Somewhere in the old Cincinnati-Dayton Defense Area that spans Southwest Ohio and Southeast Indiana sits a $1.5 million “man cave.” I made my way to the site on a warm fall morning with Google Maps and GPS coordinates supplied by my real estate advisers, Matthew and Leigh Ann Fulkerson of 20th Century Castles, LLC. Built in a decommissioned Nike missile site, the residence boasts a kitchen, four bedrooms, two baths, an exercise room, indoor swimming pool, jacuzzi, and an elevator for lowering the owner’s classic automobiles below the surface. On clear days, the doors that once exposed anti-ballistic missile for launch can be opened to let sunshine penetrate the otherwise dimly lit basement.
A lot of effort has been made by the current owner to cheer things up: a Care Bears mural graces a wall in one of the bedrooms, a building on the 14-plus-acre property has been converted into a white and red horse barn. But there are touches — such as the blast door and L-shaped hallway for containing explosions — that betray the home’s former life as one of well over two hundred missile sites that ringed America’s cities, defending them from incoming Soviet bombers.
The Cold War was an era in which Americans found their lives had become increasingly militarized: from the interstate highway system to the ubiquitous nuclear-tipped Nike missiles and civilian bomb shelters, it was hard to forget that the United States was constantly gazing down the barrel of the Soviet Union. This strange state, which was neither war nor not war can be compared to people’s current concerns about terrorism, economic collapse, peak oil (the idea that soon oil will run out, bringing about the end of society as we know it), or even something as far-fetched as the impact of a rogue planet on ours, or invasion by secret reptilian humanoids. These are the kinds of ideas that have been absorbed into a catch-all meme called, as unpoetic as it might sound, "2012." This year was chosen because it is the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar (a 5,125-year-long cycle used by some Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures). The connection between 2012 and some sort of societal collapse or "end of the world" scenario was probably first made sometime in the seventies, and it’s only become more popular in the intervening years. Indeed, for 2012 true believers, disaster is imminent — but the government doesn’t want you to know this. So citizens are left to take it upon themselves to stockpile food, buy guns, and build bunkers.
There is no way of knowing how many privately owned bunkers there are in the United States, but if the number of stories on the internet and the twenty-four hour news channels is any indication, there is considerable consumer interest. One has a hard time gauging to what extent this interest translates into sales, however. Aside from the fact that these are private companies dealing with private individuals, there are security concerns. If you were convinced that the world would soon be transformed into a Mad Max-esque nightmare hellscape, would you go around advertising your safe haven?
Dan Hotes is a commercial real estate broker based in Seattle and San Diego with expertise in threat assessment and the resale of Cold War-era missile bases and communication bunkers — specifically "those designed to withstand the effects of a nearby nuclear detonation." I’ve spoken with him a couple times, and his enthusiasm for this obscure topic is infectious. During one of those conversations I remarked on how hard it is to determine just how big this industry really is. So many people, I’ve discovered, want to talk off the record, or sell you on projects that might not exist at all.
"It's a real niche," he laughed. "Welcome to the club, okay? The bunker industry itself, if you look at it as a totality, there's a lot of money because the government's building them as fast as they can. We don't have access to that data. We're left with the scraps and handouts. There's a lot of people that want them, but a lot of people that won't pay for them. The interest level is high, the dedication level is medium, medium low." True to his career in real estate, he made sure that I plugged a Titan 1 missile base that he’s trying to unload, a facility situated at the former Larson Air Force Base in Grant County, Washington. "It's a really nice intact relic of the Cold War." And it can be yours for a cool $4 million. Would he ever live in one? "The missile silos are deep holes in the ground," he pointed out. "I wouldn't want to be down in one of those. I would never do that." I asked him about his plans for the immanent collapse of civilization. His answer was off the record, but I can sum it up in two words: "no comment."
Everybody has to go to Africa — there is no survival option possible in the United States
Patrick Geryl is an author living in Belgium, best known in the United States for books with titles like The World Cataclysm in 2012, How To Survive 2012, and The Orion Prophecy. In his native country his oeuvre extends beyond astronomy, cosmology, and Mayan history, to fruit-only diets. Geryl’s conception of the 2012 meme is pretty indicative of what you find among the more extreme end-of-the-world survivalists.
Geryl is convinced that a solar superstorm is coming that will shower the Earth with magnetism, overloading the electrical grid in the same way that the 1859 solar storm caused widespread failure of telegraphs — in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. In the modern age, electricity and electronics are what is holding our civilization together (imagine what would happen if your city’s supermarkets lost all of their refrigerators, all at once). That isn’t even the worst of it, he says. With widespread grid failure will come widespread nuclear power plant meltdowns.
As Geryl explains, all the safety subsystems in a nuclear power plant are powered by the plant itself. What happens if the plant shuts down? It uses power from the grid (there isn’t a huge distinction between on-site and off-site power, it’s all part of the same continuum). If grid power isn’t available, power is supplied by kerosene generators. If the generators fail — as happened in the case of the Fukushima I plant — meltdown occurs. As one of the articles he sent me stated, "every nuclear power plant operates in a near-meltdown state."
Except, of course, this isn’t true. As Kenneth D. Bergeron, PhD, nuclear safety expert, author of Tritium on Ice, and a 25 year veteran of Sandia National Laboratories, explains, if you accept that the entire electrical grid could be destroyed, and remain that way for a considerable length of time, then "nuclear power plants could end up without coolant circulation, but this would be many weeks or months after scram [emergency shutdown]." There could be overheating of the core, but there wouldn’t be a China Syndrome-style meltdown. Any radioactivity released would be small and local and the consequences would be small, especially when compared to whatever "hypothesized calamity" took out the grid in the first place! In other words, if Geryl’s version of 2012 were to happen, we’d have bigger problems than some nuclear power plants shutting down.
According to Geryl, Europe and the United States — with their high concentration of nuclear power plants — will be completely uninhabitable once 2012 arrives. Africa, he says, is where he will make his escape, assuming he and his small survival group can build a structure. "Everybody has to go [to Africa]," he told me, "there is no survival option possible in United States. In South America, there is a possibility, but there are lots of volcanoes on the mountains, and the earth quake activity will be very high, so survival is very low. In Belgium," he adds, "you can't survive."
Compared to Geryl, most 2012 fanboys are positively level-headed. What if the economy collapses and you can’t depend on the police to keep you safe? What would happen if there was a natural disaster, and you couldn’t rely on government agencies or non-governmental relief? Luckily, there are a few entrepreneurs out there offering turnkey survival solutions. Not that you or I could afford them.
