When the world ends, where will you go?
In 1979, with Cold War tensions threatening a nuclear winter, the U.S. Senate tried to answer this question by commissioning a study exploring what the aftermath of nuclear war would look like. Among more scientific assessments, the report included a fictional account imagining how life would proceed in an American city that survived the theoretical attacks.
Spoiler: it doesn’t go well.
In the narrative, set in Charlottesville, Virginia, the attack comes as no surprise following weeks of deteriorating relationships between the U.S. and Soviet Union.
“Spontaneous evacuation, without official sanction or direction…. A few evacuees found lodgings with private families, at great expense, but most were forced to camp by their cars in their traiIers next to the fast-food chains on Route 29,” writes author Nan Randall. “The governing bodies of Charlottesville and surrounding Albemarle County were rumored to be concerned about the drain on the area resources, without really having any way of turning back newcomers.”
“If this keeps up,” a member of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors says in the story, “we’re going to be overrun without any war.”
Things only get worse from there. One hundred million lives are lost. Rationing is enforced. Elevated reservoirs are contaminated with Iodine 131. It takes two weeks to restore electricity. The terminally ill overwhelm the hospitals. Without medicine, food or shelter, many more die during the winter.
By now, we’re almost used to these grim visions of disaster. The end of days has permeated popular culture, from movies like The Day After, Threads and I Am Legend, to books like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.
But while we may be almost half a century removed from the U.S. Senate’s early report on nuclear war, the answer to where you will go when the world ends remains the same: it won’t matter. When the world ends, 99% of us are screwed. As the ash settles and the sun peeks through the clouds once again, only the billionaires will emerge, blinking into the light, from the safety of their bunkers. Or so the sales pitch goes.
Bunker Business Is Booming
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or in a cave of your own, you’re probably aware that doomsday bunkers are big business among the ultra-rich.
According to a report by Wired, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building a 1,400-acre compound with its own private bunker, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. It’s so secretive that workers are being forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, and some have been let go for slips as simple as a social media post. All in all, the land purchase and building costs are said to be costing Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan a sum of $270 million.
According to Guthrie Scrimgeour, the journalist behind the story, there’s speculation among Kauai locals that Zuckerberg might be building “a vast underground city” in case of societal collapse. Having viewed the planning documents, Scrimgeour admits it isn’t quite a subterranean town, but plans do suggest “an opulent techno-Xanadu, complete with underground shelter and what appears to be a blast-resistant door.”
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Americans of all stripes, from wealthy executives to blue-collar preppers, are increasingly interested in these tactical vehicles, so we got the lowdown from a leading manufacturerMeanwhile, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk is looking further afield, to Mars. (Presumably all the hollowed-out volcano lairs were taken.) “It’s important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it’s far enough away from Earth that [in the event of a war] it’s more likely to survive than a moon base,” Musk said on stage at SXSW in 2018.
“If there’s a third world war, we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,” he added.
It sounds fanciful, but the idea of Musk and his ultra-rich pals as progenitors of a new human race gels with the billionaire’s well-publicized comments about population collapse being, in his view, a bigger threat to our species than climate change (the experts don’t agree). Musk himself has reportedly fathered 12 children. Should his fantasy of repopulating Earth with Martian-born humans ever play out, he’ll doubtless do his bit to up the numbers.
Back on terra firma, your imagination really is the limit when it comes to designing a doomsday bunker to call your own. Swimming pools, saunas, staff and security quarters, gyms, and even space to store your art collection are pretty much the norm.
Oppidum, one of the main players in the bunker business, claims to have gathered “the world’s most celebrated minds” in the fields of design, security, engineering and construction to deliver “peerless security for the people and objects you love the most.”
“You can be sure that you, your family and your most treasured possessions have a place of safety and comfort close at hand for as long as you need, whatever happens in the world outside,” its website reads.
