance the apocalyptic visions that lay on the other side of the periscope?