99% Invisible - 430- The Doom Boom

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Bradley Garrett is the author of Bunker: Building for the Times. People have always built underground survival shelters to stay safe from things like plagues or hurricanes. But in modern history, we've really outdone ourselves. Garrett will be our guide to the fascinating world of architecture for the end times. And we're going to find out why today we're going through a true bunker renaissance. The Doom Boom

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There are lots of reasons to build underground. In Singapore, there are whole skyscrapers under the Earth because the country has run out of space on the surface. In Toronto, Canada, there's a network of tunnels called the Path that connects the whole downtown, so people never have to go outside in the winter. And then there is the curious architecture known as the Doomsday bunker.

There's a huge amount of subterranean space that we're not aware of around us all the time. For those of us who live in suburban and rural areas, it's not unlikely that one of your neighbors has a bunker underneath their house that you don't know about. This is Bradley Garrett. I'm the author of bunker building for the end times. People have always built survival shelters to stay safe from things like plagues or hurricanes. But in modern history, we've really outdone ourselves. There are tens of thousands of government and military bunkers around the world, and every day people are building private bunker space, from simple backyard shelters to luxury condos that extend hundreds of feet underground.

You know, once you start looking for bunkers, you see them everywhere. In this episode, Brad will be our guide to the fascinating world of architecture for the end times, and we're going to find out why today we're going through a true bunker, Renaissance. Let's talk a little bit about the modern bunker as it relates to the Cold War and the first doom boom. So tell me about it, what happened during the first doom boom? Well, essentially, what happens in the middle of the Cold War is that it becomes clear that the threat of nuclear war is very real. And governments have to make a decision. Are they going to try and build shelter for their entire population?

Some governments actually do this. So Switzerland famously built bunkered space for every single human being in the populace. In fact, there's space for more than everyone. So I don't know, I guess if visitors are in town, they have a place to go as well. Plus one. Yeah. But in the United States, the decision was made not to build these spaces. Because the nuclear strategist that brought these numbers to the Eisenhower government. I mean, the numbers were astronomical. It was essentially the

the government's GDP for an entire year to shelter the population. So a decision was made in secret to build bunkers for politicians and their aides, but not their families, interestingly. That becomes, you know, the snowball effect there becomes sort of difficult to deal with. But when Kennedy takes power, he is clearly uncomfortable with the idea that people don't know what kind of danger there is. And so he gives this famous speech where he says that I'm paraphrasing here, and our conflict with the Soviet Union, it's not provocation that we seek but preparation.

Our primary purpose is neither propaganda, no provocation, but preparation. Tomorrow, I am requesting of the Congress new funds for the following immediate objective. To identify and mark space in existing structures, public and private. They could be used for fallout, shoulder. He sends out this admonishment to everyone. If you have the resources, build a bunker for yourself and your family. You have to look after yourselves. This triggers what we call the first doom boom, this multi-million dollar industry that springs up overnight of private contractors

who are suddenly rushing to excavate people's backyards and build nuclear fallout shelters. Why didn't it seem like a good idea for the US to build shelters for every citizen? Was it just a practical concern of doing the numbers, to widespread, to expensive, or do you think there's something fundamentally different about the relationship between the governance people? Why Switzerland would have a place for everyone plus one? Or was it just practical? That decision has something to do with the way that we imagine the United States as a kind of collective of individuals. But the logistics of building bunkered space for every American was also just incredibly complicated because it's a huge country.

People are really spread out. It wouldn't be fair, for instance, to say, if you live in a densely populated urban area, we're going to make sure that you have access to bunkered space because, logistically, we can offer that. But if you live in a rural area, well, you're on your own. Yeah. The government did make an effort to build fallout shelters rather than blast shelters, right? So that, you know, transforming parking garages, for instance, into a space that people could hide out in. But that's a far cry from what many governments did.

So could you define the difference between a fallout shelter and a blast shelter, or maybe even a fallout shelter and a bunker, as you see it? In the traditional Cold War calculation, there are two kinds of shelters. There's a blast shelter which can take a direct hit from a nuclear weapon, and there's a fallout shelter, which is a shelter you would hide in for 14 days. 14 days being the magic number when radiation levels fall to the point to which you can sort of safely emerge from the bunker into the post-apocalyptic world. So it's a lot cheaper to build a fallout shelter, obviously.

