Brits are paying eye-watering prices for nuclear bunkers – here’s why

Global nuclear tensions and the threat of World War Three seem to be closer than ever after President Joe Biden has allowed Ukraine to use US long-range missiles on Russia. 

The strikes have prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman to say they could lead to a ‘nuclear response’, and fear of escalation has hit the UK, leading some to take extreme measures.

Now, nuclear bunkers which can be put into homeowner’s back gardens are being sold on eBay for extortionate prices – but they’re being bought quickly.

The typical bunker features a toilet and ‘monitoring room’ to give those lucky enough to seek shelter in time a view to the outside.

One of the bunkers in Cumbria was bought for an eye-watering £48,000 – more than three times its asking price of £15,000.

Others are expected to hit the market soon as tensions continue to increase and the threat of World War Three feels all-too real.

The heat of the Cold War eventually cooled in the early nineties. ‘The threat of world war is no more,’ Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev declared in December 1991.

By 1993, most bunkers in the UK were decommissioned and sold off, with many purchased by telecom companies for use as mobile phone masts.

But many remain and are being snapped up quickly.

One underground shelter in Buxton, Derbyshire, sold for £36,000 earlier this year – despite not having a toilet.

Another nuclear bunker buried under a hill sold under the hammer for £36,000 – wacky, Renaissance-style interiors included.

The property in a field in Derbyshire fetched more than double its £15,000 guide price, with dozens of bidders from across the UK battling it out on auction day.

John Graves, 37, bought one of the decommisioned bunkers and restored it to its original glory.

He said would have been stacked with provisions so occupants could survive for two weeks underground in the advent of a nuclear explosion.

But he said since Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, the number of hopeful buyers citing fears over future world wars had in fact decreased.

Jon joked: ‘You would think it would be the other way around. But it’s definitely topical with the way American politics is at the moment and with Russia and Ukraine fighting.

‘It wouldn’t survive a direct hit, that’s for sure, but from a novel perspective, it’s definitely interesting.’

Even if owners of these bunkers were lucky enough to have access to a shelter in case of a nuclear catastrophe, it’s unlikely they’d be able to stay indefinitely.

The UK population would have just 10 minutes warning, if that, to prepare in case of a nuclear attack.

An intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a nuclear warhead would take only 20 minutes to travel from Russia to Britain before exploding with a force equivalent to 1,000,000 tons of dynamite.

As Russia has updated its doctrine to lower the threshold for using nuclear weapons and British Storm Shadow missiles were fired into Russian territory for the first time, this threat seems more likely than ever.

If a bomb of that size were to hit central London tomorrow, an estimated 1,050,720 Londoners would die and 2,489,210 people would be injured, according to nuclear modelling website NukeMap.

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