“From here to anywhere” is the motto of Debert’s business park, but it feels like the middle of nowhere.
Just 113km (70 miles) north of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Canada’s east coast, it was once a military base where thousands of soldiers trained during World War Two. Now it’s a mix old buildings and empty parking lots, bordered by thin, coniferous woods.
But there is promise of a luxurious and glamorous future in the large grassy hump popping up at one end of the park.
Canadian crypto mogul Jonathan Baha’i plans to convert the 64,000 square-foot nuclear bomb shelter into crisis-proof condos where billionaires can ride out all sorts of cataclysm.
The 50-unit project, managed by Baha’is Fallout Complex Inc, will offer amenities such as gourmet dining from a “self-sustaining” food source, biometric access, around-the-clock surveillance, and onsite medical services. Tenants with private planes can land at the small Debert Airport nearby.
After buying the site, commonly called The Diefenbunker, in 2013 for C$31,300 ($22,000; £16,500), Baha’i first pursued a different business model for it that included laser tag and historical tours, along with a small data centre.
“There’s more uncertainty in the world in the last two years than in the last 30 years,” Paul Mansfield, a project co-owner, told the local council last autumn. “It sort of led to a rebirth of people wanting to have an insurance policy” – a ‘doomsday bunker’.”
The company will work with German firm Bespoke Home and Yacht Security, which Mansfield said had provided security for US Vice-President JD Vance and reality star Kim Kardashian, though their client list is not public.
Bespoke’s recommended measures for the forthcoming complex, which has already sold 11 units, include flying drones to survey its perimeter, according to Mansfield.
The renovation plans also include a spa, a yoga room, and a cigar lounge. Modern OLED lights will replicate natural light, and an adjacent overground bunker will be used to grow food.
When condo owners aren’t there, the units will be rented out for hotel stays and the profits will be shared. Both the cost to buy and the cost to rent are secret.
“If somebody was renting it as a hotel room and something happened and they had to get kicked out, they would get kicked out,” Mansfield said.
Former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had seven bunkers built across the country from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, meant to house a skeleton crew of government officials in the event of nuclear war.
The bunker in Debert was designed to withstand a near-hit from a nuclear explosion and sustain 329 people for at least 30 days.
But by the time the bunkers were complete, they were already obsolete – long-range missile targeting had advanced and nuclear bombs had become too powerful. Instead, the Debert bunker became a provincial emergency warning centre before it was shuttered in 1996 as a cost-cutting measure.
