According to these preppers, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is merely a "mid-level" event – a warm up for what is to come. I’ve hung out in bunker complexes on the Great Plains, with groups growing food in secret forests, with people building heavily armoured vehicles, and with religious communities that have collected supplies that they’re ready to hand over to strangers in need. I spent three years conducting ethnographic research with nearly 100 preppers from six countries, including Australia, the UK, Germany, Thailand, Korea and the US. When the event passes, residents expect to be able emerge into the post-apocalyptic world (Paw, in prepper parlance) to rebuild society afresh. It is designed for a community of up to 75 people to weather a maximum of five years inside a sealed, self-sufficient luxury habitat. Since purchasing the silo over a decade ago, Hall has transformed this subterranean megastructure into a 15-story inverted tower block – a "geoscraper" – now dubbed Survival Condo.
The bunkers built to survive apocalypse. The Cold War bunkers that cover a country. The nuclear bunker in ‘Europe’s North Korea’. According to Michael Mills, a criminologist at the University of Kent, preppers build for situations where "food and basic utilities may be unavailable, government assistance may be non-existent and survivors may have to individually sustain their own survival". Preppers are the people who anticipate and attempt to adapt for what they see as probable or inevitable and impending conditions of calamity (ranging from low-level crises to extinction-level events). The bunker is now no longer owned by the government, but by Larry Hall, a former government contractor, property developer and self-confessed doomsday "prepper" who purchased it in 2008. Although it was out of sight and out of mind to the average US citizen, it played a crucial role in a geopolitical agenda of extinction-level significance during the Cold War. It was one of 72 blast "hardened" silo structures built to protect nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (IBMs) with an ordnance 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It is an Atlas F missile silo, built by the US in the early 1960s at a cost of about $15m (£12.2m). But this is not a bunker built to hide citizens or to protect the politicians who ordered its construction. To the outsider it looks a bit like a secret government installation – and indeed at one time it was. What lies underneath is a bunker that is unassuming, unassailable and – to many – unbelievable. 
If you look closely, you might notice what looks like a concrete pill box perched on the top of the small hill, flanked by cameras. Surrounded by a military-grade chain fence and in the shadow of a large wind turbine, a security guard in camouflage paces the fence line with an assault rifle.
Nestled among Kansas cornfields in a landscape devoid of any noticeable natural topography, a verdant mound can be seen from a dirt road.
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