Author: Michael Hardy / Source: WIRED
Growing up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. at the height of the Cold War, Jim Lo Scalzo knew he would be one of the first victims of any Soviet nuclear attack on the United States. “It was a genuine fear among me and my friends,” he says.
As a teenager, Lo Scalzo watched The Atomic Cafe, a darkly comic 1982 documentary about nuclear war that included archival footage of nuclear tests.
“I became obsessed with the film,” Lo Scalzo says. “The visuals surrounding doomsday—the nuclear clouds, the melting mannequins. I’m still fascinated by all that declassified Department of Defense footage.”Today, Lo Scalzo works for the European Pressphoto Agency, covering the White House and Congress, but in his free time he pursues personal projects. For the past four years, he’s been traveling the country documenting the elaborate infrastructure built by the U.S. military during the Cold War in case of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.
Much of that infrastructure has since been decommissioned and is open to the public, such as the 113,00-square-foot nuclear shelter beneath The Greenbriar, a four-star resort near White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The hardened bunker was built…
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