‘Our top search term is nuclear’: US bunker sales soar as anxiety over Russia rises
Gary Lynch is the CEO of Rising S Company in Texas. When I first visited his warehouse in 2018, I watched his crew assemble, deliver, and bury a handful of bunkers in people’s backyards every month. The bunkers are thick plate steel boxes that are welded together like a giant Lego set – the size of the bunker limited only by a client’s resources.
Sales, he says, have spiked 1,000% since that time as anxieties around the pandemic, civil unrest, climate change and war have driven more buyers to his company.
“In the past month, I would have normally fielded less than 100 inquiries – I’ve fielded over 3,000,” Lynch tells me over the phone. He sold five bunkers on a single day in February, at prices ranging from $70,000 to $240,000.
As we move into the second month of a war that has already killed more than 10,000 people, there is no doubt bunkered space has renewed appeal. Ukrainian citizens have been huddling together, sleeping, cooking food, and even giving birth deep underground, surviving in solidarity, and then emerging to fight or flee.
Ukraine has at least 5,000 publicly accessible bomb shelters, many of which have been upgraded since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. In stark contrast, the US has few public shelters. This disparity can be traced back to the cold war, when the Soviet Union invested heavily in public defence infrastructure and the United States placed the burden of nuclear protection on private citizens.
Lynch says some customers are panic-purchasing. “There are definitely a few ‘I told you we needed one of these’ conversations going on in households around the world right now,” he says. “But we have also previously shipped shelters into Ukraine and I’m certain they are currently being used.”
With Nato
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