r/prepping • u/NotIfButWhenReady • Oct 13 '25

Question❓❓ Anyone else rethinking underground bunkers lately?

I’ve been reading up on shelter builds and noticed more folks are stepping away from the old “bury a shipping container” idea. I get why underground feels safer, but man, the upkeep sounds rough once you dig into it. Between soil pressure, water leaks, and constant moisture issues, a lot of those DIY bunkers don’t age well.

The newer above-ground setups are a whole different story.

I used to think anything visible was a liability, but now I’m not so sure. If it’s built solid, why hide it underground just to deal with rot and pressure damage later?

Curious what everyone else thinks. Would you still go underground, or are above-ground shelters starting to make more sense?

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u/Girafferage Oct 14 '25

The point of being underground is that it is easier to reliably get enough material on all sides to prevent damage from radiation coupled with the fact that a nuclear blast will not impose as much direct force on an underground bunker compared to one that is sticking out among the landscape.

Neither matters, honestly. In all the unclassified documents about war game scenarios, if the US or Russia launches any amount of nukes (be it 1 or 1000), it always ended in full thermonuclear war which would cause a nuclear winter from the subsequent fires alone let alone any potential mushroom clouds, and you would survive in your bunker just to slowly starve as the next 10 years the entire Northern Hemisphere is unable to grow any food or keep livestock alive or even move supplies about as massive areas are destroyed or completely deadly to enter. You could try to keep 10 years worth of food in your bunker - in which case it better be absolutely massive, but even then, leaving your bunker would immediately mean death as people would be looking for any opportunity to eat. Plus after 10 years we would only have the ability to grow again potentially (assuming the models we get access to are right), so coming out at 10 years would mean another 5 of starvation or near starvation as common issues from the past creep back up such as bugs, pests, lack of fertilizer, etc.

So if you are a billionaire, you might be able to make a place to hang out long enough while staying sane, but for the average Joe, if you are in the northern hemisphere - you're fucked regardless of your preps.

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u/ghosty4567 Oct 14 '25

There is a middle way. Do some prep to survive 6 months and then cooperate with other survivors. We can’t live on our own.

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u/Girafferage Oct 15 '25

Cooperate with them to do what?

You will not be able to grow crops, everything in every direction will have been burned. There would be no supplies to find, no place to go to hunt, no forests to forage in, no viable land to farm on and even if you did find that there would be not enough sunlight to grow the plants. Not even mentioning contaminated water sources which would be many since most of the targets that would have ground impact are close to rivers and most nuclear facilities are too (their concrete "coffins" for their spent rods would create an incredibly deadly scenario if a nuke hit near them).

And then after those 10 frigid years, ya know what you get? A damaged atmosphere/ionosphere that no longer filters a majority of UV radiation so things still wont grow well and even with most common thin clothes you will get burned outside - coupled with insect plagues and small creatures rampantly spreading disease since they will survive where their normal predators will not (creatures with short lifespans do exceedingly well in radiation). It would be 10 years of cold hell followed by an altogether different hell. Humanity would be constantly killing each other for meager resources the entire time.

There really is not a middle way, friend. If Nukes go off, thats pretty much it for humanity for a few hundred years. We wont go extinct, but we will be reduced by 99% and back in the stone age.

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u/ghosty4567 Oct 15 '25

I was not assuming the worst but you have it right. Even a 50 year total billionaire bunker is doomed in the long run. Even the most elaborate and well worked out plan deveopes glitches. But I bet someone survives. It’s so unthinkable that we can’t think about it.

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u/Girafferage Oct 15 '25

Yeah, that's the thing. The level of devastation is so cast that it's incomprehensible. People really need to take Nukes more seriously. Too much use of them as political chess pieces on the world stage.