All told, the church spent around $12 million on the project. Members quit their jobs, emptied their bank accounts, sold their furniture, their cars, their houses. Those who couldn’t afford the move to Montana or fees for the smaller, privately built shelters nearby took out pleading ads in the paper: “Urgent mother with three small children needs loan for shelter space,” read one. Others advertised space in their own DIY shelters, made from buried oil drums or prefab bunkers, for as much as $4,000.
On March 14, 1990, Elizabeth’s followers went underground, where they were prepared to remain for a period of possibly seven years. They brought their suitcases, their children, their handguns. In her memoir, Erin recalls a certain ambient giddiness at the nearness of the golden age, at the sure vindication of their beliefs. The church’s guards patrolled the ranch’s perimeter. Elizabeth, her neck layered in jewels, her fingers covered in rings, decreed deep into the night. There were rumors that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives watched from the hills.
"‘Well, we built them and nothing happened!’ some people were thinking,” Carla recalled of the morning that followed. Noah faced the same difficulties when he built the ark. People laughed at him, too. But something did happen that day, according to Steven: they saved the world. Back then, he explained, the jolliness in his tone giving way to a thundering self-seriousness, “we were in—thirty-three years ago—the middle of what we now know as the Cold War.” And by making “the effort to survive and preserve the teachings,” they kept the Cold War from becoming a hot war. Their preparations called forth a “divine intervention” that stopped the missiles from falling.
Crazy, perhaps, but not much crazier than America’s own approach to nuclear preparedness: What is “deterrence,” after all, if not the belief that preparing for disaster is tantamount to preventing it? The believers’ commitment to surviving a civilization-destroying cataclysm struck me as grim (who would actually want to inherit such a devastated world?), but it was one they shared with defense intellectuals shaping America’s nuclear policy for much of the Cold War. In 1992, two years after the church completed construction of its shelter, the Washington Post revealed the existence of Project Greek Island, the code name for the secret congressional bunker that the government had been maintaining under the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia since 1957. The bunker, meant to ensure the continuity of government in the event of a nuclear strike, made no accommodations for the rest of the nation, who would be left to duck and cover.