After the End is a study of Cold War fantasies of bunkers, sheltering, and survival in the post–Cold War world. It argues that, although not always recognized as such, what it terms the ‘bunker fantasy’ continues to dominate any imagination of the relationship between present and future bridged by a cataclysm. The contemporary bunker fantasy is continuous with and derived from the four decades of the Cold War but in the distorted, variable, and unpredictable ways typical of the global circulation of locally generated ideas and spaces. It is both a realistic nightmare about the end of the world and an imaginative tool using apocalypse to prompt thinking about alternate pasts and speculative futures in which the world would not only survive but even, perhaps, prosper. The book includes a historical and methodological introduction, six chapters (on survivalist spaces and practices since the 1980s; survivalism in the cultural imaginary; sheltering construction and strategies around the world; contemporary appropriations and repurposings of the Cold War built environment across the globe; post-Cold-War fictions of apocalypse; the legacy of Cold War bunkering in separation walls and security debates), and a conclusion on siloing and the dominant and alternate legacies of the Cold War shelter society. Drawing on genre and literary fiction, film, television, comics, popular music, journalism, material culture, and the built environment, After the End traces Cold War legacies in global twentieth-century imaginations of the end of the world, security, migration, and inequality.