Will Byrnes's Reviews > Bunker: Building for the End Times

Since the Cold War, bunkers had never really disappeared: the subsurface of the earth continues to be a geological-geopolitical space. What’s really different now is that, globally, bunkers are being built by a wide range of government, corporate, and private actors all over the world. Ranging from new government DUMBS (Deep Underground Military Bases) to tiny walk-in-closet panic rooms, contemporary bunkers are as ubiquitous as they are diverse.

There are plenty of us who worry about the potential for doomsday-like events, whether from natural catastrophes like an incoming space rock, the blowing of super-volcanoes, global pandemic, or unnatural ones like nuclear war, global warming, the escape of designer germs or nano-things, the rise of AI, zombie-apocalypse, apes gaining higher-level sentience, alien invasion, collapse of social order, or many, many more scenarios that threaten us all. As you may note, not all of these possibilities have remained in the layer of the theoretical. But not all of us resort to planning to bug out to a personal safe space, whether in the basement, backyard, former missile silo, or reinforced concrete underground city, to ride out the storm, or relocate permanently, whether nearby or someplace off shore, or in New Zealand, the geographic center of the USA, deep in the heart of Texas, or maybe deep below the city you already live in. Bunker is about those who do.


Bradley Garrett - Image from the Guardian – photo by Bill Green

Bradley Garrett has a PhD in Social and Cultural Geography from the University of London. He is best known for Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, which looks at hidden parts of cities. Of course, the physical research required for such undertakings required a fair bit of trespassing. (His Tedx talk addresses this in some detail). And he engaged in some for this undertaking, but, for the most part, Garrett was welcomed in his explorations this time. He is interested not only in the physical elements of bunkers, but also the socio-economic, the political, and the anthropological.

Garrett’s interest in survivalism was sparked by the discovery of a giant bunker under Corsham in Wiltshire, built by the government during the Cold War. “We went down there with crowbars and prised the doors open. We found these electric buggies, stuck a screwdriver in and hotwired them and drove them around,” he says. “It has 97km of roads, connecting radiobroadcasting stations, beds and an underground reservoir. It’s an underground city.” - from The Times vis Scribd article

Who builds them? A lot of these facilities are repurposed government sites, from missile silos to deep storage facilities. Unused subway infrastructure is a nice backup for those in large cities. Some are built by religious institutions, particularly those anticipating dark days ahead. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the Mormons, has a considerable plan working for preserving their culture, producing and distributing needed supplies, and helping others outside their community. They are not the only group with such a perspective.


Splashing out on doom ... the pool at Larry Hall’s 60-metre Survival Condo underground bunker in Kansas - Image and descriptive text from The Guardian - Photograph: SurvivalCondo.com

What Are they for?
Survival, obviously. Short term or long. Large scale or not. Staying shielded from radiation, fire, hordes of those lacking the proper credentials. Not all missile silos have been sold off. Not all hardened supply depots are now in private hands. But states are not necessarily looking out for their actual citizenry. In the USA and UK, for example, the focus is more on Continuation of Government (COG) and securing reserve military control and capacity than protecting every Tom, Dick and buh-bye. One generic example of this is DUMBS, or Deep Underground Military Bases. There are many. This is something Doctor Strangelove certainly supported. It became clear in the 1960s, with the declassification of information about large government-built bunkers in Virginia and Vermont, bunkers intended to protect government officials, that most people were being left to their own devices. This had become official policy in the 1950s, when President Eisenhower saw a cost estimate of $300 billion to bunker-protect the entire US population from a nuclear war. He opted instead to spend $2.5 million to encourage people to build their own. Not to worry, you’ll be fine.


B-207 – where Garrett stayed at xPoint - image from his site

Some places are more concerned about citizens surviving. Switzerland, for example, mandates bunker shelter for 200,000 more people than the total population of the country. North Korea is the most bunkered place on the planet. Go ahead, nuke them. They will all be underground already. If KJU fantasizes that he can win a nuclear war, this is why. North Korea might actually survive a US attack. In Israel all new homes must include a bunker room. There is an interesting bit on Singapore, given its shortage of real estate, looking to protect its citizens by building geoscrapers into the ground. If they can match the grandeur of their above-ground architecture, that should be something worth seeing.


Milton Torres (lounging at right) quit his job in Chicago to live full-time in this bunker at the XPoint "survival community" in South Dakota. "I close the door and stay in there for a few days and then I can think again," he says, as the site's developer boasts that sales of the $35,000 dwellings are up "over 600 percent" in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic - Image and descriptive text from the New York Post

In addition to the sites noted above, some private entities build hardened concrete structures into, although not necessarily entirely under, the ground. These would be the larger, communal sorts of facilities for dozens to maybe 150 people, which can be rather nice. Others can be grandiose tin cans that offer a few people little more than a temporary and ill-informed sense of security buried in their back yard, or a place in which serial killers can stash their victims and nefarious supplies. Lower tiers of bunkering include panic rooms and hardened basements.


