2 Geological Deterrence: Prepping Like a State
“Nuclear destruction destroys the meaning of death by depriving it of its individuality. It destroys the meaning of immortality by making both society and history impossible. It destroys the meaning of life by throwing life back upon itself.”
—Hans J. Morgenthau, “Death in the Nuclear Age,” 19611
Lingering outside a U-Bahn station in Berlin, I noticed the sharp concrete angles of a nearby pillbox gradually being blurred by snowfall. The German city looked uncharacteristically soft. When Kate finally arrived, she seemed oblivious to the city’s transformation, anxious to get underground, out of the cold. Kate is a British-born guide for Berliner Unterwelten, a group of tunnel and bunker enthusiasts who have, over time, become custodians of the city’s subterranean heritage. Lying on the geographic fault line between the Cold War superpowers, Berlin seemed like the obvious place to get some context on the abandoned government bunkers that preppers were snapping up and retrofitting, so I’d signed up for a tour. I followed Kate into the station, where she unlatched a door and took our small group into an antechamber sixty-five feet under street level. The rumble of trains could be felt through the reinforced concrete walls.
This space had been created ninety years earlier from the remains of subway excavations: what architects call “space left over after planning” or SLOAP. It sat unused until World War II, when UK Royal Air Force planes suddenly appeared over the new National Socialist capital in August 1940 and started dropping bombs. With existing shelter available for only 4 percent of the population, Hitler tasked his architect Albert Speer to make space under the city to provide refuge from Allied aerial attacks. From 1940 to 1944, hundreds of bunkers were located or built under Berlin as part of a wartime civil defense plan. The bunker we were standing in was one of them. After the war, it lay disused until 1981, when it was reactivated during the Cold War.
The year 1981 was also the year I was born. As an elder millennial, I view the Cold War as more history than memory. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, I was still learning to read and write. Kate was eager to provide us with a visceral connection to history, letting us take turns operating the hand crank on the nuclear, biological, and/or chemical (NBC) sand filtration system. Even cranking it for ten seconds was exhausting. The bunker was built for about a thousand people—one person per three square feet—and the idea was that, once the city’s power infrastructure had been incinerated, people would take turns at cranking the filter perpetually. But it was hard to imagine people being able to stay more than a day or two down here, cranking the thing in shifts. Yet, if civil defense planners were to be believed, people were supposed to remain there for fourteen days—the magic number during nuclear fallout, at which point radiation from any nuclear strike, it was believed, would have subsided to a reasonably safe level.
Kate explained that there were four categories of bunkers in Berlin, and that this was a category one, the most rudimentary shelter. “The fact is that during the Cold War, this bunker wasn’t likely to keep you alive,” she told us bluntly. “But a population that believes the end of the world is coming loses their minds. This place at least gave them a way to respond, a place to go.” In other words, the bunker was largely a confidence trick. Kate looked up at the air filter, the lifeline to the surface, and shook her head.
“Come on, I’ll show you a category three bunker where people would’ve fared better,” she said, heading back out onto the train platform.
We took the U-Bahn to the Pankstrasse station. It was sixty feet or so underground. There, at the bottom of the station stairs, Kate showed us a sixteen-inch lead-lined blast door that would slam shut, transforming the station itself into an NBC shelter that could sustain exactly 3,339 people for fourteen days. Train stations were similarly adapted to double as nuclear bunkers in parts of the former Soviet Union. I’d seen one such site in Kiev, Ukraine, in the deepest metro station in the world, Arsenalna, which at nearly 350 feet deep needs nothing more than the closure of a steel curtain to turn it into a blast shelter.
The category three bunker had all that you would expect to sustain people over fourteen days: bunk beds, a kitchen, an airlock, an infirmary, a decontamination room, and a filtration system—not hand-cranked, this time, but on an independent power system. This technology, new then, has now made its way into private bunkers around the world. And yet another aspect of this bunker was groundbreaking: state planners, aware that people would be expected to stay underground for fourteen days, had sponsored some of the first research into the psychological effects of extended subterranean dwelling. This bunker displayed some of the fruits of that research in that it was designed to boost the occupants’ sense of well-being. For example, the walls were painted a pale green—the same color used in hospitals for instilling tranquility and obscuring bloodstains. Also, the mirrors were made of tin, and the bathrooms had no locks—both steps to prevent suicide attempts. Anything that could be readily turned into a self-harming weapon had been blunted or removed.
