nuclear-news

Welcome to the Survival Condo. This former Atlas Missile silo turned luxury condominium complex offers the world’s rich and powerful a chance to buy into the ultimate life insurance: an apocalypse bunker that promises the perfect combination of shelter and style.

……. The starting cost for a unit in this complex is $1 million, plus an extra $2,500 per month in dues to cover your living expenses: electricity, water, internet, all the tinned eggs you could dream of.

For the ultra-rich and paranoid, though, you can’t put a price on safety…

The end of the world as we know it

Nuclear winter isn’t like spending Christmas upstate. It’s a global nightmare realm, where Ice Age-like temperatures last for years, populations perish and life as we know it becomes the stuff of sci-fi nightmares.

At least that’s according to Brian Toon, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado and world-renowned expert on the global effects of nuclear war.  ……

Toon says a nuclear explosion is like “bringing a piece of the sun down to the Earth,” and the aftermath of that kind of explosion causes huge fires — think citywide infernos. Those fires push huge amounts of smoke up into the stratosphere. And because it never rains in the stratosphere, sunlight can’t reach Earth. Welcome to nuclear winter.

“The temperatures become colder than the last Ice Age,” says Toon. “So we have sub-Ice Age temperatures over the whole planet for about 10 years.”

That’s exactly why the Survival Condo exists — to protect the mega-rich from the devastation of global nuclear war, and to make sure the world’s most powerful people can survive in comfort, rather than shivering in the wasteland, waiting to have their billionaire brains eaten by hungry hordes. ……..

I’m at the very top of a bunker that descends 15 floors and 200 feet underground. On this upper level, a wide dome set into the hill houses the main entry and communal recreation facilities. That’s where you’ll find the pet park, climbing wall and swimming pool (complete with a water slide).

Beneath the dome, the cylindrical silo houses a further 14 floors — the top three floors are where you’ll find the mechanical rooms, medical facilities and a food store (complete with a full hydroponics and aquaculture setup), followed beneath by seven levels of residential condos. At the bottom, the final four floors house the classroom and library, a cinema and bar, and a workout room (with a sauna). ……..

what if there’s radiation because of a dirty bomb? You would have to go in this room, which is a decontamination scrub room. The chemicals in here can take care of everything. We have iodine pills to treat you for radiation, we have Geiger counters that detect radiation, and we have special chemicals to scrub both biological and radioactive contaminants from you. But you would lose your clothes. You’d be naked and afraid.”

As we wind our way through the Survival Condo, it’s like I’m in an episode of Cribz, set in a dark, alternate reality. This is where we keep the camo gear! This is the gun range! Here’s how we scrub the volcanic ash out of the air in the event of a supervolcano! …….

As a bonus, if the world is really ending, these windows display a real-time view of the carnage outside, thanks to the Survival Condo’s external surveillance cameras. Everyone come to the kitchen! The surface-dwellers are hunting in packs now!….

I guess there’s a grim irony in the idea that even when the nukes drop and the very fabric of society has disintegrated beyond recognition, the rich and powerful will still have it better off than the rest of us.

We’ll still be a society of haves and have-nots. Except in this case, the haves will be watching Armageddon from the comfort of their air-conditioned, underground cinema. And the have-nots will be out in the wilderness, freezing through nuclear winter and picking over the bones of our loved ones, trying to survive the real thing.  https://www.cnet.com/features/inside-the-survival-condo-nuclear-bunker-protecting-the-ultrarich-hacking-the-apocalypse/