AI Summary
5 min readIn 2018, a journalist named Garrett Graff was handed a lost government ID badge by a colleague who had found it on a Washington, D.C. street. The badge belonged to someone with a high security clearance. When Graff turned it over, he found two sets of driving directions on the back: one labeled “short term,” the other “long term.” The short-term directions led to an office building in Arlington, Virginia. The long-term directions, when Graff followed them on Google Maps, took him miles out into rural Virginia, into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the road dead-ended into the side of a mountain. Graff, a national security journalist, recognized what he was looking at: a secret evacuation bunker, built for a nuclear attack. That discovery launched him into the hidden history of the U.S. government’s Cold War doomsday planning—and eventually into a strange, existential question about what “America” actually is.
The Government’s Secret Post-Apocalyptic Blueprint
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:31) **A Mysterious ID and a Secret Bunker** - Historian Garrett Graff finds a lost government ID badge with two sets of driving directions on the back.
- 2 (05:56) **Cold War Doomsday Planning** - The 1950s belief that nuclear war was survivable led to elaborate government plans for a post-apocalyptic America.
- 3 (13:12) **The Artifacts to Save** - A secret task force chose seven items to be rescued by helicopter to preserve the "idea of America."
- 4 (19:29) **Questioning the List** - The hosts and producer Simon Adler debate the narrow, musty selection and decide to crowdsource a new list from modern Americans.
- 5 (22:59) **Crowdsourcing a New List** - Simon Adler travels to American Legion halls and calls niche museums to ask what artifacts should be saved.
- 6 (27:24) **A Favorite Answer: Jazz and Shared Humanity** - Professor Sheronie Green suggests a 1958 Newport Jazz Festival recording, arguing it captures American humility and racial integration.
- 7 (30:42) **The Pushback: Nationalism as the Problem** - Writer Jill Lepore argues that preserving nationalistic totems is absurd, as nationalism caused the apocalypse.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Back in the 1950s, facing the threat of nuclear annihilation, federal officials sat down and pondered what American life would actually look like after an atomic attack. They faced a slew of practical questions like: Who would count the dead and where would they build the refugee camps? But they faced a more spiritual question as well. If Washington DC were hit, every object in the the National Archives would be eviscerated in a moment. Terrified by this reality, they set out to save some of America’s most precious stuff. Today, we look back at the items our Cold War era planners sought to save and we ask the question: what objects would we preserve now?
We first released this episode back in 2020, but with our big fourth of July – 250 years! – just around the corner, we thought it was a strange but profound reflection on what this whole America thing that we’re celebrating… actually is.
Special thanks to Luke Manon, Ben Irving, Bill Pretzer, Jason Spier, and Garrett Graff for all his reporting that made this episode possible.
LATERAL CUTS -
The Cataclysm Sentence (https://radiolab.org/podcast/cataclysm-sentence)
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Simon Adler
with help from - Tad Davis
Produced by - Simon Adler
Original music and sound design contributed by - SIMON ADLER
and Edited by - Pat Walters
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