Oppidum offers custom designs starting from $2 million, with its 12,380-square-foot, five-bedroom, seven-bathroom Model L’Heritage starting at $60 million. If you do go premium, you’re guaranteed a lot of bang protection for your buck; the Model L’Heritage is blast protected, gas tight, energy independent, seismic protected, as well as chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) protected, with optional extras including amenities like a garden, cinema, swimming pool, art gallery, gym and sauna.
Another company, Vivos, calls itself “The backup plan for humanity.”
“An epic humanitarian project the size of a city,” Vivos is less a luxury bunker for you and yours, and more a communal experience consisting of 575 private bunkers, apparently with room for “thousands,” located in “one of North America’s safest locations” (which, apparently, is in South Dakota).
Not currently in the continental U.S.? Don’t worry, Vivos is expanding worldwide, with sites “from Germany to Asia” promising space for 10,000 people — assuming your membership application is successful.
As with any property purchase, location really is everything. Patricia Marx, writing on bunkers in the The New Yorker, reports on a former mine in Utah, converted into a community fallout shelter sometime during the Cold War; a $4.9 million compound in Battle Creek, Michigan, including its own bunker with a shooting range and an indoor greenhouse; an unused missile silo in North Dakota; and, the pièce de résistance: a 20,000-square-foot cave in Arkansas, formerly used to rear earthworms. In a separate New Yorker story, a 2016 profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Altman explained that he has “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to” should we face ruthless viruses, nukes or rogue AI.
But while North America is a popular site and the U.K. has its share of bunker companies, your favorite prepper’s favorite prepper is headed somewhere else: New Zealand.
A 2018 Bloomberg report found that at least seven tech entrepreneurs had purchased bunkers down under Down Under. Even tech billionaire Peter Thiel has reportedly claimed a New Zealand passport in case he needs to decamp there. That’s assuming the end of the world allows plenty of time for a flight to the other side of the world.
(In reporting this article I reached out to multiple departments within the New Zealand government asking if New Zealand was wary or welcoming of high-net-worth individuals building shelters in the country, but no one was able to provide an answer.)
“The Event” — Whatever It May Be — Is Imminent
Naturally, the client list of high-end bunker companies is kept under lock and key. (And with good reason: advertise that you own a bunker, and you might risk your neighbors — or worse‚ your employees — turning up and jostling for space.) Kim Kardashian and Tom Cruise are said to have bunkers at home. Meanwhile, the rapper Rick Ross’s bunker will reportedly have its own “water maker” and multiple wings.
Media theorist and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff literally wrote the book on the billionaire bunker craze. It’s Rushkoff’s opinion that we’re so interested in bunkers right now because we’re “having trouble imagining how the world can continue at its current pace.”
“The data on the ground is indicating catastrophic failure of the systems that sustain life on the planet: ocean salinity, plankton, atmospheric oxygen, aerosols…and that’s just climate change,” he says via email. “So, like the billionaires who are actually building bunkers, spaceships, and computers to house their consciousness, normal people are thinking about how to survive a catastrophe as well.”
We’ve been obsessed with shelter since our ancestors discovered their first cave, but lately, its importance seems more pertinent than ever. So far, the 2020s have been defined by ongoing global conflicts, a move towards right-wing populism, massive wildfires and flooding, and cultural debates that drive a wedge through society.
According to a 2024 YouGov poll on NATO and nuclear war, men and older Americans are the most likely to have thought about a plan for nuclear war. And in the U.K., 53% of Britons think World War III is likely within the next decade.
“When the war broke out in Ukraine, my phone was ringing every 45 seconds for about two weeks,” Ron Hubbard, CEO of bunker builder Atlas Survival Shelters, told The Atlantic last year.
But, just like all of those Cold War disaster movies, Rushkoff says that our obsession with bunkers is partly a fantasy — an escape from the “onslaught of crises demanding our attention.”
“It’s what [billionaires] have been dreaming about since they were kids,” says Rushkoff. “These technologies are atomizing and anti-social, so it’s no wonder the fantasies associated with them have less to do with living together in organic villages than living alone in a Mars dome.” Viewed through that lens, a billionaire escaping to a remote bunker when the world goes to shit is almost the literal interpretation of burying their head in the sand.
