On a whim, I went to see if new tour dates have opened up for the Nevada National Security Site Tours. Every year, whenever I remember to check, the schedule has already filled up, or at least those days when I can make a trip. Not this year, as it seems all dates next year are still available.
For those who haven't heard about this tour before, the Department of Energy take visitors on a day-long bus outing — free of charge! — through a “vast outdoor laboratory that is larger than the state of Rhode Island, to see firsthand, artifacts and archaeological sites from the early settlers, to the many relics remaining from nuclear weapons tests, nuclear rocket experiments, and a variety of other defense, environmental, and energy-related programs.”
Listed as points of interests in this atomic wasteland include the following:
Frenchman Flat, where on January 27, 1951, the first atmospheric nuclear test on the Nevada National Security Site, ABLE, took place. Thirteen subsequent atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted at the site between 1951 and 1962.
Control Point-1 was the command post used for conducting nuclear tests. Today, it plays an important role supporting other Nevada National Security Site missions.
News Nob was a viewpoint from which journalists and visiting dignitaries witnessed atmospheric tests.
Sedan was a cratering experiment as part of the Plowshare program - the peaceful uses of nuclear explosives. The 104-kiloton nuclear device explosion displaced about 12 million tons of earth, creating a crater 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep. This underground test was conducted on July 6, 1962.
Of course, this still being a restricted access government area, you must send in your registration paperwork way in advance for a background check. I sent mine in for December 12, 2013, so fingers crossed, and if yours and mine are confirmed, I'll meet you there and then.
During the height of the Cold War, anti-aircraft missile batteries surrounded many of the major population centers in the United States. Built under the Project Nike program, these rings of military bases formed defense shields against a nuclear attack from Soviet long-range bombers. At the beginning of the program, they carried missiles with conventional warheads, but in later years, they were equipped with missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads with yields ranging from 2 to 30 kilotons.
While detonating a nuclear bomb so close to a city like Los Angeles and New York might sound like it would defeat the purpose of protecting them from such a blast, bear in mind that these Nike batteries were literally the last line of defense. Getting just a singe also seems to be a more preferable outcome than total nuclear annihilation. But exactly how many missiles were fitted with a nuclear warhead and at which sites seem to be a matter of state secret.
Chicago had a total of 23 batteries — the most among the Nike program cities. Each one was typically divided into two separate parcels of land. At the Launch Area, the missiles were stored in underground bunkers and brought up to the surface using an elevator and a rail system. Located a short distance away, the Battery Control Area contained the radar and computer equipment.
Since each site was typically manned by a large crew of at least 100 personnel, there were recreational facilities, crew quarters and other support facilities attached to either the launch or control area. Otherwise they would have been located at a separate third area.
As can be seen from the map above, most of the sites were built on the urban fringes of the city and away from densely populated areas. A couple were even located in the boondocks of northern Indiana. But what's really interesting about these Chicago emplacements (and what really piqued our interest in the very first place) is that three of them were inserted into prime parkland area along the shores of Lake Michigan.
The launch area of Site C-03, for instance, was built on Belmont Harbor; its control area was on Montrose Harbor a little further to the north. Just a few yards away from its arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles were high-rise lakefront apartments. One wonders if residents in those buildings regularly spied on the missiles preening upwards on their launchers during test runs. Surely they must have been treated to the spectacle of a simulated nuclear armageddon.
Another battery, Site C-40, was built on the northern end of Burnham Park, near McCormick Place and Soldier Field. The third, Site C-41, was located in the similarly genteel surroundings of Jackson Park, the very same park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and in an earlier era hosted Daniel Burnham's White City during the World's Columbian Exposition.
It's interesting to think that in the backyard of the Museum of Science of Industry, students from the nearby University of Chicago might have taken leisurely strolls among picturesque lagoons and arcadian meadows while soldiers, in their restricted enclosures, hurriedly scampered about during a readiness drill, the sounds of birds twittering and frolicking mashed up with alarms blaring. Closer to the lake, people threw frisbees around while radar towers looming above them tracked the skies for any incoming apocalypse.
All structures at the three lakefront sites have long been demolished and cleared away. Most of the other sites also have had their buildings razed and their underground bunkers filled in. Post-Nike conversions have varied through the years, and have included a police shooting range, a golf course, parking lots and industrial developments. A popular conversion seems to be turning them into “Nike Parks” or “Patriot's Parks”. There's not much left to see, in other words.
