Introduction: After the imminent apocalypse: the bunker fantasy since the Cold War
1 The fantasy of 1980s survivalism since the Reagan years
2 Survivance in fictions of survivalism since the Reagan years
3 The hedgehog, the tortoise, and the world: Switzerland, Albania, and the global bunker fantasy
4 Life in the ontological bunker: Cold War continuance, appropriation, and repurposing from America to Taiwan
5 Writing from the epistemological bunker: fictions of postnuclear apocalypse
6 Wall and tunnel: security, containment ,and subversion
Conclusion: Biosecurity, siloing, and the legacies of a shelter society

After the end studies the enduring legacy of Cold War culture in current debates and concerns around risk, security, borders, environmental justice, inequality, and apocalypse. The chapters trace this legacy from the ideologies of survivalism through global fantasies of bunkering from Switzerland and Albania to Taiwan and India to current imaginings of post-apocalyptic worlds.

Pike argues that the real and imagined spaces of sheltering continue to inform in foundational and often unrecognized ways; not only in cultural forms such as literature, film, comics, music, and the built environment, but also policy and political formulations. The book documents the ways the Cold War affected its primary antagonists and how the rest of the world processed the fallout of this antagonism. It surveys the fate of Cold War fortifications and shelters as they are repurposed for twenty-first century needs.

After the end shows how counter-visions appropriating those same apocalyptic forms have emerged from the global South and from marginalized populations within the US and elsewhere to challenge the lingering verities of the Cold War years.