“Life has gotten too complicated, and the idea of living on a sustainable patch of land in the middle of nowhere is very appealing,” Rushkoff adds. “If it’s defensible….”
One day there will be a war and these bombs will be used, [so] it’s about preparation.
– Charles Hardman of Subterranean Spaces
Dante Vicino has a more generous perspective. As the executive director and director of operations at the Vivos Group, which is behind the survival community in South Dakota, he says that “a bunker provides physical protection for more corporeal concerns.”
I asked, given the price tags and emphasis on luxury, if these structures should be organized along more egalitarian lines. “Our clientele come from all walks of life and all kinds of professional backgrounds,” Vicino replied.
“Though there’s plenty of talk of ‘luxury’, we have always strived to be attainable to as many people as possible through fair pricing and nondiscrimination…. Not only the rich can afford bunkers,” he says. “That’s been our position in this market since our company’s inception. We are effectively democratizing the bunker industry and shifting it away from the elite and the 1% and back into the hands of the average person…. To give you a small sample, we have everyone from union workers to celebrities, doctors, construction workers, IT professionals and teachers.”
Charles Hardman represents Subterranean Spaces, a U.K.-based company that offers basement construction in London where space is at a premium. Among its other services, the outfit offers underground panic rooms and shelters protecting against nuclear or biochemical attacks.
“Nuclear bunkers have always been something we haven’t wanted to think about, but when the Ukraine war hit they become more of a reality in our everyday lives,” Hardman says, arguing that “one day there will be a war and these bombs will be used, [so] it’s about preparation.”
The problem, according to Hardman, is that bunkers are not cheap, so only the “very rich” can afford them, but he is looking to launch a more affordable “Pod Bunker” in the next six months. “These are a more budgeted bunker, however [they are] not for comfort, or a long period of time.”
Hardman says that most of his clients have U.K. properties but live overseas and in many cases have grown up with bunkers of their own in Europe or elsewhere. “They’re wealthy, with high-profile jobs,” he says. “Also, some people these days just want to tick a box and say ‘I have a nuclear bunker.’ They have everything else, they just want the new trend.”
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Dr. John Leach, a senior research fellow and expert in survival psychology at the Extreme Environments Research Group based at the University of Portsmouth, U.K., says that bunkers as a concept have been around for a long time; we’ve been hiding out in them since at least World War I.
In fact, during World War II, many British homes had an “Anderson shelter” in their backyards. And you don’t need to be Dr. Strangelove to understand that most governments likely have their own emergency shelters prepped and ready at all times.
“This idea of prepping, which I think came out of America, is not a new concept at all,” Leach says. Nor is it an elite concept. During the Covid pandemic, I wrote a piece for National Geographic on “the survivalists who saw lockdown coming.” The idea was to find out whether, among prepper communities, there was a sense of justification when events like Brexit and the Covid lockdowns occurred.
These weren’t billionaires, but average people, including a mother who was concerned about her daughter’s medicine supplies, and a colleague of Leach’s, Dr. Sarita Robinson, principal lecturer in the University of Central Lancashire’s School of Psychology, who told me that “My childhood seemed to be full of young adult fiction that was total dystopia, like Z for Zachariah. It was unrelenting misery! I do think it feeds into the psyche a little bit. I think we’re just fascinated by what could go wrong.”
Writing in 1982, Jonathan Schell, a visiting fellow at Yale University, took it upon himself to discover exactly what could go wrong, exploring the consequences of nuclear war in The Fate of the Earth. It’s a bleak and heavily academic book that offers little hope for adherents of the traditional backyard shelter. Schell writes that in the case of a nuclear attack, such shelters would effectively work as an oven, cooking those inside. It’s understandable, then, that today’s bunker owners want something a little bit more guaranteed.
Writing in The Guardian, Rushkoff, the media theorist, recounts being whisked off to a mystery location in the desert by “ultra-wealthy stakeholders” who then peppered him with questions about the end of days.
