This chapter will consider nuclear futurity and long-term radioactive half-life and decay as timescales of continuity that are figured in eerie and apocalyptic ways not only in fictions that engage with nuclear anxiety during the Cold War (I will use Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett as case studies) but also in the engineering projects that deal with the inconceivably long aftermath risks in deep underground nuclear waste disposal. In particular, I will be comparing Gunther Anders’ 1962 ‘Theses for an Atomic Age’ with late-1980s Nirex reports into the suitability of storing highly radioactive waste in deep boreholes, and using other pairings of literary/cultural speculation with actual storage facility technologies to explore the deep time of nuclear waste continuities beyond the Cold War. The chapter will fi rst explore the bunker mentality of the high Cold War, using Virilio's Bunker Archaeologyas well as anecdotal evidence proving the relation between family nuclear shelters and the underground systems of the nuclear state. This entombed refuge technology is set against the work of geologist J. Laurence Kulp, who developed radioactive isotope dating of extremely ancient rock formations, and in doing so stumbled on the radioactive effect of the tests in the nuclear South- West, which led to the crucial Project Sunshine which uncovered the dangers of fallout linked to tests at proving grounds and in the atmosphere. Project Sunshine not only effectively led to the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, but also consolidated in the public imagination the link between deep geological time, radioactivity and underground secret tomb/refuge systems. These connections can be traced in two 1964 texts: Beckett's ‘All Strange Away’, which features a tight tomb space where the human is figured as waste, and Bowen's The Little Girls, which features an obsessive burying of expressive objects as a time capsule speaking to a deep future time. The texts are drawn into the force field, then, of later Cold War debates about how to deal with radioactive waste from the nuclear industry, specifically Swedish research that used deep-time geological comparisons to illustrate what might happen to the buried world of nuclear waste repositories in the equally deep futurity of half-life timescales.