Most striking was the airlock leading into this “luxury” category three shelter. From the inside, the warden of the shelter could only see through a small pane of glass into a mirror (again, tin) that reflected the airlock threshold—but nothing beyond it, helping them to make the decision to shut the airlock, even if this meant separating families or severing limbs. The reasoning was simple: though 75 percent of West Berlin’s U-Bahn stations had civil defense shelters concealed within their walls, there were only twenty-three working NBC shelters in West Berlin at the height of the Cold War, making available twenty-eight thousand spaces in a city of just over three million people. Less than 1 percent of the population would make it in—and those numbers had to be adhered to. If a shelter went over capacity, its predefined lockdown time frame of fourteen days would be jeopardized. After that time, and not before, an emergency hatch would be released capable of throwing off five tons of rubble, or even a car, and citizens would emerge into the blast-stricken landscape.
Material remains become archaeological with the passage of time, and enough time has now passed that the remains of the Cold War at places like Pankstrasse have also become sites of tourism and scholarship, visited by people like me. Recent geopolitical events make clear they are not follies, but harbingers: today, governments across the world are still building bunkers.
Today, the magnitude of state-level bunker excavation around the world is staggering—without even taking into account what remains beyond the ken of the public. According to Department of Defense (DOD) estimates, there were approximately ten thousand major underground military installations in the world just over a decade ago, many not visible from Earth’s surface.2 Russia’s Mount Yamantau bunker in the Ural Mountains, for instance, purportedly contains an underground facility called Ramenki-43 that can house fifteen thousand people for thirty years in the event of a nuclear attack on Moscow.
In 1994, an urban exploration group in Russia called Diggers of the Underground Planet gained entry to Metro-2, a secret subway system built under Stalin. Metro-2 connects the Kremlin with various “exurban” command posts, including Ramenki-43, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters, and a government airport.3 It’s said to have four lines of track and be 650 feet deep in some places.
Elsewhere, satellite images have revealed that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) recently completed a fourteen-square-mile underground military complex in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.4 Meanwhile, India has built fourteen thousand new bunkers for families in Chachwal Village to protect citizens from shelling along the border with Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir.5
Equally, the seventeen known deep underground military bases (DUMBS) built by the United States from the 1950s on would sound totally implausible if we didn’t know they existed, and they’re surely a fraction of the total built. Three of these sites are of crucial importance to continuity of government (COG), the government’s ability to function after a catastrophic event.
One subterranean lair is known as Raven Rock or Site R, which in a 1954 edition of Life magazine was called out as the “alternative pentagon.”6 It was originally imagined as a five- to six-square-mile facility in which fourteen hundred inhabitants kept the space humming underneath a quarter mile of Pennsylvanian granite.7 Five parallel caverns housed three-storey buildings mounted on massive springs that would flex during blast shock. The first version of the facility was completed in 1953 at a cost of $47 million. Billions of dollars have since been dumped into it, expanding the site to a flabbergasting thirty-seven square miles; today, the bunker has people working in it 24/7, 365 days a year. It’s a fully functioning underground city, replete with a well-stocked bar.
In 1954 the government also broke ground on Mount Weather, a thirty-five-square-mile facility located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, some fifty miles from Washington, DC. In the early 1980s, the National Gallery of Art developed a program to transport the valuable paintings in its collection to Mount Weather in the event of a nuclear launch. It’s also the bunker where the government “B Team”—the people who would run the country if all the top officials were dead—would assemble during a national crisis. On 9/11, after the first plane hit the twin towers, congressional leaders, including then Senate majority leader Tom Daschle were whisked there by helicopter. FEMA currently runs operations in the aboveground areas, fueling conspiracy theories about what they’re actually training for.8 One theory is that they’re setting up concentration camps to house political dissidents after an event.9 FEMA, like its predecessor, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), is in charge of coordinating the nation’s postapocalypse efforts, and their budget for this is classified, known to only twenty members of Congress.10 This, surely, has fueled many of these conspiracy theories.
Finally, in 1956, after President Dwight D. Eisenhower hosted a conference at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, construction began on another US government bunker. Project Greek Island, as the twenty-one-square-mile facility was code-named, was designed to house more than 1,000 government elites in times of crises, including the 535 members of Congress, and one aide for each politician, underneath a new wing of the hotel. About the size of a Walmart, it featured eighteen dormitories, industrial kitchen facilities, a hospital, a document vault, power systems, a hardened television studio, and a periodically refreshed six-month supply of food. Spoils from the excavation were used to expand the hotel golf course to hide digging operations from the public. In 1992, the Washington Post exposed the existence of the facility, rendering it all but useless.11 Like Pankstrasse, it’s now a tourist destination.