You know, you don't have to reinforce it to the same degree. It doesn't have to be buried deeply underground. And so many fallout shelters were built during the Cold War, and many of those were private. They were built in people's backyards. The fear of nuclear war started receding in the 1990s, at least my fear of nuclear war, started receding in the 1990s. And you write that some of these private bunkers were converted into pantries and nurseries for kids. What happened to all the government bunkers?

If you think about the sums of money that were invested in constructing those massive bunkered spaces for the Cold War, I mean, it's kind of incredible, right? That we, I mean, because of course they now appear to be architectural follies. They never served the function that they were intended for. So what do you do with them? If you're a government and you're now sort of operating under varying levels of austerity and you're trying to scramble to find money for things and then you realize, hey, wait a minute,

we've got that subterranean fortress that we built that we never used. Maybe we could put that on the private market. This has happened over and over again. Governments put their bunkers up for sale and very often the people who want to buy those spaces are not doomsday preppers, right? People want to put data servers and mushroom farms and wine sellers and all sorts of things, but they are competing with people who genuinely believe that we're things, but they are competing with people who genuinely believe that we're headed towards a precipice. And they're interested in buying those bunkered spaces and moving them into

the private market. And it's a very lucrative business. If you can afford to pay a million dollars for a defunct government bunker, and then retrofit that with some fresh technology and a paint job and sell space inside that bunker to private individuals. You know, it's a booming real estate market right now. Demand for bunkers went down after the Cold War, but in the last few years, it's gone way back up. The tech website, The Verge, reported that, according to a bunch of companies, the demand for bunkers space in America has reached an all-time high since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

Do you think this is an anomaly or part of a bigger trend? In contrast to the Cold War, where we had a kind of specific anxiety about a very particular event, I think people now are just generally anxious about everything. So if we think about existential threats, the threats that have the possibility

of wiping us out as a species, nuclear war was clearly an existential threat. But now we worry about climate change, we worry about artificial intelligence, we worry about viral outbreaks, you know, potentially one that's much more fatal than what we're dealing with. There's a calculation there that is incalculable, that people are trying to make every day. Some people respond by becoming apathetic or trying to dull their senses to make it through these things, and other people respond by trying to control the parameters of their life that are

immediately around them. So I would argue that we're in the midst of a second doom boom at the moment. That doom boom is, you know, bunker building is part of it. People are building private bunkers as they were in the Cold War, but they're we're also building these massive communal bunkers for multiple families. There's a thriving market in survival foods, freeze-dried foods, escape vehicles, bug out vehicles, people are buying, I mean, look at how the market for humb these, right? Private market that we're seeing spring up all around us, which is now a multi-billion dollar market, selling all of these products to alleviate people's dread about an uncertain future. That is all part of the second doom boom that we're in the midst of right now.

So how many people are actively prepping in those ways? I'm supposed to be a social scientist. Let me give you some numbers here. In 2011, there was a survey done where 3.7 million Americans admitted that they were actively prepping. That was broadly conceived. So that could have been people just putting an emergency kit in their garage and thinking about, I mean, in California, we all do this. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

It's really part of the culture. You get a bucket that has all that stuff in it or you have a solar power, crank radio. I mean, it's sort of like expected. It is expected on a low level, right? Now, here's the shocking statistic. There's a researcher at Cornell University, a PhD student, Chris Ellis, who took some survey data from FEMA. They had conducted surveys in 2017 and 2018

in every state and territory. And they found that there were extrapolating those statistics that there were almost 12 million Americans who were prepared to survive for 30 days without any kind of state infrastructure, no water, no electricity, no internet, no restaurants, no grocery stores. Almost 12 million Americans are currently prepared to do that. Ellis in his research, he calls these people resilient citizens. And what was really fascinating is that per capita, the most resilient citizens in the country were native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, many of whom are already growing food or

live off grid. So they're kind of better prepared than people like myself who've been living in cities for 15 years and have absolutely no idea how to grow food. I guess the final takeaway there is that those numbers are from 2017 and 2018. Imagine what they're going to look like in 2021 when we collect that data again. I think so many people have been pulled into the orbit of what I would call practical prepping. Prepping for like just basic everyday functionality rather than a kind of doomsday scenario. I think that those numbers

are going to just, there's going to be a meteoric rise in the next couple of years. You went out and explored some of the architecture of the new Doom Boom. there's gonna be a meteoric rise in the next couple of years. You went out and explored some of the architecture of the new Doom Boom. What was the most impressive piece of architecture that you came across? This was the great joy of the book was going to see people's bunkers. And as you can imagine, most people don't want you to see.

