Ronald Reagan and his officials misspoke themselves so regularly that they seemed to have a certain awkward ballsiness about them, as if they knew they could say anything and get away with it. “We begin bombing in five minutes,” of course, is a favorite. And T.K. Jones, Reagan’s deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces, offered this homespun civil-defense strategy for American citizens in case of nuclear attack: “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors, and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It’s the dirt that does it.”
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The members of the Northern California Chapter of Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility figured they’d help the government out in this laudable goal by holding a bomb-shelter-design contest. They sent out entry forms in the fall of 1986 and eventually received 80 entries from architects and designers across the country. Oddly enough, the entrants seemed not to take the assignment seriously.
“We saw it as ridiculous to assume that things would survive [after a nuclear war]. As architects, we’re pretty convinced that’s a pipe dream,” says Jack Busby, a member of ADPSR and an honorable-mention winner. His entry depicts the residents of a suburb or small town flocking to the local shelter–a hugely oversize grade-school chair, the kind with a writing desk attached. The kind American children used to huddle under during duck ‘n’ cover civil-defense drills. “Now we know how useless that would have really been during a real nuclear attack,” says Busby.
These days there has been such an outpouring of goodwill between the two superpowers that Reagan’s new cold war already seems like ancient history. But the missiles are still there, ready to fire. And these tongue-in-cheek drafts bring up a question of central importance today: how can the Bush administration possibly be this much fun?
