Wealthy folks from sea to shining sea are getting very concerned about a mine shaft gap, and they’re panic-buying bomb shelters like it’s the Cold War. Unfortunately for them, though, those bunkers won’t actually help them if things truly go south.
The Associated Press spoke both with wealthy folks who’d paid to have bunkers installed, as well as experts who claimed that those bunkers had all the protection of Linus’s security blanket. The threats are real, according to experts, but the solutions are little better than snake oil:
Global security leaders are warning nuclear threats are growing as weapons spending surged to $91.4 billion last year. At the same time, private bunker sales are on the rise globally, from small metal boxes to crawl inside of to extravagant underground mansions.
Critics warn these bunkers create a false perception that a nuclear war is survivable. They argue that people planning to live through an atomic blast aren’t focusing on the real and current dangers posed by nuclear threats, and the critical need to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
The AP goes on to talk about the risks of radioactive fallout specifically, which experts say can be mitigated without a bomb shelter — simply getting inside a well-sealed building can keep you safe from the worst of it:
“Look, this fallout exposure is entirely preventable because it is something that happens after the detonation,” said Brooke Buddemeier a radiation safety specialist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the U.S. government designs nuclear weapons. Buddemeier and his colleagues are tasked with evaluating what could happen after an attack and how best to survive. “There’s going to be a fairly obvious nuclear explosion event, a large cloud. So just getting inside, away from where those particles fall, can keep you and your family safe.”
Professional bomb shelters can get well into the six-figure price range even for off-the-shelf units, let alone the kind of custom jobs preferred by the ultra-wealthy. Add installation to that, decades of air filters, the cost of stocking the shelter with canned chili and aged whiskey — shelters are an incomprehensibly expensive endeavor. It makes sense that they’re reserved for the ultra-wealthy, who think that bunkers will help them survive the kind of mutually assured destruction that promises to kill everyone involved. Could we just not do that, instead? That seems better.
