Inside the doomsday bunker for the super rich

[Music] as you can see this place is pretty much unchanged from the Cold War this is a converted missile silo how much can this place withstand it was engineered to withstand at ten kiloton nuclear warhead [Music] when it comes to the apocalypse nothing's quite as terrifying as nuclear war so when the nuclear apocalypse comes are we gonna get blasted back into the Stone Age or can we use our heads and survive the end of days with the help of technology here in beautiful Colorado one man is already thinking about the end of the world professor brian toon is an atmospheric scientist and an expert on nuclear winter Brian level with me how likely is an all-out nuclear war and should I be finding a bunker right now you never know for sure because that's one of the real terrifying things here is that one person in the United States and one person in Russia could decide all by themselves to have a nuclear conflict how many nukes are there around the world to who has them there are about 14,000 nuclear weapons in the world more than a thousand of them are held by Britain France India Pakistan Israel and China each of those countries has two or three hundred then Russia and the United States have 90 percent of the missiles so the lesson is everyone has nukes now but what exactly happens when these bombs go off if you're knocking over concrete buildings you're gonna blow people to pieces so there's a range of going out from distance in which you die from the blast wave tearing you to pieces the radiation burning you up the light wave burning you or catching you on fire what happens when day one a week later a year later what are we looking at well when a nuclear weapon explodes it sends out a burst of light it's like bringing a piece of the Sun which is nuclear explosions happening down to the earth and that burst of light catches everything around it on fire that fire sends huge amounts of smoke into the stratosphere but because it doesn't rain up there it takes years for that smoke to clear creating a nuclear winter sunlight from reaching the ground which of course makes it cool off it gets cold at the ground and people expect that about 90% of the global population will die from starvation because there won't be anything to eat the more I thought about nuclear winter the more terrified I became I needed a plan to survive the nuclear apocalypse before the world went to hell so where do you go when you want to get off the grid Kansas [Music] here in the heartland of rural Kansas one man is offering millionaire Preppers a high-tech way to avoid the apocalypse welcome to the survival condo this former cold war missile silo is now a luxury bunker built for the super-rich going off the grid no longer means giving up a lavish lifestyle think of it kind of like cribs in camo from the outside the security cameras armored guard and eight tons steel doors are the only sign you're entering a top-secret facility in fact this place is so top secret I can't even tell you where it is I'm here to meet the man behind the condo Larry Hall who's going to give me a full tour so Clara those doors that we just came in through weigh eight tons each so there's 16,000 pounds they're armored steel filled with concrete so you definitely hear that safety bang on the door closes inside this 54,000 square foot complex boasts everything you could need to live through the end of days [Music] okay let's go down and show you what's underground hey you're not in Kansas anymore we're going beneath Kansas the survival condo is spread across 15 floors and goes 200 feet underground at the top under the dome are the recreation facilities like the pet park and climbing wall underneath that are the mechanical level Medical Bay and food stores with luxury living quarters spread across the next seven floors at the bottom a further four floors house a classroom a library a bar a gym and a cinema alright so I'll show you a full floor unit this is a three-bedroom two-bath unit and they have 9-foot ceilings you see we've got all these high-end stainless steel appliances and most importantly even though I'm 11 stories underground I've still got a window well these are windows are online you're coming out of the units and you see the birds flying and the sunset coming up and the rain and the weather changing that's the input your brain is used to if you look in here you can see that there's the bidet toilets and we have a jacuzzi tub and a shower with the side Jets why don't you why do you have the de toilets instead the regular clothes well interestingly we did a little calculation in the max occupancy for this facility of 75 people and if we put toilet paper for 75 people for five years that a volume of toilet paper would take an entire floor to storage this toilet paper and that square footage cost about three million dollars to build okay it is pretty comfy these are good mattresses welcome to the paradise of the - it's a saltwater pool it's completely computer-controlled the pool is kept to 82 degrees [Music] people do not expect to see a resort pool and an underground bunker and we get drop jaws every time people they go are you kidding me another thing I wasn't expecting underground so much space you got a 24 foot rock climbing wall this is a fun room this is an indoor shooting range you can come down here and shoot everything from handguns up to 308 caliber sniper rifles in here so under proper supervision so we've properly trained people [Music] [Laughter] so we have this media database with about 3000 movies on it anything in particular you're interested in do you have them again oh we got everything we got that but the apocalypse isn't all fun and games there's a schoolroom in the bunker so kids from K through 12 can take self-guided lessons on brand-new IMAX and because this is the 21st century there's no worries if the internet goes out this whole facility as an Internet and when you buy a unit here one of the things that you fill out on your form are things that are of interest to you and what we do is we put that into a device that is like a Google search engine it goes out and it crawls over the Internet and it downloads websites that have those keywords on them they're