So it took a lot of trust building, to get to the point where people would send those invitations. But one of the best invitations I received was from a Canadian who was living in Thailand. I was in Sydney at the time. I was at the University of Sydney and he sent me a message and he said, I'm building a bunker. It's in the countryside. I would love for you to come out and see the thing.

And of course, I immediately flew over there to go and see it. And in contrast to many of the prepers that I met, this guy was like, he was very, very cool, very collected. The story that he told me was simply that he moved to Thailand to marry a woman that he met in a DVD rental store way back in the day. And they had a wonderful life in Thailand, but he was working on offshore oil fields. And so he was often away for two or three months at a time. And eventually they had a child, and he was worried about them all the time. And he admitted that he was spending his time digging through the news for bad stories. And so he kept moving them into more and more fortified gated communities, and then eventually decided, I'm going to build a bunker. So he bought a plot of land in an

abandoned orchard. And his plan was to create four blocks that were these villas. He called it sanctum. And he was going to live in the first block, and he was going to sell off the other three to pay for the first. And the block that he was building, which I had the opportunity to see, was an incredible thing. It was a giant concrete square with no windows. But the place was beautiful. It was open at the top, light flooded through the middle of it. It dropped down into a swimming pool and underneath the swimming pool, there was a nuclear blast shelter that he had actually turned into a day spa. So it didn't feel like a shelter. And that was his idea.

He had passion fruit vines growing down the walls inside and it was totally self-sufficient so he drilled wells. He had solar panels on the top of the building. He actually won some architectural awards for the sustainability elements in the building. But essentially it was a fortress and we were standing on the rooftop there and I was looking around and I realized that we were in this incredibly remote village, like people were living in small huts, everything was totally open. Most people didn't have doors or windows and he had built this fortress here and then I looked off into the distance and I could see a Buddhist monastery, this huge gold statue

of Buddha that was staring at this fortress. I was impressed with the building, but I was also very kind of taken by the idea that I was in this remote place, and rural Thailand, and even here, someone was building a bunker waiting for the end of the places you visited was a place called Survival Condo, which is a luxury bunker. What is it like in a luxury bunker? Like how nice could it be? Yeah, Survival Condo was built by an ex-government contractor called Larry Hall. And he used to work on defense projects for the government, including building bunkers. And when he had the opportunity to break out

and work on his own projects, he decided he was gonna build his own bunker. I asked him why, and he said, you don't wanna know. Which was really just concerning. It was implying that you knew of dangers you didn't know about. And that's why you're building this bunker. Yes, okay.

Precisely, yeah. And I have to say, a of the people that that I met who are prepping used to work for the government and You know it could be that if you're in those sorts of roles you end up Seeing Disconcerting things and that makes you think about the world in a particular way or it could be that they know something we don't know in a particular way, or it could be that they know something we don't know. But Larry Hall, he purchased a nuclear missile silo that used to have an intercontinental ballistic missile inside of it in the middle of Kansas. And so I'm sure many of your listeners will know, but there are two kinds of nuclear silos, right?

They're the horizontal ones and the vertical ones, so this is one of the vertical ones. Obviously, the missile had been removed. The place was actually flooded. It was in the middle of cornfields and all this sort of agricultural runoff had filled the silo. He pumped that all out of there and he turned this into, I described it in my book as a geoscraper. It's sort of the opposite of a skyscraper. It's 15 stories, but it goes into the earth. You drive through the giant blast doors at the top of this thing. You drive into the parking garage and then you take the elevator down. As you descend, you move first through levels that contain condominiums, both full floor

and half floor condominiums, both full-floor and half-floor condominiums. And then when you get to the bottom of the facility, you've got the kind of communal facilities. He had hired a psychologist to educate him about what people needed to survive. And of course, the base level needs are easy. You know, you can give people food and clean air and clean water. But what gets tricky is how you keep people there for three weeks or three months or three years. He had introduced all of these elements on the advice of the psychologist that would keep people from going nuts or hurting each other or whatever inside the bunker. There's a gym, a yoga studio, a shooting range, climbing wall,

swimming pool, a fully stocked bar. And the thing that's really interesting about Survival Kondo is that Larry Hall was very clear about the fact that he was building this for wealthy people. He was building this for people who actually didn't want to take any responsibility for their own preparations. They wanted to pay him to do everything. They wanted to turn key solution. So he sells half floor condos for 1.5 million and full floor condos for 3 million.