All three of these sites are a small part of a “federal relocation arc”: an archipelago of dozens of facilities in which the government could take sanctuary, all about a hundred miles from the Capitol and organized in three increasingly fortified layers linked by an internal communication system. According to a declassified document from 1958, it was recommended that at least four sites be “hardened against blast, thermal and radiation effects.”12 Raven Rock, Mount Weather, and Greenbrier were part of that recommendation as the most secure layer in the arc. Unlike the European public shelters, North American DUMBS of the same period were constructed not for citizens but for the government elites. Citizens had to make their own preparations.
On the other side of the country, in the middle of Colorado, tucked under almost twenty-five hundred feet of granite, is the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which is not so much a place as a negative space. Here is the alternate command center for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which has served as a fictional backdrop in films like Dr. Strangelove, War Games, and Terminator. This is where the military monitors missile launches, activity in outer space, nuclear tests, and cyberthreats. The bunker called off its “nuclear watch” in 1992 after the Soviet Union disintegrated, but in 2015—the same year that Russia reinstated its own civil defense training in the Metro—the Pentagon dumped a fresh $700 million into it. They’d found it was a natural Faraday cage—a grounded shield preventing electrostatic and electromagnetic interruption. Today, a thousand workers roam the mountain’s innards. Six million gallons of fresh water are stored in pools carved out of the rock and 510,000 gallons of diesel are sealed behind a closed wall ready to run the facility off-grid for as long as necessary. You can even order a Subway sandwich there from workers who, during a nuclear attack on the country, might just be the luckiest “sandwich artists” in the USA.
Though these bunkers have never been used during a nuclear attack, there were times when humans edged close to such a disaster. During the thirteen-day standoff that was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviets attempted to deploy a ballistic missile program in Cuba within striking distance of the United States, the world came closer than at any time in history to a nuclear war between superpowers.
The Russians have had their own scares. During the Cuban Missile Crisis an American destroyer near the island, the USS Randolph, dropped depth charges on a B-59, a Soviet submarine armed with a ten-kiloton nuclear torpedo. The intention was to force it to the surface. The charges were nonlethal practice rounds, but the Russians had no way of knowing this, or indeed if all-out war had broken out on the surface. The launch of the B-59’s nuclear torpedo required the consent of all three senior officers aboard. Only one, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, dissented. His sole refusal very likely prevented a nuclear war. Every year, on October 27, people celebrate “Arkhipov Day,” toasting the man who saved the world.
Equally harrowing was an early November morning seventeen years later in 1979, when National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was woken at 3 a.m. and told that two hundred fifty Soviet nuclear missiles had been launched at the United States. It was all-out nuclear Armageddon. Brzezinski knew that the president—Jimmy Carter at the time—had an extremely limited window in which to launch a counterattack, triggering the fabled mutually assured destruction (MAD) scenario. Sixty seconds before Brzezinski intended to call the president to advise him of the attack, he was told that it had been a false alarm. Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system.13 According to National Security Archive documents declassified in 2012, there were three more false alerts the following year, despite stern admonitions from the Soviet Communist Party command that such errors were “fraught with a tremendous danger” and must be avoided at all cost.
Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the easing of tensions between East and West superpowers, there were close calls. In 1995, Russian radar mistook the launch of a Norwegian scientific rocket, being sent to study the Northern Lights, for a surprise attack by the United States, potentially an EMP meant to wipe out electronic communications in the Russian capital. The benign rocket was heading on the exact trajectory of a Minuteman III nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from North Dakota. President Boris Yeltsin was actually handed the Russian nuclear briefcase, the Cheget, to launch a retaliatory strike. He held off, but it remains the only known incident in which a head of state activated such a briefcase and prepared to launch an attack.14
Elsewhere, civil defense programs went beyond the creation of bunker space for the elite few and made attempts to build shelters for every citizen. These programs are still maintained today—at least, by some countries. Sweden maintains space in nuclear-, biological-, and/or chemical-filtered bunkers for 70 percent of its residents, though the structures have never been used in war. In 2018, the Swedish government triggered minor nationwide hysteria when they sent pamphlets to each of the country’s 4.8 million households, reminding them where shelters were and telling them how to prepare for an enemy attack.15 Next door in Finland, for decades the country has been hoarding medical supplies, oil, food, tools, and raw materials to make ammunition. When COVID-19 struck, the Finnish government tapped the stockpile for the first time since World War II and found it to be in superabundance, earning Finland the title of “prepper nation.”16
Meanwhile in Switzerland, a 1963 law still in place dictates that every citizen has access to a nuclear bunker. As of 2016 there was bunker space for 8.6 million individuals—five thousand public shelters and more than three hundred thousand private bunkers—in a country of less than 8.4 million.17 Just in case tourists are in town, I suppose. One of the public shelters is in Lucerne, inside a road tunnel that can be sealed by four three hundred twenty ton gates, and can house twenty thousand people over seven floors.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, bunkers are also ubiquitous in much of Israel, a country in conflict since its founding in 1948. Merhav mugan dirati or “apartment protected space,” commonly known as mamads, can be found in almost half of Israeli houses. Ofer Gal, an Israeli professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, and a good friend, explained to me that public shelters had always been part of blocks of houses, and people knew how to get to the community shelter during an attack. His own family did so, especially during the 1967 and 1973 wars.