also Skype enabled so when we bring our second silo online they're going to be connected with a microwave link and the kids in this elementary classroom could see the kids in the other elementary classroom they can talk live and so they don't feel like they're alone down on the store level there's an aquaculture set up that can be used for raising fish and hydroponics for growing organic vegetables you can have salad daily with this kind of setup oh yeah great yeah so well we'll have tomatoes onions different kinds of lettuces some kale blueberries strawberries blackberries but even without that there's still loads and I mean loads of stockpiled food this really satisfies my prepper mode inside of me I feel very safe surrounded by tins of food the silo is also kitted out with high-tech equipment to keep everyone in here alive for years backup fuel stores a water filtration system and even a system that scrubs volcanic ash out of the air just in case so if let's say Yellowstone were to erupt that scientists predict that we could have four to five feet of volcanic ash here well that amount of debris in the air would overwhelm our Erin NBC filters so that pre-filter would come on and it takes all of the volcanic ash out of the air okay so I'm not gonna die in a supervolcano situation not here originally built during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s this Atlas missile silo was designed to withstand the launch of America's ICBMs but turns out designing something to withstand a nuclear launch also makes it really good for withstanding a nuclear blast it took Larry Hall and his team about nine months to clear out all that missile gear before doubling the amount of concrete in the bunker and then fitting it out with the luxuries we see today so this here is a nine foot thick reinforced wall reinforced with steel and this was here when they built the original missile silo [Music] what can you throw at it it was engineered to withstand a ten kiloton nuclear warhead detonated within a half-mile and that would produce a shockwave that would travel 2,000 miles an hour so it can withstand anything up to and including a 2,000 mile an hour shockwave what's the longest I could live down underground for it was engineered to be able to be off grid indefinitely we've got five different power sources including a wind turbine and geothermal systems so the limit is really most practically three to five years that may or may not be enough time to ride out the apocalypse a nuclear winter can last for months or years and even after that you're returning to a world with an altered climate a depleted ozone layer and a drastically reduced food supply to get an idea of just how safe it is to live inside this bunker I visited it's very low-tech cousin down the road here Paul has a second missile silo earmarked for a future survival condo but aside from the new concrete floors this place hasn't really changed since the Cold War this is the elevator shaft check that out [Music] so this is upstairs in the launch control complex in the Atlas missile silo and as you can see this place is pretty much unchanged from the Cold War it's got you can see the lights on Springs so that if a missile goes off the whole thing isn't going to shake off the ceiling we've got a whole gap around the edge of the room so that you've got space for this floor to rattle and right in the middle of the room you can see this is where this is the bathrooms we're back in the day you had the shift workers who could go into the bathroom here and then they lived in these quarters behind me so you had three shifts of people sleeping resting and then manning the controls downstairs it is so eerie to be in here it's such a bizarre space what kind of people have bought here all of our people are self-made millionaires they're very successful doctors engineers lawyers international business people almost all of them have children and they're concerned about the what-if scenario like every year it's like whether it was superstorm sandy or global climate change food shortages economic collapse meteor impact solar flares you're listing my nightmares exactly if those are the kind of things that bother you this is the kind of facility it takes to not worry about those I'm not just gonna cost me well a half floor unit start reading around a million dollars and go up to a million and a half and then we have a full floor unit we're going to spend anywhere between two and a half and three million for a full floor most of us don't have a million dollars lying around to spend on a survival condo and let's be honest signing the deed on one of these doesn't guarantee you'll survive a nuclear winter or any apocalyptic scenario for that matter luckily for the rest of us there are thousands of innovators working on solutions to save humanity from the end of the world I'm just going to have to keep looking for them [Music] Larry Hall we're in the survival condos but I'm 30 no I'm not when it bangs outside make sure you have bang inside I see you walking backwards when we're downstairs you're gonna get kicked out I don't want to hear you like trying to read me your will while you're falling to the bottom I didn't feel scared walking down stairs before but now I've seen the drop I've become very aware of my own mortality you

Channel: CNET

Views: 5,001,058

Rating: 4.8160257 out of 5

Keywords: CNET, Technology, News, Tech, science, claire reilly, hacking the apocalypse, hta, episode 2, ep 2, nuclear winter, missile silo, bomb shelter, apocalypse, nuclear war, nuclear apocalypse, brian toon

Id: TX1sRxCrduA

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ACL_Tearer]

The good thing about selling doomsday bunkers is that if they don't work you don't have to worry about being sued.

[u/daanishh]

I'm wondering where the funding came from.

That must have cost such an insane amount of money to make, and it's also not like it's going to be generating any revenue or any profit just sitting there. How does the whole economics of this work?

Edit: Forgot to mention: holy moly, major fucking Fallout vibes from the whole thing.

[u/Burzenta]

Fascinating. I think this is going to be a big business going forward. Definitely see the demand.