One of the better documented sites in its ruin state is C-84. Before a shopping mall was plopped down on top, the National Park Service sent some of its awesome HABS/HAER surveyors in 1992 to take some photographs. One imagines urban explorers lamenting at the loss of such a pleasure ground.
Fortunately for the dark tourists, ruin pornographers and CLUI junkies, there are still some residual traces worth your time. For instance, some concrete slabs and building foundations remain at the launcher area of Site C-44, located at Wolf Lake in the southeastern corner of the city.
To see a sizable collection of buildings and radar towers still intact, you'd have to go to Site C-47 in Indiana. The control area, now a Blast Camp paintball venue, still have some of its radar towers. All the buildings at the launcher area are still standing, though this parcel of the site is private property.
Add in a “Nike Park” and a “Patriot's Park” to the itinerary plus a stop at the C-84 shopping mall and even a picnic in Jackson Park, and you have the making of an interesting Sunday outing perambulating the city's edgelands. It'd be like re-tracing some spectral pilgrimage route encircling the city, perhaps in tangent to the same arcs and loops which decades ago some military inspector, while island hopping from one nuclear arsenal to another, had inscribed into the landscape with his irradiated body. And who knows, maybe you'll also be soaking in minute amounts of radiation at each way station, in which case your own infinitesimally irradiated body will be leaving a trail of energetic breadcrumbs.
It'll be an atomic tour of Chicago's Cold War missile defense shield.
From the HABS/HAER collections in the Library of Congress comes these gorgeous photographs of an anti-ballistic missile complex in North Dakota.
Several such sites were planned as part of the Safeguard Program, but only this was ever completed. And after being in operations for just 4 months, it was deactivated.
In the years since, countless drunken youths and their spray paints have made pilgrimages to these Pharaonic ruins of the U.S. Army. No doubt one of them must have wondered whether if it was simply a matter of coincidence that this pyramid, whose walls he was pissing on, resembles the unfinished pyramid in the Great Seal of the United States, its once radar equipment being the Eye of Providence, the all-seeing eye.
Or if the military counts among its ranks a cabal of Freemasons constantly and surreptitiously finding ways to channel their aesthetic inclinations, in the face of institutionalized prohibition against self-expression and individuality. Sculpted berms here, geometrically-patterned rows of exhaust stacks there, mastaba-shaped radar facility right over there, chalked footpaths everywhere.
The U.S. anti-ballistic landscape as a subset of Land Art.
One of his companions, a blogger of the built environment, will later report these inebriated musings, speculating further that those anonymous soldier-bureaucrat-architects must have been great admirers of the unbuilt works of Étienne-Louis Boullée. As an homage, they designed the radar building in the form of the master's pyramidal cenotaphs.
Even their monument-complex are pierced with holes, this blogger will blog, although they are not cosmically aligned. You will not see stars; they do not form constellations. Rather, they are aligned to millions of city dwellers halfway around the world, under surveillance, targeted for total erasure.
Or: by an Act of Congress, Dugway Proving Ground gets transferred from the Department of Defense to the National Park Service.
Landscape architects are hired to turn the site as open and occupiable as all the other parks under the care of the NPS. Because why bar humanity for thousands of years from visiting the place when it can offer new ways of experiencing landscapes?
So they, i.e., the landscape architects, set out do what they do: master planning for uses, choreographing circulation, stagecrafting experiences, preservation, etc. Meanwhile, the CDC concocts treatments for Ebola, Avian flu, smallpox and all other bioweapons the U.S. military had played around with at Dugway.
Soon the first visitors arrive.
They swallow the pills and are immunized.
After a waiting period of a few minutes for the drug to take effect, they then set off on foot, backpacking from one square to another square, from one circle to another, tracing arcs, diameters and circumferences, each and every geometry carefully measured and inscribed on the parched Nevada landscape.
Sure enough, red marks begin to appear on their skin, turning blue, then to black. Cutaneous necropsy. Trigonometry has infected you with a plague. Maybe it's anthrax.