But, he went on, “the Gulf War in 1991 changed everything.” With the Israeli government worried about chemical weapon attacks, underground community shelters “were the last place you wanted to send people to. We were told to seal off a room with plastic sheeting and enclose ourselves there during attacks. Like everybody, I did. Then one day I was sitting in my living room and I felt a breeze—it was coming right through the sheet fortifications. It was futile; I ripped it all down. The next time we heard the air-raid sirens, I went up to the roof with two friends and we watched a Scud missile launch from Iraq and then a Patriot missile launch from Israel in an attempt to intercept. It was beautiful in a way; they totally missed each other and made two great arcs in the sky.” When the group descended from the roof and turned on the TV, the official government line was that the Scud had been “successfully intercepted by a Patriot missile.”
“Though I wasn’t particularly young or naïve,” Gal mused, “the unmitigated lie was quite an eye-opener,” causing him to forevermore question government narratives. After the Gulf War, all new apartments had to include mamads with NBC air filters. As they became part of the home, and a private responsibility, people learned to turn them into studies or children’s rooms. Their very existence created a constant sense of self-perpetuating emergency that residents tried to domesticate.18
The most bunkered part of the world is of course the Korean Peninsula. In North Korea, between eleven and fourteen thousand underground facilities have been dug out since the 1950s. Subterranean weapons factories are believed to employ as many as twenty thousand workers.19 The North Korean People’s Liberation Army Air Force is believed to have three different underground air bases, one of which reportedly includes a six-thousand-foot-long runway inside a mountain. They also have up to five hundred missile-launching hardened artillery sites, HARTS, carved into the sides of mountains.20
The California-based Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability is a leading authority on the Korean Peninsula. I spoke to Peter Hayes, the institute’s director, over the phone while I was plotting my tour of bunker architecture. Hayes assured me that in South Korea I’d have trouble getting access to bunkered space and that if I went to North Korea I wouldn’t see much but that “the country’s surface architecture is epi-phenomenal; the essential North Korea is underground.”
After the Korean War ended in 1953, the uneasy truce persisted. In this state of perpetual potential conflict, the South Korean government built nineteen thousand fallout and bomb shelters around the country, with thirty-two hundred public shelters in Seoul alone. It’s hardly surprising, given the place nuclear war holds in the Korean psyche.
More than forty thousand Koreans—those working as forced laborers in Japanese industry—died in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.21 For Koreans, in other words, nuclear war was a lived experience with real and horrifying effects, not a speculative matter, as it exists in the imagination of most Westerners today. Korean nuclear survivors, Hayes told me, have drawn three simple lessons from their terrible experience: “Nuclear wars cannot be won; conflicts must be solved by peaceful dialogue; and nuclear strategy makes nuclear war possible.”
“North of the DMZ [demilitarized zone],” Hayes added, “is another story.” He explained to me that during the first six months of the Korean War, most surface buildings in North Korea were more or less destroyed. Unsurprisingly, North Koreans began investing heavily in burrowing.
“Every hill is honeycombed,” Hayes continued. “Artillery, food, even an entire MiG airfield are buried underground. Multiple weapons factories, including the entire nuclear program, are in bunkers. Make no mistake, North Korea is the most bunkered society in the history of Earth.”
South Korea is taking the re-emerging threat seriously. As in other parts of the world, bunkers there are being “reactivated,” particularly in metro stations. John Delury, an expert in Korean Peninsula affairs, at Yonsei University in Seoul, met me in the midst of my travels and painted a vivid picture of the escalating sense of emergency in the Korean Republic around this time. He had friends in Seoul who had received “bug-out bags”—bags with enough supplies to survive for seventy-two hours—as Christmas gifts when tensions were ramping up in 2017. He also showed me a new government app called Emergency Ready. The app was complex and confusing. There was one tab for “natural emergencies,” one for “social emergencies,” one to call emergency services, and one for “lifestyle safety.” Under the “natural emergencies” tab, one icon looked like it was to be used to report a giant squid attack. Delury said the app was supposed to direct you to a shelter if something did happen, but he worried how it would work if there was no mobile reception.