The data on the ground is indicating catastrophic failure of the systems that sustain life on the planet. So, like the billionaires who are actually building bunkers…normal people are thinking about how to survive a catastrophe as well.
– Douglas Rushkoff, Author of “Survival of the Richest”
“They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality?” Rushkoff writes. “Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? … Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?’ The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.”
Rushkoff goes on, recounting concerns that armed guards would be needed to protect compounds from raiders and angry mobs. One person already had a dozen Navy SEALs on the payroll. But how to pay them when crypto becomes worthless? In that instance, what would stop a guard revolt? Should they use combination locks on food cupboards, the sequence to which only they know? Maybe they could build robot guards instead?
Robot armies and Navy SEALs aside, billionaires are preparing in other, more mundane ways, too. In an interview with The New Yorker, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, admitted to having recently undergone laser eye surgery. “If the world ends — and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble — getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass…without them, I’m fucked,” he told writer Evan Osnos.
Yet there is one threat potentially even more deadly than ailing vision or revolting guards — a threat which even the most robust bunker would be powerless to protect against.
In a wide-ranging piece about doomsday prepping, Jacob Sweet asked Ron Hubbard of Atlas Survival Shelters whether rogue AI was a motivating factor among his clients. Hubbard thought not, but explained that whether a gas attack or a destabilization of the power grid is caused by Ultron or a rogue world leader, the impact is the same, and his bunkers are designed to protect against it either way.
Interviewed in the same article, Rob Bensinger, the head of research communications at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, had a different take. “There’s no ‘prepping’ that can be done to physically guard against that kind of threat,” he says of smarter-than-human AI intent on harvesting “every atom of material on every planet of the solar system.”
“If you’re facing a superintelligence, you’ve already lost,” Eliezer Yudkowsky, the senior research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute added. “Building an elaborate bunker would not help the tiniest bit in any superintelligence disaster I consider realistic, even if the bunker were on Mars.”
Life in the Bunker
Even if your bunker is fit for purpose — even if the sound of a thousand nuclear explosions is as faint as that of wood popping on your hearth, even if the recycled air you breath tastes sweet and fresh even as the ozone layer is dissolved — there’s no still no guarantee you’ll survive.
As someone who has studied survival in all of its forms, Dr. Leach of the Extreme Environments Research Group is fascinated by the psychology of who makes it and who doesn’t.
“We don’t think about death,” he says. “We know that it will come one day, but that one day is far off into the future.” One of the only times we might think about death, Leach says, is if we’re diagnosed with a terminal illness.
Leach is interested in people who are given a terminal diagnosis but “die very quickly, long before the end date.” Instead of the projected two years, such a person might last two months — a phenomenon Leach is still exploring, and calls a “psychogenic death.” He is reticent to attribute this to anything as cliche as a “will to survive” but admits that “Every day of our life is a survival situation. We’ve adapted mentally, physically, physiologically to the environment we’re living in at this present moment.”
For the vast majority of us, living in a bunker is a very different psychological landscape to our current “present moment.” Just because we’ve made it inside, it doesn’t mean we’ve made it, period.
In a classic episode of The Simpsons called “Bart’s Comet,” Springfield is plunged into a frenzy of despair after it’s discovered that a comet will shortly wipe the town off the map. Almost the entire cast crams into Flanders’s survival bunker. Despite the bunker being stocked for four, Flanders is characteristically amiable enough to allow Homer, Marge, Maggie, Bart and Lisa in, too. Soon the entire town joins them, and it isn’t long before in-fighting forces them all back out to brave the comet head-on. The Decline, a Canadian film about preppers spending a training weekend in the remote wilderness, also shows just how quickly mistakes and strong personality types within a group can lead to disaster.
With these two pop-culture references in mind, I go off on a bit of a Psychology 101 tangent, asking Leach if there’s anything inherent in the billionaire mindset that makes them more or less likely to survive — even in their bunkers.
