Friday 23 September 2022 12:26 AM Inside the billionaires' doomsday bunkers: Secret subterranean palaces with ... trends now

The prospect of a nuclear strike on Britain has never seemed more real, with Vladimir Putin and his henchmen threatening to obliterate London and other Western capitals in the latest escalation of the Ukraine war.

On Sunday, Russian state TV aired threats by Andrey Gurulyov, a member of the State Duma. Taking particular issue with the UK, he called it ‘the root of all evil’ and suggested that it could be turned into a ‘Martian desert’ by Russian nukes.

Putin himself warned that ‘this is not a bluff’, seemingly willing to risk precipitating Armageddon with bombs that would set the sky alight with the blaze of a thousand suns.

Millions would be incinerated instantly and even for those who escape the initial blast or the ensuing radiation fallout, there would be little hope of survival. As firestorms rage, great clouds of toxic smoke would rise into the atmosphere, blocking the sun’s rays and causing a severe cooling of the planet. This would kill crops and cause a global famine that would last for many years.

In a world where emaciated neighbours are killing each other in fights over scraps of food, it seems incredible that anyone would be concerned with how to heat their swimming pools, or practise their golf swing.

Yet that is exactly how the world’s super-rich hope to live out just such a nuclear apocalypse, or indeed any other worldwide catastrophe, according to a fascinating new book revealing their elaborate plans for surviving while the rest of us perish.

Survival Of The Richest is written by Professor Douglas Rushkoff, a technology expert whose interest in how seriously those business moguls are planning their post-apocalyptic future was sparked by a rendezvous at a secret desert location in 2018.

Lured by a fee equivalent to a third of his annual teaching salary at the City University of New York, he was flown business class and picked up from the nearest airport in a limo that drove him for three hours to ‘the most luxurious, yet isolated place I’ve ever seen. A resort in the middle of nowhere’.

A typical audience for Rushkoff would be 100 or so investment bankers, but instead he found himself sitting around a table with five of America’s wealthiest men.

‘All were from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge fund world,’ he explains. ‘At least two of them were billionaires.’

After some small talk, he realised that these hoodie-wearing tech titans had no interest in the talk he had prepared about the digital future. Instead, they questioned him endlessly about what they should do after The Event.

That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, unstoppable virus or malicious computer hack that might one day take everything down.

Should they build their bunkers in New Zealand or Alaska? Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis? What was the greater threat: climate change or biological warfare?

These were the questions on their minds and Rushkoff was struck by how much thought these terrified tycoons had put into their survival strategies.

One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. Another was obsessed with the heated pool he wanted in his bunker and ways of simulating daylight as he went for his subterranean swims.

When Rushkoff suggested that finding parts for the pool’s heating system during a nuclear winter might prove tricky, the magnate nodded earnestly. ‘He was jotting things down on his pad like “order more parts for pool”.’

As Rushkoff points out, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants is very slim. ‘Everything gets everywhere. Toxic clouds, plague and radiation have a way of spreading and seeping through the most well-thought-out barricades. Air filters need to be regularly replaced and sometimes fail even when they are.’

Sourcing new filters when the factories making them have been destroyed will be impossible. But such practical matters will be the least of the billionaires’ worries if we do reach the end of days.

For there is a fatal flaw in their survival strategies — how to maintain the loyalty of the staff they pay to protect them in a world plunged into unimaginable chaos.

That will be a problem wherever they decide to flee. For most, the boltholes of choice seem to be underground bunkers and money is, of course, no object when it comes to fitting them out. ‘Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a yacht with a helipad that serves as a companion yacht to his main yacht, whose sails would get in the way of his helicopter during takeoff and landing,’ points out Rushkoff.

According to Robert Vicino, founder of Californian bunker supplier Vivos, Bill Gates has huge shelters under every one of his homes. ‘His head of security visited with us a couple years ago,’ Vicino said in a recent interview. ‘For these multibillionaires, a few million is nothing. It’s really just the newest form of insurance.’

Clues as to how these sumptuous sunken palaces might be equipped can be found in the options provided by the Rising S Company in Texas, motto: We Don’t Sell Fear, We Sell Preparedness. Housing about 50 people — enough for family, friends and a large retinue of staff — their top-of-the range 10,600 sq ft Aristocrat bunker costs £8.3million.

It comes complete with a home cinema, sauna, gym, bowling alley and, of course, a swimming pool. But it can be customised to incorporate just about any other mod-con required, be it a putting green or a fake park where you can walk your dog without going outside.

The largest shelter built by Rising S was 14,000 sq ft and included an indoor shooting range. Another had space for a client’s racehorses which can be transported into the steel fortress via a

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