ByGiancarlo CininniReporting fromDebert, Nova Scotia and Antonia ZwisslerReporting fromDebert, Nova Scotia
“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.
Baha’i doesn’t like the term doomsday bunker.
While it was built “to survive anything”, he said, overall “it’s not about the end of the world, it’s about smart, practical storm preparedness, whatever kind of storm”.
When Hurricane Fiona hit Nova Scotia in 2022, he opened the bunker to his coworkers and their families.
“It’s completely off-grid and self-sufficient,” he said. “If a massive storm hits our condo, the condo owners know they have a guaranteed warm, safe place with power, food, and everything they need.”
He would rather focus on what the bunker will bring to Debert and its local economy: a tourist destination and “world-class” data centre.
“It’s exactly like owning a really secure, beautiful Airbnb,” Baha’i said. The project is expected to be completed by early next year.
While the project has mostly generated interest from people on the east coast, it has also attracted attention from around the world.
It will require over 40 hotel staff, and people with skills to run the expanded data centre – ideally locals.
The data centre is set to expand to a modest 15,000 square feet and will use the latest technology to mitigate power consumption and offer high security for its customers, Baha’i said.
The fates of other bunkers in Canada show there are few alternative places for Baha’i to make his plans a reality.
The old nuclear bunker in Borden, Ontario, is locked up while one in Shilo, Manitoba, is buried underground. After being left derelict for years and attracting urban explorers, the Nanaimo bunker in British Columbia was intentionally flooded. And in Penhold, Alberta, a bunker was demolished over fears Hells Angels would buy it for a clubhouse.
There aren’t any official figures on how much it cost to build the Debert bunker, but the similarly sized Nanaimo shelter ran C$2m-3m at the time to construct– about C$30m in today’s currency.
Owning the Diefenbunker currently costs about C$60,000 a year to run.
The Wessex Institute of Technology, which advocates for the heritage of British Cold War bunkers, has said options for their use are often limited to tourism, high-security facilities, and data centres.
And disaster shelters are big business these days.
In the US, there is a bunker boom, part of a larger disaster “prepping” industry now worth at least $500m, according to some projections. While estimates vary, anywhere from 20 million to more than 70 million Americans are preparing for disaster. Developers are even building homes with pre-installed bunkers.
At the same time, existing military infrastructure is increasingly being converted for private use.
In the Black Hills of Virginia, a former Air Force base has been turned into the Vivos condominium complex, a “survivalist gated community”, and in Kansas, the Atlas survival condo was created in a repurposed Army missile silo.
But while there is a business case, some in Debert, like Annette Sharpe, the secretary of the Debert Military Museum, have reservations.
“As a museum, it breaks my heart to say, I’m sorry, that piece of history is now private property, and they’re refurbishing it for I don’t know what,” she said about museum visitors wanting to see the bunker up close.
In one of the museum’s rooms, Sharpe showed off the Diefenbunker’s old communication equipment, and in another, she lit up the warning system, meant to alert operators how close the world was to Armageddon.
After the base closed, the population of Debert plummeted from more than 60,000, including troops, to its current population of around 1,400.
Now, “if you drive down that road, you’ll see the amount of stuff that’s decrepit,” Sharpe said. Nearby apartments cost only C$2,000 to rent, she added.
“Who’s gonna afford to buy one of those Hollywood pretend scenes?” she said, referring to the Diefenbunker condos.
Debert Councillor Marie Benoit voiced concern about the boutique hotel’s uber-luxury rates, estimated to be higher than most hotels in Halifax.
“Looking at people’s wages, I don’t know if it will be something that they can access,” Benoit said.
Debert Mayor Blair, though, said it “is a novel thing and a unique thing” to have one of the few remaining Diefenbaker-era bunkers is in her municipality.
And constituents aren’t pushing back against the condo project, she said.
“They don’t have any problem with it, that we know of. We haven’t had any people saying ‘no, we don’t want this here.'”
Owner of Angelina’s Pizzeria, Fady Farah, hopes the project will bring more business to the area, like when the bunker hosted laser tag.
Besides, he added, “if the situation were to pop off, you’d see me there, knocking on the doors. Someone’s gotta cook their food while they’re in there”.