Image from the film Parasite

Another tier altogether is mobile bunkers, mega-vehicles that would be at home in any Mad Max Movie. Although people sometimes let their paranoia fuse with their mechanical creativity with dire results. One fellow made himself a killdozer and took out his considerable rage on the town he felt had done him wrong, Kranby, CO.

Who wants them?
Governments have a particular need to keep on keeping on. In the private marketplace, preppers come in all shapes and sizes, well, maybe not all. Mostly in the range from InfoWars fans to almost-InfoWars fans among the rank and file of believers. But there is a considerable representation of the very wealthy, for whom the large sums required for a serious bunker are not an impediment. Larger in numbers are those more fringy sorts, who have been breathlessly waiting for the Second Coming, the Fourth Turning, the general collapse of western civilization or things of that nature, doomsteaders. There are also, I was surprised to learn, some preppers who were more rational about it all,

I got the sense that these preppers were operating on a variation of Pascal’s wager: the precept that even if the existence of a higher power is unlikely the potential upsides of believing in one are so vast that we might as well. If these preppers were right about some, or just one, of their theories, then they all just might survive a cataclysm—it’s a payoff for faith that costs little in the present. [Well, it is actually pretty clear that the cost is considerable, but maybe not for the very wealthy.]

Who sells them?
One of the primary subjects Garrett addresses is people who sell. Doomsday capitalists promote the notion that the big shitstorm is certainly coming. We just do not yet know exactly when, and don’t you want to be prepared? As if doomsday capitalists was not catchy enough, Garrett has settled on dread merchants for this group. They are a colorful crew, with high representation by real estate salesmen. Some are actually legit. They are fun to read about, a Damon-Runyon-esque collection.

Where Are they?
Garrett covers considerable territory in his global bunker scan. That is not to say that he visited everywhere he writes of. He spent time in South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Tennessee, Kansas, the DC Area, West Virginia, Australia, Bath, in the UK, Berlin, and Thailand, mostly looking at actual bunker sites or prospective sites, but also meeting with developers, and preppers related to the whole bunker industry. He also writes about places he has not visited, at least not for this project, including Moscow, North Korea, Montana and others. But I would bet that there are bunkers, bunker enthusiasts, and bunker-promoters pretty much everywhere.

When did this begin?
As long as there have been people, there have been reasons to hunker in a bunker, whether to keep away from cave bears, saber toothed cats or raiders from the next community over. Garrett does not go that far back, but he does make use of his academic licks to offer up a fascinating history of bunker-building through the ages, as far back as Roman-era Anatolia and Pompei. The contemporary push to dig in exploded with the nuclear bomb. He does point out that we are increasingly looking to protect ourselves from a hostile world.

By the year 2000, a third of all new homes in the United States were being built in gated communities: a kind of social-contract failure architecture in which every community must fend for itself.

So, is it safe?
I was very excited to read this book on learning of its availability. I am totally thrilled to have been given the chance. I knew next to nothing about the whole prepper culture and global bunker spread previously. Gap filled. It is clear that Garrett is sympathetic with the mindset of many of the preppers, the saner ones, anyway. While I expect that most of us see most preppers are paranoids, it is clear that there are many who are not, who view prep-culture and arranging for a bunker if the world goes sideways as a sort of insurance policy, a smart investment, just in case, particularly for those with considerable means. You will learn a lot about a subculture that is unfamiliar, and maybe appreciate some perspectives that you had not really ever considered. I had a bit of discomfort with the author, who I take to be a Libertarian sort, particularly when he gleefully announces that he has no intention of paying off his student loans. (page 88) And there is the odd political analysis that seemed a bit too much. But, really, those did not at all take away from the upside of learning all that Garrett has to teach us.

So yeah, you might want to hunker down in a safe place for a few hours. Make sure you have plenty of water, or whatever might be your beverage of choice, enough chow to last you for the entirety of your reading session, make sure the doors and power supply are properly secured, switch on a light, get comfortable and dig in. What you unearth will repay your investment.

“I know that in the after time I’ll just kill, which is why I don’t want to shoot this pistol, I can’t break that seal yet,” Blake said, pulling it from the shoulder holster. “When the time comes, though, I won’t feel remorse, I won’t feel bad, I’ll kill anybody that gets in my way. I’ll kill anybody that tries to get in this facility, and I won’t think twice about it. There won’t be any conversation, just action. The only thing stopping me doing that now are the consequences—in the after time there will be no consequences. What there will be is survival.

Review posted – September 25, 2020

Publication dates
----------August 4, 2020 - hardcover
----------August 3, 2021 - trade paperback

I received a copy of this book from Scribner in return for a review that dug beneath the surface of the book, which I tried to do. Can I come out now?

And thanks to MC. You know who you are.

==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below.