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from the does-anyone-have-to-go-outside-to-clean-the-sensors? dept.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/01/3m-price-tag-inside-luxury-doomsday-bunker
Afraid of nuclear war, natural disasters, economic meltdown? The Survival Condo could be the answer
"Mechanical level", "medical level", "store level" the voice announces as the lift descends into the earth. I'd entered at parking lot level, the building's apex. I am travelling through an inverted skyscraper, the floor numbers ascending – third, fourth – as we plumb the building's depths. A hulking man in his late 50s called Larry Hall stands next to me, whistling, black shirt tucked into blue jeans.
When the doors open, I can't suppress a laugh. In front of us, four storeys below central Kansas, is a supermarket complete with shopping baskets, cold cabinets and an espresso machine behind the counter. Hall smiles.
"It's good, isn't it? On the original blueprint for the renovation, it just said 'storerooms' on this level. The psychologist we hired for the project took one look at that and said, 'No, no, no, this needs to feel like a miniature Whole Foods supermarket. We need a tile floor and nicely presented cases, because if people are locked in this silo and they have to come down here and rifle through cardboard boxes to get their food, you'll have depressed people everywhere.'"
I am inside the most lavish and sophisticated private bunker in the world: the Survival Condo. It was once a cold war US government missile silo. Constructed in the early 60s, at a cost of approximately $15m to the US taxpayer, it was one of 72 structures built to protect [against] a nuclear warhead 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Many of these silos were blown up and buried after decades of disuse. But not all of them.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday August 03 2020, @01:56AM (6 children)
The duration of nuclear winter to the extent that no kinds of crops grow at all is maybe no more than 2-3 years(though possibly as much as 10-20, we've never experimented). The worst of the fallout goes in that time too, though your overall radiation dose is likely to be way higher than what is considered "safe", it's also likely to get below instantly lethal too. It's gonna be a miserable, hardscrabble subsistence farming life if you survive a nuclear war, but it's quite possible that it is a life.
The mythos of a nuclear war being an extinction event comes from the very reasonable understanding that incredibly few people could plausibly survive one, even if large quantities of resources were allocated to doing so.
Most other apocalypse scenarios don't seem like they'd benefit much from a bunker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @05:41AM
a whole bunch of meteor hits would also be survivable in a bunker.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 03 2020, @01:45PM (4 children)
Well, incredibly few people are trying to survive one. I think if large quantities of resources were allocated to such a thing, and you had the land area to play with (like the US, not like Luxembourg) a large number of people could survive.
I think rather that these myths are a coping mechanism for urbanites. Urban areas would be among the worst places (living near a big military target would be the only thing worse) to be in during a nuclear war and its aftermath, so it's natural to assume that everyone else has a similarly precarious situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @04:44PM (3 children)
That's more a myth of ruralites--that by virtue of being in the sticks, they are somehow disconnected from all the dependencies of urbanites. The reality is most people who consider themselves "rural" are every bit as doomed. They're nearly all living suburban consumer lifestyles, the only real difference being they have septic systems instead of proper sewers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 03 2020, @10:21PM (2 children)
Which is more a fact than a myth. The isolation forces a substantial degree of independence.
In other words, they are "urban" but with more real estate and a sewer system that won't go down when the collapse/war/whatever happens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @11:53PM (1 child)
In other words, they're still highly dependent on the supply chain for very nearly absolutely everything.
There are of course exceptions and we are all so very impressed with those odd rugged individualists, but the vast, vast majority of people wouldn't survive very long after the stores have been raided and their gas tank runs dry.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:36AM
Where "everything" is much smaller than it is for a urban population. The elephant in the room is food. Anything else can be worked around or just suffered through. No matter how you work it, urban populations are too dense to feed themselves, even if somehow the entire urban region was converted to food growing. And that's ignoring that urban areas make tempting targets for nuclear warfare.