Nuclear attack is the greatest fear looming at everyone's heads during the height of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the I...
Nuclear attack is the greatest fear looming at everyone's heads during the height of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain with the United States and the rest of the free World. And the place that is somehow the perfect target in this ideological war is New York City. Interestingly, science fiction writers, futurists and visionaries have always envisioned the city as the usual setting in their 'destruction fantasies.'
Architect and city planner Oscar Newman, the proponent of the defensive space theory, has conceptualized a design for a nuke-proof replica of the Big Apple that is to be located in a hollowed-out space hundreds of space below the existing city. His futuristic vision was published in 1969 where it ironically called for nuclear weapons to be buried deep underground and detonated to create the space for the underground city that is expected to survive from a nuclear blast.
The hollowed globular space would be occupied by a duplicate city with the usual grid of streets and skyscrapers, several levels of underground space are reserved as additional bomb shelters while giant "air filters" reach out the surface. Though it is not sure how to decontaminate everyone underground if the radioactive fall out from the nuclear blast from the city above would be able to reach down below. Interestingly, a helicopter can be seen surveying the underground city while a large projector managed to show a Coca-Cola logo as if business remains as usual hundreds of feet underground.
Newman further added: "Manhattan could have a half-dozen such atomic cities strung under the city proper…the real problem in an underground city would be the lack of views and fresh air, but its easy access to the surface and the fact that, even as things are, our air should be filtered and what most of us see from our window’s is somebody else's wall."
The ambitious doomsday project is a gargantuan task to accomplish from the transport of millions of people underground to the sustainability of living underground for a long period of time. A critic has summed it up: "The author (Oscar Newman) of this plan speculated on building this spherical city in Manhattan bedrock–a structure which so far as I can determine would have a volume of 1.2 cubic miles (5 km3) with its top beginning some 1,200′ under Times Square. Its an impressive hole 'just' to dig–it would be a goodly chunk of the volume of Lake Mead. And it would make the world's largest man-made hole–the Bingham Copper Mine in Utah–seem like the very beginning efforts to digging this beast out to begin with. The Bingham Pit is 2 miles wide and about .75 miles deep, which means that the hole needed to be excavated to reach a 1.2 mile diameter of this sphere some 3,500 feet under the surface would be, um, 'big'–like needing to divert the Hudson and the East rivers, and extending the digging into Jersey, which would be a, well, 'task'."
By 1972, he further developed his theory in the book "Defensive Space" where uses New York as his test subject and pointed out that higher crime rate existed in high-rise residential buildings than lower housing projects. He reached into a conclusion that because residents felt no control or personal responsibility for their densely populated residences. He maintained his emphasis on social control, crime prevention and public health in community design.
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