How to await the apocalypse in style

RON HUBBARD sells high-end fallout shelters, and business is booming. Just $144,999 (fiat currency, not gold), buys a 500-square-foot, sandblasted, tar-coated, modular fallout shelter with a bulletproof hatch, decontamination shower, gas-tight interior doors, L-shaped entry “to attenuate gamma radiation”, kitchen, bathroom, sleeping space for a family and, of course, the chance to upgrade it as far as the buyer’s wallet will allow. Shouting down the phone in his Texas twang, Mr Hubbard says that “people are buying [my shelters] because they think the shit’s going to hit the fan in this country! Eventually a hard-core socialist liberal’s going to take control, and they’re not going to let that happen. People are preparing for civil war.”

Preparing for disaster—“prepping”, as practitioners tend to call it—is nothing new. At the height of the cold war, people built fallout shelters in their yards, and governments installed them under public buildings. Moscow’s immense subway stations double as fallout shelters; Switzerland’s network of shelters can house the country’s entire population.

But the prepping business is still going strong, even as the threat of great-power nuclear conflict has receded—and the difference now is that disaster no longer need mean discomfort. Former nuclear-missile storage facilities across the...

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