If open conflict did break out, Delury said, “It would be a mess. The reason people won’t practice disaster planning or use the shelters in Seoul is because… it’s a young democracy with a strong sense of social welfare and a deep distrust of authority.” He explained that many young South Koreans feel that North Korea is used by politicians to keep them living in a state of fear, and therefore obedience. “These are the last people that are going to huddle in a bunker waiting to be saved,” he said.
During the Cold War, then, most state bunkers seemed to fall into one of two categories. In the North American and English model, bunkers were kept secret and reserved only for those in power. Meanwhile, the public civil defense models adopted in places like the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, Korea, and Switzerland became normalized in people’s minds: something to groan or joke about—or simply forget.
Before leaving Europe, I made an extra stop in the UK to go visit the University of Oxford, where I’d worked from 2012 to 2014. One of my colleagues at the time was Ian Klinke. During those years Ian and I could be found at the wooden picnic tables outside of the Kings Arms, catty-corner to the Bodleian Library, sipping pints and talking shop. A striking German-born political geographer with a penchant for trench coats and a habit of constantly adjusting his gold wire-rimmed spectacles, Klinke is one of the most exacting scholars I know—and a fellow bunker nerd.
I timed my arrival in Oxford so that I could tag along with him to a dinner at St. Johns College, Ian’s base. I’d missed the familiar pomp of these affairs, the air that demands implicit secrecy. We stashed our laptops, collected our black robes, and gathered in the dining room. The head of house banged a gavel and words were spoken in Latin. As dinner progressed, wineglasses were discreetly refilled by white-gloved staff.
During dinner, Ian explained that scholars assume World War I to be the catalyst for widespread bunker construction: the introduction of bombing aircraft obviously rendered walls pointless. But, he went on, this was only part of the story. He suggested that the building of concrete bunkers, particularly from World War II on, was also a way of holding territory both horizontally and vertically. “In other words,” Ian said, in military terms “territory went three-dimensional around this time.”22
The next major leap forward in bunker building came with the Cold War and the nuclear threat that accompanied it, presenting state planners with another, greater challenge. If people couldn’t be evacuated from cities, they had to be invacuated into bunkers—because a state without its people couldn’t rebuild itself. Ian pointed me to a passage in the supremely depressing 1960 book On Thermonuclear War by the famous RAND Corporation nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, a man once described as “the heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals.” In it, Kahn intoned that “any power that can evacuate a high percentage of its urban population to protection is in a much better position to bargain than one which cannot do this.”23
Playing out these and other horrific thought experiments on paper, Kahn imagined a nuclear-resistant bunker world on an epic scale. This included a $200 billion civil defense program for the USA, which would shelter 200 million Americans underground long enough to allow them to emerge into survivable postwar conditions, even if everything aboveground had been destroyed. As we made our way through several courses of an increasingly bibulous dinner, Ian explained that, with the final decision of who lives and who dies on a global scale in the hands of a few elites, US citizens responded in a variety of ways. Some grew fatalistic, seeing nuclear war as unavoidable and in some cases even foreordained by religious beliefs in the end of days.24 Others responded by fleeing major cities that would undoubtedly be targeted in a nuclear strike, and whose populations had developed what Kahn called “prime-target-fixation syndrome.” Once ensconced in their suburban homes outside the envisaged blast radius, these fleeing citizens then dug in, burying bunkers in their backyards. In the event of disaster, they pinned their hopes on resurrection.
“The hope was that enough people would emerge from the bunker to rebuild,” Ian told me. “Yet in a worst-case Cold War scenario, there is nothing to emerge into, the surface of the Earth would be toxic and barren.” This has been described as “the problem of the fifteenth day.” As in: You may survive in a Cold War bunker for two weeks, but what do you find when you emerge on day fifteen? This is perhaps why Kahn imagined staying underground for months.
As Ian and I wended our way home from dinner, on wet cobblestone streets past the Bridge of Sighs, I reflected on our conversation. Since the Cold War, bunkers had never really disappeared: the subsurface of the Earth continues to be a geological-geopolitical space.25 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 to tiny walk-in-closet panic rooms, contemporary bunkers are as ubiquitous as they are diverse. In order to understand how we got to this point in history, it’s worth looking back in time.