Leach — who doesn’t own a TV — isn’t convinced by the line of questioning. But in a 2019 study, a team of German economists and psychologists looked into exactly that, interviewing 130 wealthy individuals in an attempt to compare the psychological profile of the rich to that of average adults.
Based off this sample size, the study found that the rich are more emotionally stable and less neurotic; especially extroverted and more open to new experiences; less agreeable and more likely to shy away from conflicts; and more conscientious. In other words, potentially the perfect bunker-mate.
However, the rich were also found to be more narcissistic, and to “exhibit a stronger internal locus of control” (i.e., they’re more likely to agree with statements such as “I determine how my life turns out,” which could be a problem).
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Tristan Gooley, the only man to fly and sail solo across the Atlantic, on using the night sky to find your way homeYou might have all the art, swimming pools and fancy decor you could want in your bunker, but to prevent psychological breakdown, Leach says routine is key. “They need a job to do,” he says. “They need to establish their goal. That goal could be survival, to get through their provisional existence, but they need to have some meaning in it.”
Instead of having a remote bunker “just in case,” Leach says a smart survival plan would be to familiarize oneself with the bunker beforehand, so that you can actually get used to the intricacies of spending the foreseeable future down there.
If they haven’t tried these bunkers out, Leach says, “I suspect that shortly after they go in for real, they’re gonna say, ‘Oh, I wish I’d thought of this before.’”
“Like in lockdown, they need to maintain personal standards of not only physical hygiene, but psychological hygiene,” he adds. “If they don’t, they’ll just go downhill.”
There’s a long history of people becoming unmoored from reality in isolation. Studies have found that solitary confinement in prisons can cause or worsen mental health issues including suicidal behavior and PTSD, and can even cause permanent changes to the brain and personality.
Scientists in remote research bases have been known to suffer from something similar, in a phenomenon known as “winter-over syndrome.” A fire in Antarctica’s McMurdo Station in 1978 was caused by a researcher who had lost touch with reality, and Leach points to another polar base where the inhabitants, discovered by a resupply ship in the 1950s, had completely deconstructed the social order.
“It was about 12 men and they found that the whole social structure had broken down,” Leach says. “They stopped talking to each other. The air was rancid. Nothing had been done, each of them had just gone off into their own little rooms and built what was described as ‘animal dens.’ They were all living locked away in their own rooms, and their personalities were just disintegrating.”
Without a sense of purpose and a strong understanding of what is required to live in a bunker for an undetermined amount of time, Leach says the same could very well happen to our billionaires, and that this might cause them to “die anyway.”
Then, of course, there’s the question of what happens when they come out. In Heinz Helle’s fantastic novel Euphoria, a small group of middle-aged, middle-class friends are on a remote skiing trip in Europe. When the trip’s over, they come down the mountain to discover the world has ended. What they find isn’t pretty, and their resulting trauma, combined with their lack of preparation — both mental and physical — doesn’t bode well for their long-term survival.
Leach was consulted on the U.K.’s Covid lockdowns and says he advised those in power that if lockdown continued for more than 18 months, they would have trouble getting people back into normal society.
“The degradation in behavior that we saw during lockdown followed exactly the same pattern of behavior that was reported during and after World War I by army psychiatrists who were dealing with prisoners of war,” he says. Having adapted to being captured, surviving POWs often struggled to reintegrate into society after the war’s end — particularly as society had moved on without them. If you’re hiding out in a billionaire’s bunker for an unknown length of time, who knows how the world and society may have changed while you’re down there? If indeed the world, or society as we know it, will still exist at all.
If only billionaires, with all of their spare cash for space tourism and luxury bunkers, had some more tangible way of ensuring the survival not just of them and their money, but of all of us.
Rushkoff, writing for The Guardian, says that for the people he met, at least, there didn’t seem to be much crossover between self-preservation and a desire to help others. But then, if you’re used to spending your life in such rarified air, what really does it matter if the air outside your bunker turns toxic? Either way, you’ll still be left alone.
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