You have to pay with cash because what bank is going to finance your doomsday bunker. And it's an incredible facility. It's incredibly comfortable. In fact, I was in the middle of writing the book and I said, do you want someone to test this for you? Because I would be very happy to stay down here for three months and finish writing the book. He didn't take me up on that offer.

So right, Wakanda was kind of the high end. It cost a million and a half dollars to get a unit there or three million to get a fancy or unit. But you did visit for a range, another place called X Point. I think you sort of suggested it as a potential to be more widespread and functional because it's not exactly a luxury punk of community. So what was it like at X Point and who were they trying to attract? So it was built during World War II.

It was actually a munitions storage complex. And the Army Corps of Engineers built these semi-subterranean concrete igloos, they called them. They kind of have that shape. And they built 575 of them in this huge expansive land in the middle of the plains in South Dakota. I forget the square footage, but it's about three quarters of the size of Manhattan, this bunker field. And at one time, they would have filled all of these bunkers with weapons to protect them from other weapons. Strange irony there. And now they're filled with people who are protecting themselves from weapons, potentially. Or viruses or zombies. Or viruses or yeah, it's on the zombie apocalypse. This was another real estate development project that was pitched by a Doomsday Prepper. His

name is Robert Vesino. He lives in California. And when he saw this bunker field, he saw it as an incredible opportunity to create what he described to me as The place from which humanity would be reborn After the next great calamity he very much saw it as a kind of Calling he was gonna build this place. So he found this bunker field in South Dakota This is another one of these Architectural spaces that the government has a really

hard time dealing with. What do you do with a giant bunker field? Who do you sell it to? So when they had a real estate developer approach them and saying, I've got a viable business plan. They said, fantastic. Please take this off of our hands. And Vesino, he started cleaning up and selling empty concrete igloos for $25,000. I was there on day one. I saw the first four families move into their bunkers. They were working class people. People were building there.

They were interested in building a space that would become essentially a second home. Rather than purchasing the second home, they buy the bunker and turn it into the second home. It's kind of their vacation property. So they would go there for Fourth of July, for instance. They would have big parties with all of the other bunker residents.

But no one was really interested in living there permanently. Because to be frank, it's a very rough environment. It's windy, it's dry, it's cold. It would be really hard to live in these bunkers permanently. Not to mention that in the beginning, there was no running water or sanitation infrastructure. That did come later. The families that are living there now

are living in, or that have space there, are living in decent comfort. This is something I found interesting, and I wonder if you thought about this too. It seems to me, and these are with broad sociological terms, that the person who builds or is attracted to a bunker is kind of a self-reliant, libertarian, maybe minded person who is trying to solve this problem on their own because, and they probably think that they should solve a lot of problems on their own. But they're buying into this commune in the post-apocalyptic world that might run counter the how they would live their lives today, but they maybe think that this sort of like

the Stoomstay event would realign their interests or something. Have you interviewed people who thought about what that transition would feel like for them? One of the most difficult things to get out of people is what they imagine the post-apocalyptic world to be like. Everyone imagines building, you know, everyone's building now, right? And they can imagine the bunker they want to build. I'm using bunker loosely, right? That this kind of whatever space, their remote property or their subterranean bunker, whatever.

And they can imagine the event, the thing that drives them into the bunker. And then they imagine very often this kind of moment of relief. I don't have to go to work anymore. I don't have to participate in society. My phone doesn't work, right? The internet's broken. There's this kind of euphoria that people have expressed to me over

and over again about the idea of being like trapped in the bunker, maybe with a couple of, you know, what they would consider like-minded people. But we never really get to the long-term vision. Where are we headed with this? What kind of society do you build after that? Those people who might also have depended very much on themselves and mistrusted the government to deal with emergencies, you're now in a community with those people. And you have to rebuild when I entered into those conversations with people, often they would stall out at that point.

Many of the bunker preppers are prepping in a way that it's really geared towards them and their family. It's very individualistic. Like no one's going to tell them what to do. And yet some of the preppers you talk to seem totally ready to assign people roles after the disaster. Like, you know, you'll be a baker and you'll be a doctor. Like they're making a commune.

It strikes me as a funny contradiction. That's part of the utopia, I think, is imagining all of the traditional roles being broken, which is an irony, right? Because a lot of these people are very stuck in traditional notions of how things should function. But we should also be careful not to character preppers too much because there's some brilliant research by Annamarie Bounds at Queens University in New York where she worked with urban preppers and she worked with the specific preppers network of inner city preppers, most of whom were black and most of whom said that they had been through traumatic experiences in the past. They'd been through

Sandy. They'd been through 9-11. They'd had difficult childhoods and they said, we're not going back there. So stockpiling for them and saving money and preparing for emergencies and skill building. For them, that was all an effort to kind of keep themselves in the space that they had climbed to in their minds. We'll have more with Bradley Garrett after this. How did your outlook on prepping change while you're doing the research for this book and writing the book? Preppers defied all my expectations.

