The American "bunker culture" is definitely one of those cultural thing that people in the far future will highlight as an example of how weird people in the past were, like trepanation, skullbinding or Europeans throwing cats into the bonfire for entertainment.
I think "bunker culture" is unironically real and is an exclusively American thing as you legitimately can't find parallel of it in other countries. The optimism of "better living underground", the image of the nuclear WASP family surviving through the collapse of human civilization hiding in a hole underground like a prolonged underground.
It is a display of the supreme arrogance of American individualism, a defiance to the maxim of "no man is an island" by semi-literally constructing tiny "islands" of civilization that are supposed to weather through disasters and atrocities all their lonesomes without outside support, just surviving by poor bootstraps and canned foods alone.
I think the lack of parallel in other countries is partly explained by the lack of civil defense spending and nuclear/natural disaster preparedness funding. I read in a nuclear survival manual that the Soviets and Eastern Europe outspent the USA on civil defense (i.e. public bunkers and shelters) by several orders of a magnitude. The Soviets prioritized the survival of people, and the US nuclear preparedness strategy relied on creating a private industry that preyed on paranoia and fear as their major selling point, regardless of the fact that there is a real basis for shelters and bunkers, it makes much more sense for it to be public. The investment in civil defense came in handy for people in Ukraine and Donbas, who had bomb shelters all over the place that were often turned into restaurants etc. If a war came to the the US, the public would largely be fucked, just like they are during a natural disaster, save for a few paranoid, well off people, or people who happened to live near a public building that
may or may not still have a working shelter in its basement. You can still see some signage for nuclear shelters in US cities, but they are generally housed in courthouses, government buildings, or other public, but relatively inaccessible places.
The American "bunker culture" is definitely one of those cultural thing that people in the far future will highlight as an example of how weird people in the past were, like trepanation, skullbinding or Europeans throwing cats into the bonfire for entertainment.
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I think "bunker culture" is unironically real and is an exclusively American thing as you legitimately can't find parallel of it in other countries. The optimism of "better living underground", the image of the nuclear WASP family surviving through the collapse of human civilization hiding in a hole underground like a prolonged underground.
It is a display of the supreme arrogance of American individualism, a defiance to the maxim of "no man is an island" by semi-literally constructing tiny "islands" of civilization that are supposed to weather through disasters and atrocities all their lonesomes without outside support, just surviving by poor bootstraps and canned foods alone.
I think the lack of parallel in other countries is partly explained by the lack of civil defense spending and nuclear/natural disaster preparedness funding. I read in a nuclear survival manual that the Soviets and Eastern Europe outspent the USA on civil defense (i.e. public bunkers and shelters) by several orders of a magnitude. The Soviets prioritized the survival of people, and the US nuclear preparedness strategy relied on creating a private industry that preyed on paranoia and fear as their major selling point, regardless of the fact that there is a real basis for shelters and bunkers, it makes much more sense for it to be public. The investment in civil defense came in handy for people in Ukraine and Donbas, who had bomb shelters all over the place that were often turned into restaurants etc. If a war came to the the US, the public would largely be fucked, just like they are during a natural disaster, save for a few paranoid, well off people, or people who happened to live near a public building that may or may not still have a working shelter in its basement. You can still see some signage for nuclear shelters in US cities, but they are generally housed in courthouses, government buildings, or other public, but relatively inaccessible places.