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Gimme Shelter


Radical armies, North Korea and Donald Trump are all igniting fears that the end is nigh and doomsdayers are spending big bucks to keep themselves bunker safe by Peter Carter


illustration by Mick Wiggens/Getty I


N LATE 2016, RECEDING ARCTIC ICE UNVEILED a long- hidden US military secret: Camp Century. Located less than 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole


on Denmark-controlled Greenland and constructed in 1959, Camp Century consists of approximately three kilo-


metres of tunnels beneath the tundra. There are 21 trenches, each one covered with an arched roof and assigned a purpose: there are ops rooms, bedrooms, a church, a hospital. When the US government sold the Danes on the idea, the offi cial purpose of Camp Century was to test construction techniques under Arctic conditions. It was actually used as a nuclear-material storage unit. The project was decommissioned in 1967 but concealed from


view until last year, when melting ice exposed Camp Century to the world. (You will no doubt hear more about Camp Century. The US and Danish governments now have to hash out who is responsible for the radioactive and chemical waste leſt on-site.) Among the people who were fi rst to set foot on what would become Camp Century some 60 years ago was control tower operator (and later a radiological scientifi c offi cer and professor of economics) Bruce Beach.


40 | CPA MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2017 Beach, now in his mid-’80s, lives with his wife, Jean, in a tiny


picturesque village called Horning’s Mills, Ont., 90 minutes north of Toronto. “I’ve never talked about this with anybody,” Beach told me when I visited his property in September. “I walked with the team that did the fi rst survey of Camp Century.” And that’s why, exactly 1.2 kilometres from Beach’s tiny


house, buried under fi ve hectares of grassy farmland, there is essentially a Camp Century clone planned and paid for by Beach and constructed by hired workers. He calls the installation Ark Two and it’s a big fallout shelter, designed to provide safe harbour for at least 500 survivors of the nuclear holocaust that Beach believes is imminent. In a sense, Beach is following a millennia-old tradition of predicting that “the end is nigh.” Astrologers, seers, numerologists and others who claim to have superhuman prescience have long employed Biblical citations to fi gure out exact times and dates for when the world will, in fact, come to an abrupt and, typically, fi ery demise. This time around, it’s diff erent. Many of the people preparing


for and investing in The Big One are not just bushy-bearded eccentrics. More and more regular people who look just like you or your neighbour are spending money on post-meltdown gear.


Life magazine/ Time Warner Roger Lemoyne


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