Get a Peek Inside Russia’s Mass-Produced Mobile Nuclear Fallout Shelters
The KUB-M looks unprepared to weather the storm of a nuclear weapon. But looks can be deceiving.
Amid growing nuclear tensions between Russia and the West, Moscow has ordered the mass production of mobile fallout shelters. Called “KUB-M,” the boxy and modular containers are designed to protect Russian citizens from the “light radiation” of a nuclear explosion and radioactive contamination.
That is, of course, if you take the Kremlin at its word. The mass production announcement came from the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MCHS) and is the product of its research arm, the All-Russian Research Institute for Civil Defense and Emergencies of the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MCHS).
The shelters are not exclusively for use in the event of a nuclear attack. “The mobile shelter is a multifunctional structure that provides protection for people from various threats, including natural disasters and man-made accidents,” MCHS said in a statement on its website.
According to a primer about the KUB-M on the MCHS site, it can withstand “the shockwave and light radiation of a nuclear explosion,” the fallout after a nuke goes off, conventional weapons, debris from a falling building, fire, and hazardous chemicals. Its key features, however, are that it’s cheap and mobile. According to the MCHS, these things will take just a few weeks to manufacture and install.
Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein looked over the patent for the shelters and weighed in via email. “The basic key here is that this is a modular system you could mass produce and then sell to municipalities, who could then connect a bunch of them together however made sense to them. They come with a basic power plant and air scrubber, and are made from materials that are meant to absorb radiation and be relatively resistant to blast and fire,” Wellerstein said.
“The base module they show in the pictures does not seem to have any areas for storing supply or sanitation facilities, but it is implied that you would buy a bunch of these and then add those capabilities to one of the modules. They are ‘mobile’ in the sense that they are easy to move around, not in the sense that they’d be moving with you in them. They seem designed to be ‘installed.’ My read is that they are meant to be a cheaper way for a community to get decent public shelters than constructing a new purpose-built shelter from scratch.”
Once installed, the MCHS said the shelters will provide upwards of 54 people around two days of protection. It won’t be a comfortable 48 hours. Photos and video published to MCHS Telegram channels showed the interior of the fallout shelters. It appears to be a shipping container lined with single cots.
Based on appearances, it also doesn’t seem like the KUB-M could keep people safe from any but the lightest of blasts. In the MCHS video of the shelters, the thin walls of the shipping container appear to be augmented with concrete blocks filled with sand and crude metal structures to hold them up.
“They appear to claim to be able to attenuate radiation by a factor of 1,000 (more if you bury the module in dirt) which would be a very high degree of protection from radiation if accurate,” Wellerstein said. “To put that into context, a basement of a large apartment complex, made from concrete, is typically cited as reducing radiation from fallout by a factor of 200 or so. The basement of a 2-story house only reduces it by a factor of 20 or so. So, if I am understanding their claim correctly, a factor of 1,000 is very high indeed. It is possible that they mean something different by ‘attenuation factor,’ which is not the normal term for these factors (protection factors) in English.”
On Bluesky, NPR editor Geoff Brumfiel called out the design of the KUB-M. “I suppose these blocks are better than nothing (assuming you do get them full of sand in advance. But the door isn't shielded at all! And I can't imagine that it's all that good in a really fallout heavy environment,” he said. “AND YOU LEFT THEM OFF THE MOST IMPORTANT PART COMRADE! The roof! That's where the fallout settles.No I can see they have some example roof blocks over there on the side, but do we know what the strength of a shipping container roof is? Can it actually hold rows of concrete blocks filled with sand?”
Brumfiel also pointed out that the shelter is powered by a diesel generator that appears to vent directly out the side of the container. “No way that could go wrong if there was a nuclear blast!” Brumfiel said.
Edward Geist, a Senior Policy Researcher for RAND, was similarly baffled. “I must confess my genuine puzzlement about the Kub-M shelter,” he said in an email. “The USSR had a well-developed tradition of designing and building bomb and fallout shelters, including those constructed out of improvised materials (e.g., large sections of precast concrete pipe). This shelter doesn’t seem to live up to the standards that those shelters followed with respect to key characteristics such as blast resistance and thermal management. If one wanted to construct a shelter to show on TV as a propaganda exercise, one would probably want something that would inspire more confidence than this.”
Wellerstein was more forgiving. “If you built this kind of thing, and kept it stocked with supplies, and people got into it, it would be probably better than just walking around or being in a house,” he said. “If you hit these shelters dead-on with a nuke they would not protect you, but little would. They appear to offer better protection than a basement against many threats, assuming, again, they perform up to spec and are kept in working order and people get into them.”
The announcement of the mass production of the KUB-M comes on the heels of Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine. Teased in September and published this week, Moscow’s new nuclear doctrine lowers the threshold for it to use nuclear weapons. The release of the new doctrine itself is a reaction to the White House telling Ukraine it can go ahead and strike Russia with long range missiles. Kyiv did so earlier today for the first time, saying it had struck an ammunition depot near the town of Karachev.
UPDATE 11/20/24: This story was updated to include a comment from Edward Geist.