This paper explores the worldwide unprecedented bunker infrastructure of Switzerland. Since the 1960s, the country has built hundreds of thousands of nuclear bomb shelters in family homes. Drawing on poststructural theories of social practice and ritual theory, the all-pervasive structures in the private sphere are analyzed as transitory spaces that coordinate the movement and connections between different milieus, regimes, and bodies. By studying the operational scripts of the authorities and the spatial arrangements and artifacts of the shelter, the paper argues that a sequenced set of “rites of passage” were to be practiced in order to guarantee a transition into the postapocalypse without any violations of norms, social roles, and affective regimes. However, this “territorializing” process launched by the state with the aim of engineering a “bomb-proof” society met with little success. By ignoring, distorting, or violating the constant prewar situation in their homes, Swiss people, as early as in the 1970s, started to undermine the shelter as an instance of concrete governmentality. Being traversed by various processes of “deterritorialization” the bunker lost its function as a locus of secured passage and transformed into a highly dynamic “empty space” that hides, till this day, residua for creativity and difference.

Debates on risk have largely assumed risk to be the outcome of calculative practices. There is a related assumption that risk objects come only in one form, and that the reason not everything can be transformed into a risk is because of the difficulties in calculating and creating universal quantitative comparisons. In this article, building on recent studies of preparedness that have broadened understandings of risk, we provide an analysis of how preparedness measures might themselves produce risk, in particular through risk’s durable instantiation, or what we call ‘concretisation’. Our empirical focus is on how government agencies in two countries shifted their attention from the risk of nuclear attack during the Cold War to an all hazards approach to preparedness. Comparing the mid- to late-twentieth century histories of the UK and Switzerland, we show that both countries shifted from focusing from a single risk to plural risks. This shift cannot be explained by a change in prevailing calculative practices, or by the fact that the risks changed historically. Instead, it is driven by historically specific changes in how risks are produced and reproduced in relation to how materialisations of risk operate over time.

The introduction to the volume lays out the rationale and ambitions of the book, delineates its chronological and geographical focus and situates it in the existing historiography of civil defence. One central ambition is to advance civil defence history by attuning it more explicitly to the study of science and technology and to pave the way for transnational and comparative efforts. We do so in two steps. We introduce and explore the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries developed by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, before applying and adjusting it to civil defence history. Finally, the introduction provides a brief overview of the chapters in the volume.

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Sinnes- und Emotionsgeschichte der atomaren Bedrohung im Kalten Krieg. Das Augenmerk der Literatur galt bislang visuellen Repräsentationen von Feuerbällen, Atompilzen und Ruinen von Städten, die staatlicherseits zur emotionalen Kontrolle der Bevölkerung instrumentalisiert wurden. Allzu schnell wird bei diesem Fokus auf zirkulierende Bilder der Bombe jedoch vergessen, dass das nukleare Zeitalter auch reale Bauten hervorgebracht hat, die nicht nur den Sehsinn, sondern das gesamte körperliche Sensorium der Menschen qua materiellem Schutz gegen Nuklearwaffen miteinbezog. Anhand wissenschaftlicher Studien zum Leben in Atomschutzräumen in der Schweiz zeigt der Beitrag, dass im „radikalen Zeitalter“ durchaus alle Sinne einem staatlichen Zugriff unterworfen waren. Übergeordnete Zielsetzung der in den 1960er- und 1970er-Jahren durchgeführten Laborstudien war es, die Denk- und Gefühlswelten der Schweizer durch die Modulierung der sensorischen Umweltstressoren im Bunker zu steuern. Emotionale und multisensorische Geographien waren im Kalten Krieg aufs engste miteinander verwoben. Der schweizerische Staat verschrieb sich einer sensory politics, die eine auf das Sehen ebenso wie die haptischen, olfaktorischen und akustischen Wahrnehmung zielende Regulierung der Sinne umfasste, um dozile Bürger und eine schweizerische „bomb-proof society“ herzustellen. *** Cette contribution traite de l’histoire des sens et des émotions dans le cadre de la menace nucléaire durant la Guerre Froide. Pour la plupart des gens, la menace de «la Bombe» qui structurait l’antagonisme systémique entre les blocs était très difficile à appréhender de manière sensorielle. La littérature à ce sujet se focalisait presque exclusivement sur des images et des films représentant des champignons atomiques, des boules de feu ou encore des villes en ruines, autant d’images qui étaient instrumentalisées de manière répétée par l’Etat à des fins de contrôle émotionnel des populations. Cette focalisation sur la dimension visuelle de la Bombe contribuait le plus souvent à faire oublier que le conflit Est­Ouest avait suscité la construction de structures dont le but était justement d’offrir une protection matérielle et sensorielle la plus large possible contre la bombe atomique: les fallout shelters ou bunkers anti-atomiques. En se basant sur des études scientifiques analysant les conditions de vie dans les bunkers en Suisse, cette contribution souligne que tous les sens étaient soumis durant la Guerre Froide au regard inquisiteur de l’Etat. En effet, les expériences de laboratoire menées durant les années 1960 et 1970 visaient principalement à orienter les univers sensoriels et cognitifs des Suissesses et des Suisses par le biais d’une modulation des expériences haptiques, olfactives et visuelles à l’intérieur des bunkers. L’Etat fédéral développait ainsi de véritables sensory politics dont le but était de produire des citoyen·ne·s dociles et, autant que possible, une bomb­proof society.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to a ubiquitous 20th-century political space that was long overlooked – the bunker. This body of work draws on a variety of theoretical influences and explores multiple historical contexts, yet most remains wedded to the late Paul Virilio's influential 1970s study of the Nazi Atlantic Wall. Enlightening as his 'Bunker Archeology' is, Virilio's theorization has constrained contemporary debates around the function, materiality and temporality of the bunker. Here, we seek to counter this set of limitations in three ways. First, we contest the idea of the bunker as a simple space of human protection and argue for a more expansive conceptual-ization that is attentive to the bunker as a site of extermination. Second, we challenge the assumed concrete materiality of the bunker and suggest an expanded typology, utilizing a range of materials and milieux. Finally, we take to task readings of the bunker as an obsolete relic by highlighting the continued construction, re-appropriation and reimagination of this architectural form.

Historical-themed guided tours are a basic format of the touristic storytelling industry. By understanding them as spatially bound rituals of collective gazing in which images of the past are drawn collaboratively by the guide and the tourists, this article argues that guided tours provide a lens through which to examine the making of history. Focusing on commercial communism tours in Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava, the article shows that the promise to bodily experience the communist past via immersion enables ludic performances that can both strengthen and unsettle historical images. As a paradoxical result, communism tours evoke both nostalgia for a simple, easily understandable world and a negative image of an unwanted, difficult past.

This article presents a ‘pathology’ of the Cold War bunker via an analysis of the decay, entropy and post-human fecundity to be found within the closed system of these now abandoned man-made protective cavities. Opening with a contextual overview of current research in bunker studies, and providing an orientation to the variety of bunkers to be found across the US, UK and Europe, the article then presents fieldwork in recently opened bunker caves on the Norwegian island of Tjøme, foregrounding the complex’s after-life as an incubator for the extremophilic organisms and crystalline formations growing within it. These inhabitants adapt the bunker, producing a post-human ‘bunker culture’ of sorts, manifested in alien forms of survival and inter-organism conflict, that strangely echo Cold War science’s research into entropy and cybernetics, and that war’s co-option of matter and culture to apocalyptic, existential ends.