Bunker makers say business is booming — but there’s a reason governments left bomb shelters behind | CBC News

Russia’s intensifying conflict has inspired a wave of worry across Europe about the threat of nuclear war, prompting some with means to investigate the possibility of building their own shelter or renting space in former government facilities abandoned for their impracticality as a means of protecting civilian populations.

Google Trends data shows searches for “bunker” spiking to levels that haven’t been seen since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Searches for “nuclear,” meanwhile, are at their most numerous since the 2011 Fukushima disaster.)

Mathieu Séranne, whose Paris-based company Artemis Protection is only one year old, said he has received more than 900 requests for quotes and designs since the war began five weeks ago.

“We have very, very different kinds of people, and from different backgrounds,” he said. “And we were not prepared for that.”

Séranne, like Hardman, designs bespoke luxury bunkers that start at nearly $200,000. Many run into the millions. In peacetime, they resemble a playroom, home cinema or even an entire underground house.

One of Hardman’s projects is 4,300 square feet, he said — room enough “for the family and for the staff that run the house.”

‘Not cheap to build’

If things go south, they contain filtration systems, generators and metres of concrete the manufacturers say are necessary to endure a nuclear or chemical attack.

“They’re not cheap to build,” Hardman said. “And if anyone said it is, then they’re lying.”

Building isn’t the only option. Other wealthy survivalists buy space in decommissioned government bunkers, often at an eye-popping price.

In 2014, a 15-storey condo built inside a former missile silo in Kansas was able to sell out its 75 units for $1.9 million and up. 

More recently, Vivos Survival Shelters has started selling space in a former East German bunker for $2.7 million — even though Dante Vicino, their executive director, said they’re “still working on” making it habitable.

“If Germany was invaded tomorrow, it’s not going to be ready for that, unfortunately,” he said.

But it’s not only the wealthy who are buying. Vivos is also trying to cater to doomsday preppers and survivalists, who Vicino said were “reading the tea leaves” and were not surprised by the outbreak of war.

At the company’s xPoint facility in South Dakota, you can have your own bunker in a former army base billed as the “largest survival community on earth,” for $45,000 — plus $100,000 or more in customization costs.

But the increasing number of privatized facilities like Vivos Europa One points to another reality that bunker makers may be more hesitant to acknowledge: governments long ago gave up on bunkering down.

After the aerial bombardments of the First World War and the Second World War, European countries poured millions into civil defences like bunkers, with the aim of minimizing civilian casualties in the next war.

But that changed in 1954, with the first public testing of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon thousands of times as devastating as the bomb dropped at Hiroshima and capable of producing devastating nuclear fallout that could poison regions.

According to Emily Glass, a British archeologist and expert in Cold War bunkers, officials realized they would need to build “a whole city underground” if they were to protect their civilian populations and sustain them until they could safely emerge — months or years later.

“That’s something I don’t think any government has provided anywhere in the world,” she said.

According to Luke Bennett, a researcher of Britain’s history of civil defence, H-bomb tests marked a fundamental shift.

“The military instead [put] their faith — and the bulk of funds allocated to addressing the Soviet nuclear threat — into [making more] nuclear weapons,” he wrote in a 2018 paper —  part of a “policy of deterrence via mutually assured destruction.”

Civil defence

Some countries, like Albania, still invested millions in bunker networks, adopting a “nationalistic mindset of prepping,” said Glass, using the constant threat of invasion to suppress opposition to the government.

Some countries still mandate some form of civil defence. Switzerland requires private home builders to include air raid shelters in their designs. Sweden’s civil defence department maintains a network of more than 65,000 public fallout shelters. After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, they recommended more be built.

But the more common route was that of Germany, which gradually shuttered nuclear bunkers or sold them to the highest bidder.

Hubert Warner once guarded a bunker near Bonn that was to house the West German government in the event of nuclear war, built to satisfy a NATO requirement. 

It’s since been converted into a Cold War museum, and today he guides tours there.

“I think it makes no sense to prepare for nuclear war because there is no protection possible for a nuclear bomb,” he said. “We had [the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster], and what could people do against it? Nothing.”

‘An expression of fear’

Recently, Warner said, the museum has been receiving calls of people who are asking whether they could “get a place” in the bunker. 

“From my point of view, it is an expression of fear,” he said, “and under fear, you cannot [make] good decisions.”

For that reason, he’s skeptical of companies like Vivos Survival Shelters, Artemis Protection and Subterranean Spaces that would profit from a moment of great anxiety.

“It’s a good way to make money,” he said. “But it’s not a good way to protect the people and prevent war.”

But for the bunker builders, there’s little room for doubt.

“I do think the future is about living underground,” said Subterranean Space’s Hardman. “How long are we going to do that? I have no idea.

“But if there’s devastation above ground, where [are you going] to go? You’re going to go under.”