The eternal fallout shelter: we're still living in the wake left by Cold War civil defense hysteria.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Apocalypse predictions - Column

IN THE SUMMER of 1961, 100 pessimistic members of an Arizona-based religious sect called the Full Gospel Assembly Church spent about $250,000 (in current dollars) on food, locked up their homes, and descended into a half dozen nearby bomb shelters that they had recently constructed. There they waited patiently for the Soviets to destroy America with a hailstorm of atom bombs.

Although the Lord had tipped them that an attack was imminent, a day passed, and then a week passed, and then a month passed; apparently the godless Russians were too busy celebrating their recent mastery of human space flight to fulfill divine prophecy. So on August 16, after 42 days underground, the followers of the Full Gospel Assembly Church resurfaced, alive and presumably well-fed, to find the world pretty much as they'd left it.

Fifty years later, Armageddon still threatens to drift in on any breeze. The Soviet Union is gone, but in its place we've got leaky reactors, kooky dictators, Islamic dead-enders, shaky tectonic plates, solar tsunamis, the shrinking thermosphere, pole shifts, and whatever's causing thousands of dead birds to drop from the skies en masse. Is it any surprise that new home sales hit record lows in February? Who wants to lock himself into a 30-year mortgage when the Mayan apocalypse is just around the corner?

While traditional real estate sales are slumping, end times mean boom times for other sectors of the market. In March, CNNMoney.com reported that "U.S. companies selling doomsday bunkers are seeing sales skyrocket anywhere from 20 percent to 1,000 percent." In 2011 home sweet home is a $100,000 turnkey fiberglass pod for eight from Radius Engineering. Or a $25,000 co-ownership share in the Vivos Group's four-level, 137,000-square-foot communal luxury bunker outside Omaha, which boasts, amongst other amenities, a fully stocked wine cellar, an urgent care hospital, a hair salon, pet kennels, and the ability to withstand a 50-megaton nuclear blast within 10 miles.

To hear the Vivos Group's RobertVicino tell it, Uncle Sam is definitely not a part of Apocalypse America's welcome wagon, at least if you're Joe Sixpack. "You know the government has underground facilities," Vicino says. "They're in Colorado, New Mexico, a half mile down, large shelters that can accommodate 5,000 people. They've got extensive equipment down there, earth-boring machines, so if they get buried under whatever, they can bore themselves back out. This is our tax...