A wealthy financier’s 1978 bomb shelter is
the ultimate Cold War relic—and an extreme
version of the government-sanctioned
“security theater” still prevalent today.
The Las Vegas house shown on
these pages is a sort of stage set for
the Nuclear Age. Located 25 feet belowground, it’s not a casino attraction or
a subterranean Brady Bunch pad for
nostalgic high rollers but something
more extreme: a relic of that odd and
delusional moment during the Cold
War when our government tried convincing us that the prospect of a nuclear
attack was neither unthinkable nor
hopeless. We could survive, they told
us, if we prepared.
This 16,000-square-foot bomb
shelter—complete with ranch house,
guesthouse, pool, yard, and barbecue—
may be that era’s most surreal expres-
sion. And when Susan Roy, a longtime
magazine editor turned architecture
historian, first saw images of it eight years
ago in Nest, the experience launched her
on a journey that eventually resulted in
a new book, Bomboozled: How the U.S.
Government Misled Itself and Its People
Into Believing They Could Survive
a Nuclear Attack (Pointed Leaf Press).
“I was kind of haunted by them,” Roy
During the course of research for
the book, the author amassed one of the
largest collections of Cold War ephemera
in the country (thanks to eBay).