Crawl Out Through the Fallout Into One of These Survival Bunkers
Political turmoil and Covid-19 got you wishing for a place to hide away from it all? Until Elon Musk colonizes Mars, the human race is still tethered to Earth. There are, however, plenty of real estate options that could provide a place to safely wait out global turmoil.
Off-gridding and bunkers have become a part of pop culture in recent years because of the increased visibility of survivalists and “preppers,” folks that believe the possibility of societal collapse is not a question of if, but when. Preppers religiously stock up on MREs, dried goods, guns, ammo, water and any other items that they might need in the event of an apocalypse. Naturally, a prepper needs a secure home base to defend, so there’s a thriving market for decommissioned communication bunkers and fallout shelters among that crowd.
Bunkers as we know them first hit the popular zeitgeist around the 1950s and ‘60s, during the height of the Red Scare. During those days, ordinary Americans routinely lived in fear that their neighborhoods would either be wiped off the map by am A-bomb courtesy of the USSR, or that one of their neighbors was a communist spy. So, what’s a rational person to do? Build their own backyard fallout shelter, naturally.
By the late 1950s, in fact, the U.S. government was actively promoting the construction of private fallout shelters as a part of its civil defense program. They created a bevy of reading materials and videos that showed the benefits of having a bunker and how to build one. And, when relations with the USSR nearly hit a boiling point with the Bay of Pigs, President John F. Kennedy saw that having “a fallout shelter for everybody as rapidly as possible” was essential for the country. So, keeping up with the Joneses during this time period might have just meant converting a storm cellar into a nuclear-blast-proof bunker.
The trend of having a fallout shelter didn’t die out with the end of the Cold War. In fact, building and owning a bunker experienced a resurgence during the Y2K scare in 1999, when people believed society would disintegrate when computers would be unable to process any dates in the year 2000. The global infrastructure, of course, did not collapse, but plenty of people invested in creating a personalized fallout shelter — just in case.
Of course, crude underground bunkers aren’t the only type of survivalist home out there. There are also off-grid homesteads that offer a completely self-sufficient lifestyle for the right prepping owner. And, there’s even some luxury options that blow the traditional definition of survivalist escape right off the map.
Click over to the gallery to check out some unique modern bunkers on the market right now.
Launch Gallery: Get Inside One of These Modern Safe Houses
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