Meanwhile, you are inspecting some angles, their hypotenuse pointing NNE towards some distant, rock-strewn hills. A fog rolls in from aerosol fountains, then evaporates. Seconds later, your lymph nodes begin to swell and a rash starts to spread from your crotch.
But you worry not. It's all part of the tour: a fantastic voyage into militarized infection, from the initial cough to nose bleeds to coma to fully restored health.
There won't be any baby sneezes or sunburns or watery eyes or any of the allergic sort. Because after all, this is not Yellowstone, and you're certainly not on the beach. Camping here aren't made memorable with the mere brush up with poison ivy. That headache isn't caused by altitude sickness. It's something more terrifying, more sublime, more marvelous.
And so with your first contagion cured, you go explore another part of the park. Wide airport runways, a whole series of them, their perfectly straight chalked edges extending far to meet the horizon.
“What superlative surveying techniques,” you shout, perhaps quoting Maria Reiche, and all the while every orifice in your body begins to ooze with blood.
The latest peripheral from Subtopia points us to this recent article in The New York Times about atomic tourism in the American Southwest.
At the Titan Missile Museum, we learn, visitors can “stare up at a 103-foot-tall intercontinental ballistic missile from the bottom of a hardened silo buried in the Arizona desert;” see how the crew rested (or experienced countless anxiety attacks) in spartan conditions; feel the thick, cold steel of the blast doors; and even jiggle around with the switches on the firing console.
Meanwhile, at the Nevada Test Site, you get to see the actual effects of Armageddon.
“As the bus headed toward the site of a 37-kiloton blast in 1957,” writes Henry Fountain, “it drove past the mangled remains of several shelters made of aluminum. Nearby was a blasted bank vault, an experiment to see whether money and valuable documents could survive nuclear war. There were twisted I-beams from a section of a trestle bridge, large poles for testing window glass and concrete bunkers that looked relatively unscathed.”
And there are also “the remains of the Apple 2 project, a 1955 explosion designed to test civil defenses. Parts of a small town were constructed for the test, with stores, cars and houses complete with refrigerators filled with food and mannequins dressed in clothing.”
For some reason, we are reminded of a design competition, held many years ago, for a permanent warning sign for Yucca Mountain, the nation's first long-term geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
The winning design, by Ashok Sukumaran, features “genetically engineered Yucca catcus which turns various shades of blue depending on the levels of radiation in the area.”
This is a giant 3-D version of the iconic radioactive danger sign designed by Yulia Hanansen: “We stylized the conventional sign, arriving at the conjoined triangle design shown below. The sign has sharp edges, representing an acuteness and seriousness appropriate for the warning it must convey. It is a pyramidal structure which can be perceived as a message containing another message. The monument itself becomes a symbolic mountain where one will be able to enter it and learn about what lies within.”
None of which, of course, will ever prevent anyone from visiting the site — even if our descendants still understood English, and the universal radioactive danger sign remains iconographically legible 10,000 years from now. Build a field of menacing concrete spikes, and it becomes a popular destination. CLUI will send busloads of tourists.
What should be done in the intervening thousands of year is to develop an anti-radiation pill or the fast-acting anti-tumor pill, so that with these miraculous medical breakthroughs, future travelers will go on so-called radiation tours.
As you walk through the excavated labyrinth of Yucca Mountain during these tours, you become listless, nauseous. Going deeper and deeper into the caverns — damp, mildewed surfaces; stale air; pyramids of light falling heavily on your weakening body — you begin to have what will become the worst migraine of your life.
Others in your group had taken a different path and are now suffering from beta burns. Still others, on a different scenic route, are vomiting every few steps, their nose bleeding.
But obviously, all is well; you've taken the pills. Radiation poisoning is as safe as a Disney ride or a stroll through the park.
And as a souvenir you'll be given a wig at the gift shop.
From the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress, a scene from a “camouflage class in New York University, where men and women are preparing for jobs in the Army or in industry.” The assignments sound rather intensive: “make models from aerial photographs, re-photograph them, then work out a camouflage scheme and make a final photograph.”
But what would happen if you repeat the same process, only this time you make the model not from aerial photographs but from that final photograph of the camouflage scheme? And the same process gets repeated again. And again and again. Over and over until you've produced a township of simulated simulacra, a camouflage of a camouflage of a camouflage that actually gets built.
