Perusing the Blast Door Cave Art of Nuclear Armageddon

Imagine that this is your job. You have an office of sorts located 30 or more feet underground somewhere in the American Great Plains. The office is shaped roughly like a small submarine, with concrete and steel reinforced walls, one access shaft/entrance, and a single very narrow escape tube at one end, for “personal egress.” You have one coworker and you both work in 24 hour shifts. The job is to monitor the status of 10 Minuteman intercontinental-ballistic missles and, in the event of an Emergency War Order (a series of missile codes and authentication information), you would perform a list of tasks that may lead to the launching of some or all of those 10 missles — at 1.2 megatons of

TNT

for a Minuteman II missle, one would be about 70 times as powerful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagosaki — possibly at large concentrations of civilian human beings. Or, also quite possibly, at remote control centers like yours, only in the Soviet Union.

When you’re not monitoring or waiting to launch missles, you are in the control center’s living quarters, “pass[ing] time by reading, watching television or studying for master’s degrees through a special Air Force educational program,” according to the National Park Service, which maintains a remote control center in South Dakota as a National Historic Site. You might also be creating some of the strangest and most revealing art in the technological age, art that captures both the highly compressed fear and dissonance of an era in which hell on Earth is available at the turn of a key and some dial settings. Tom Vanderbilt, of the Design Observer Group (via Retronaut), collected a number of pieces of “blast-door art” — art found on the blast doors of Minuteman remote control centers in the U.S. There were about 1,000 Minuteman missiles active from the ’60s through the ’90s, when many/most were decommissioned; factor in repainting, and there were potentially thousands of these created.

The photographs come courtesy of photographer Robert Lyon and Daniel Friese, a civilian employee at the Air Force Center for Environmental Excellence. From the Design Observer:

In 1995, [Friese] got a grant from the Department of Defense and, with photographer Robert Lyon, set out to capture this subterranean culture. "It was the greatest four weeks of my life, going to all these holes in the ground," says Friese, who was trained as an entomologist. He estimates he has nearly 400 images from about 100 launch control facilities across the central and western United States, and is an authority on the genre. At Whiteman, for example, several cartoon characters (e.g., Road Runner, Oscar the Grouch) showed up, but so too did the squadron's predecessor nose art. "They had taken a lot of the art from their B-17 squadron, the host squadron. That was a little different from Ellsworth, which was a little more freeform, if you will." On several blast doors in the Whiteman squadrons, the actual B-17 is itself depicted; painted above the cranking mechanisms and the warnings to "Stand Clear of Door," they bear replicas of the original nose art, with logos like "Texas Belle" or "Piccadilly Commando." The latter, notes Friese, refers to World War II serviceman's slang for the women who used to solicit in Piccadilly Square; the phrase "30 Bob," also found on the blast door art, referred to the going rate.

The repurposed Domino logo above is chilling, but I can only think “you would too.” It seems less an act of minimizing or trivializing the work of mass-death — or of the military apparatus turning control center workers cold-blooded — than it does another sort of escape hatch into unreality or surreality, making an inhuman job tolerable for an actual human. A cold grey, blank blast door seems scarier. Maybe.

But then again, some of these make their creators look like jingoistic assholes. I imagine it’s a bit of both, with a whole lot of fear being the central motivation.

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“It was gallows humor," Friese told the Design Observer. "It was like, 'Hey, we're defending the free world, and we don't fear the commies. If it's going to happen it's going to happen, and we're here to finish the job.' I think that was the whole Cold War mentality." I still think there’s more to it than that; gallows humor isn’t just an acceptance of a terrifying thing, it’s an escape from it. I’m not about to sympathize with anything behind these paintings, but there’s something to be had in empathy — always.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

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