Surviving a nuclear apocalypse in a luxury doomsday bunker

[MUSIC] As you can see, this place is pretty much unchanged from the Cold War [MUSIC] This is a converted missile silo. [MUSIC] How much can this place withstand? It was engineered to withstand a 10 kiloton nuclear warhead. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [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? [MUSIC] 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, who has them? There are about 14,000 nuclear weapons in the world More than 1000 of them are held by Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and China, or each of those countries as 2 or 300. Then Russian and the United States have 90% of the missels. 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 going to blow people to pieces so there's a range of going out from distance in which you die from The blast wave tear you to pieces the radiation burning you up. The Lightwave burning you are catching you in 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 virtual 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. Black 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? 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 Cribbs in camo. From the outside, the security Security cameras, armoured guard and eight tonne 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. To clear those doors that we just came in through way, eight tons each, so they're 16,000 pounds. They're armored steel filled with concrete. So you definitely hear that safety Bang on the door closes. [MUSIC]. Inside this 54,000 square foot complex boasts everything you could need to live through the end of days. [MUSIC]. Okay, let's get down and show you what's underground. [MUSIC] You're not in Kansas anymore. We're going to 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, 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 cinema. Alright, so i'll show you a full fourth unit. This is a three bedroom two bath unit. And they have 9' ceilings. You see we've got all these high end stainless steel appliances. And most importantly, even though I'm 11 storeys underground, I've still got a window. When these are windows are online you come in and out of the universe and you see the birds flying in the sunset coming up in the. Rain in the weather changing. That's the input your brain is used to. [MUSIC] If you look in here, you can see that there's the big day toilets and we have a twosie tub and a shower with the side jets. Why don't you Why do you have the day toilets instead, the regulatory Well, interestingly we did a little calculation and the max occupancy for this facility is 75 people. And if we put toilet paper for 75 people for five years, that volume of toilet paper would take an entire floor to store just toilet paper. And that square footage cost about $3 million to build.>> Okay the day it is.>>The day it is.>>The day it is. [MUSIC] Pretty comfy. These are good mattresses. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Welcome to the paradise of the beach. [MUSIC] It's a saltwater pool. It's completely computer controlled, the pools kept to 82 degrees. [MUSIC] People here expect to see a resort pool In an underground bunker, and we get dropped 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. [MUSIC] Wow, weuh. This is a fun room. This is an indoor shooting range. Can come down here, shoot everything, from hand guns up to 308 caliber sniper rifles in here. So under proper supervision. Of course So we've properly trained people. [MUSIC] Theatre and lounge level [MUSIC] So we have this media database with about 3000 movies on it. Anything in particular you're interested in. Do you have them again? We got everything. We have that. All right, let's roll that. All right. [MUSIC] 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 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 agriculture setup that can be used for raising fish and hydroponics for growing organic vegetables. You can have salad daily with this kind of setup. Yeah Great [UNKNOWN]. Yeah. So 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. [MUSIC] 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 scientist predicted we could have four to five feet of volcanic ash here. Well, that amount of debris in the air would overwhelm our Aaron NBC filters. So that pre filter would come on and it takes all of volcanic ash out of the air. Okay, so I'm not gonna die in a supervolcano situation, Not here is good. 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 hole 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 say 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. [BLANK_AUDIO] What can you throw at it? It was engineered to withstand a 10 kiloton nuclear warhead. Detonated within a half mile and that would produce a shockwave that would travel 2000 miles an hour so it can withstand anything up to an including a 2000 mile an hour Shockwave. What's the longest I can live down on the ground floor. 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. And 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 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 say this is where the bathrooms were. 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 down stairs. It is so eerie to be in here. It's such a bizarre space. [MUSIC] 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, meteorite impact solar fires. You're listing my nightmares. Exactly. If those are the kinda things that bother you this is the kind of facility it takes to not worry about those. [MUSIC] How much is it gonna cost me? While the half floor unit start right around a million dollars and go up to a million and a half, and then we have a full floor unit You're gonna spend anywhere between two and a half and 3 million for a full floor. [MUSIC] Most of us don't have a million dollars lying around to spend on a survival condo. And let's be honest, signing the date 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] [SOUND] Larry Hall we're in the survival condos but I'm 30 no not. [SOUND] When it bangs outside. Make sure you have bang inside. I see you walking backwards. We were downstairs. You're gonna get kicked out. I don't wanna 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. [LAUGH]