On a whim I entered “landscape architect” as a search string on USAJOBS, the official job site of the U.S. Federal Government. Three of the results piqued my interest: this, this and this, according to the announcements, are positions which “may be located in various locations throughout Afghanistan.”
While they do provide detailed information on duties, required qualifications, benefits, and the likes, I'm left wondering what sort of “assigned projects” whose “planning, engineering, design, construction, and technical functions” the successful applicant will manage. Rebuilding damaged highways, sewer systems, and other basic infrastructure? Providing technical and material expertise in water management and conservation (even though the region has quite a long history in such matters)? Reclaiming marshes from years of unsustainable agricultural practices? Terraforming military and government installations to deter, deflect, and absorb attacks? Revegetating streets, parks, and forests? Biodetecting and bioremediating sites contaminated with land mines, WMDs, and industrial detritus? Joyriding on a Bleex? Indulging some genetic fetish for the ike™? Mythologizing the lost terrains of Robert Byron and BruceChatwin? Compromising the tectonic integrity of the Hindu Kush to eradicate its geocloaking capabilities?
In other words, if you currently hold any one of these positions or will do so in the future, let us know once you obtain all the necessary security clearance, if any. See upper left sidebar for the contact information.
Referred to in long-form as the Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton, this DARPA-funded Ellen Ripley hydraulic couturier will allow soldiers, combat engineers and civilian techno-sartorialists to carry hundreds of pounds (potentially more) with little physical effort.
Such a machine could become an invaluable tool for anyone who needs to travel long distances by foot with a heavy load. The exoskeleton could eventually be used by army medics to carry injured soldiers off a battlefield, firefighters to haul their gear up dozens of flights of stairs to put out a high-rise blaze, or rescue workers to bring in food and first-aid supplies to areas where vehicles cannot enter.
Of course, the BLEEX could also allow a lone landscape architect to carry a shed worth of tools, a truckload of hardscaping material or the entire inventory of an arboretum. With added appendages for the upper extremities, he might even carry an entire garden straight from the factory to an awaiting backyard.
With just a small army of highly trained migrant workers, you could overlay an interstate highway or landscape a dozen Central Parks in a day. Or a bed of mums in one picosecond.
This is the future of guerrilla gardening. You get suited up with the Bleex, and with your night vision goggles, satellite navigation systems and weaponized hoe, you set about re-wilding urban concrete wastelands. Under the cover of darkness, a squadron of Bleex Soldier-Gardeners armed with prairie grasses and wildflowers carries out sabotage on Wal-Mart parking lots.
From GlobalSecurity.org: “The mission of Dugway is to test U.S. and Allied biological & chemical defense systems; perform Nuclear Biological Chemical survivable testing of defense material; provide support to chemical and biological weapons conventions; and Operate and maintain an installation to support test mission. Dugway is located approximately 80 miles west-southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah in Tooele County. DPG, covering 798,855 acres, is located in the Great Salt Lake Desert, approximately 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. Surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges, the proving grounds terrain varies from level salt flats to scattered sand dunes and rugged mountains.”
What goes on the ground sounds utterly fascinating and frightening at the same time, but only a lucky few ever gets to see them. For those without the necessary security clearance, TerraServer provides the perfect alternative. Taking a cue from Polar Inertia, here are some satellite photos of the military installation.
First of all, the sights from above are stunning. Despite the fact that they are the landscape markings of killing machines, capable of annihilating the entire global population, they are graphically beautiful. The US Army surely has outdone both Richard Long and Walter De Maria several times over. More sublime (in the true sense of the word) than Spiral Jetty. More relevant than Double Negative. The Department of Defense should definitely donate the site to Dia if and when it's decommissioned. Still contaminated, still littered with unexploded ordnance.
A comparison can certainly be made to Thomas Jefferson's Land Survey grid system imposed over much of the American landscape, overriding topography and pre-settlement cultural and ecological systems. Like its counterpart, the landscapes of lines at Dugway are governed by analytical methodology, mathematical hierarchies, mechanics, trigonometry. But rather than being an expression of democracy, settlement, domesticity, even the heroic rural life, this Jeffersonian grid has mutated into a sinister expression of global terrorism, surveillance, and chemical and biological warfare. The Apocalypse distilled as geometry and algebraic equations.