They were more diverse than I expected. They were calmer than I expected. I realized in the time that I spent with them how many skills I was lacking and how little knowledge I had about so many things. It's also introduced a bit of dread in me that I can't shake, you know, this kind of uncertainty about where we're headed and what the purpose of all this is. I guess it's kind of shaken my faith

in this kind of shaken my faith in this kind of enlightenment trajectory where we're supposed to be just escalating into utopia or whatever. I kept running into this feeling that they saw time as moving in spirals. Like breakdown was inevitable. Tomorrow is gonna be different than today.

And that's okay. Like they were at peace with that today. That's okay. They were at peace with that idea. Before I started working on this project, I wasn't. I wanted tomorrow to be better than today, always. It was actually filling me with anxiety, continuing to think constantly about what more I needed to achieve or what university should I work at next. How many books should I write in the next 10 years? You know, and I just don't care anymore. I mean, I do care, but I guess that care has been that kind of obsession with my career and that trajectory has been tempered now.

You know, I mean, the pandemic has also contributed to it. Because I've been stuck here with my family taking care of them, and that's been great. It's been actually a healing process for me. But when I started writing this book, I had no idea there was going to be a pandemic. So there was this kind of, I don't know, just perfect crescendo that has led me to this place where I feel so much better about my life. And that's what the preppers told me. They said the disaster, I mean, we didn't know what the disaster was going to be, but they said the disaster will forcefully realign your priorities.

I mean, when you talk to people who were sort of engaged with this, who like built or lived in hardened architecture, had bunkers prepped a bit, did you feel that their fears were being asswaged by this stuff surrounding them or stoked by this stuff surrounding them. I expected to find a group of people who were anxious and paranoid, and they really weren't. They felt that they had taken control of the parameters around them. They lived with a profound sense of peace, actually, regardless of the external circumstances that they were dealing with or might have to deal with, they had put everything in place that they needed to assure the best possibility of survival. You know, you can't assure survival, but you can assure the best possibility of survival.

Thousands of years from now, when humanity has gone, what is going to be left? Will it be the Empire State Building? What do you think it'll be apocalypse bunkers? Just look at the Atlantic wall Those bunkers from World War two that are like giant robot helmets and they're slumped into the beaches of Normandy Those things are gonna be there in a thousand years. We are building Monuments right now monuments to this age. They may outlast us. You know, it could be some other species that emerges that eventually finds these giant bunkers and subterranean fortresses that we built. And they're going to tell a story about a civilization that was that is afraid of itself. I used to be an archaeologist

and I worked in Mexico at a site called Tulum, so post-classic Maya site. And these people had the most ideal lifestyle, you can imagine, they sort of built temples on the beach and there's beautiful blue water. And right at the end, so eventually they disappear, like every civilization. Right at the end, so eventually they disappear, right, like every civilization. Right at the end, according to the material records, they start building these walls around

their temples. And they never had walls before. And no one knows why they started building them. Some people have said that they were engaged in warfare with someone that they had a falling out with, but there's another theory that actually it was because of viruses. When the Spanish came over and people started getting infected, they didn't know what it was. And so they started building walls to keep the virus out.

Those walls are still there today, but it occurs to me that the walls that we're building now are going to tell a similar story of a people who were scared and uncertain about the future who aren't sure where they're headed. I think one of the most interesting aspects of the bunker as an architectural space is actually imagining it as the future archaeology. Bradley Gears book is called Bunker, building for the end times. It is so good. If you're fascinated by this stuff at all, you're going to love this book. There's so much in it that we did not cover here. You can get it now in hard back, and it will be out in paperback later this year.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Barube, music by Sean Rial, sound mix by Amita Ganatra. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall, Kurt Colesette is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Le, Christopher Johnson, Abby Medon, Katie Mingle, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered in little audio bunkers across the continent, but when the end times come, we will run straight to beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of

the most innovative listeners supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 9i.pi.org, or on Instagram and Reddit too. If you want to see pictures of bunkers and a link to the book, bunker, building for the end times, it's so good. You're going to want to get it. Look no further than 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.

you