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Bunker: Building for the End Times by Bradley Garrett review – the new doom boom

When we refer to someone as having a “bunker mentality” we usually mean they are so stuck in their ways that they’re unable to look around and see the world for what it is. But is it possible that the rational response to the state of the world is to retreat into a bomb-proof, virus-free bunker?

In his new book Bunker: Building for the End Times, Bradley Garrett, an American “experimental geographer” and “urban explorer”, sets out if not to answer this question, then at least to raise it. Never before in recorded history, he writes, “has humankind faced such grave, and myriad, existential threats” as we do today.

There are many people whose response to the proliferation of nuclear and biochemical weapons is to prepare themselves for the day when war breaks out or an accident happens and the kind of catastrophe familiar from science fiction takes place. They call themselves “preppers” and what they have in common is the conviction that, when the dread moment arrives, the state will not be looking to help them.

At least not most states. In Switzerland, Garrett informs us, there is bunker space for 8.6 million people. And North Korea “is the most bunkered society in the history of the Earth”. But in the UK and the US, during the cold war, government preparation for a nuclear Armageddon was limited to taking care of themselves and state bureaucracies. Everyone else was quietly left to fend for themselves.

In the US, Garrett notes, citizens were called upon to build their own bunkers in an effort to preserve the state. This had the paradoxical effect of encouraging a sense of self-preservation that “made the state seem superfluous”. As a consequence, it’s not uncommon in the US – at least in this book – to come across self-declared patriots who feel the best way to protect their country is to break away from it.

Whether from sympathy (Garrett admits to his own prepper instincts) or academic discipline, the author displays a great deal more tolerance for the cast of conspiracy theorists, paranoiacs, libertarians and hucksters he encounters than many readers might possess. In my narrow-minded case, I find I rapidly lose interest in someone’s opinions the moment they declare that 9/11 was an inside job.

However, when Garrett gets an earful of Truther nonsense, he doesn’t rush to judgment. And he hears a lot of that kind of talk as he visits various bleak bunker sites across America, all of which promise to keep out the coming apocalypse. What becomes swiftly evident is that it’s in the economic interests of the entrepreneurs who own these places, with such deathless names as Almost Heaven and Paradise Valley, to talk up the risk of impending cataclysm.

It’s tempting to see bunker-building as a rather expensive version of burying one’s head in the sand

Often, their properties are little more than empty concrete shells, buried in some no man’s land in Utah or Idaho, selling for premium prices to the gullible and the fearful. It’s no great surprise to learn that a number of what Garrett calls “dread merchants” turn out to be charlatans, criminals or both.

The emotional fall-out from the (very real) existential threat of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 led to what’s called the first “doom boom”. Then 9/11 heralded a new opportunity for the dread merchants. As Garrett notes, in one sense these safe places are simply the most extreme manifestation of a general trend towards social protection and isolationism in the US.

Apparently one in three new-built homes in America is within a gated community. This large-scale retreat from public space has many effects, not least fostering the idea that the outside world is dangerous, which in turn becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as confidence and investment in public space decline.

It’s tempting, therefore, to see bunker-building as a rather expensive version of burying one’s head in the sand – a physical rejection of reality. But the disturbing fact is that we’ve become adept at forgetting that we live on the precipice of almighty disaster. The Covid crisis has presented a glimpse of how vulnerable we are to a nasty but not especially lethal virus.

So far, this time round, the most extreme response to the threat has been panic-buying lavatory rolls. But how would society hold up against something like a nuclear explosion or a devastating bioengineered pathogen?

Seeing a new dark age ahead, Garrett concludes that the time to hunker down and “out-think extinction” is now upon us. So what will be left when you finally venture outside your subterranean blast shelter? A bunch of paranoid middle Americans and even more paranoid North Koreans. And, of course, the Swiss. Never will we be more in need of their neutrality and euthanasia services.

Bunker: Building for the End Times by Bradley Garrett is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copy for £17.40 go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15