Built in 1965 by AT&T to be used for government communications, a bomb shelter and secure storage facility is on the market in the village of Encino, New Mexico with a $3 million asking price.
Measuring around 12, 200 square feet, the desert shelter structure some 90 miles to the southeast of Albuquerque was built during the middle of the Cold War and can withstand a 20-megaton atomic blast.
The Encino shelter at 19103 U.S. Route 54 was one of tens of thousands of such shelters built nationally primarily during the 1950s and 60s and designed to support microwave and coaxial cable circuits linking military bases across the country.
The shelters were built in roughly half of the states, including Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, with construction encouraged in 1961 by President John Kennedy, backing an ambitious $207 million program whose goal was “fallout protection for every American.”
Governor Nelson Rockefeller wanted to see such construction mandated in his native state of New York in both public and private construction.
According to government statistics there were more than 200,000 shelters completed in the U.S. by 1965, up from just over 1,500 in 1960.
Dwight Eisenhower, who knew a few things about war, opposed a shelter construction program in the final months of his presidency, saying that it would both be too expensive and ultimately ineffective against thermonuclear weapons.
Construction of the shelters significantly decreased in the 1970s as tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union lessened. At such point, notes Amber Davis, in an essay for Oak Ridge Associated Universities in 2024, “many of the shelters fell into disrepair or became storage rooms as they were decommissioned.”
In recent months a 19,000-square-foot specialty structure built in the early 1960s with a steel reinforced shelter and “operational 47-ton blast door” has been listed for sale in Sprague, Washington for $1.3 million; while a 7,650-square-foot structure in Fort Pierce, Florida sold around a year ago for just under $900,000,
A bomb shelter structure measuring just over 12,500 square feet has been put up for sale in Nashville with an asking price of $1.3 million.
The Encino bomb shelter, designated as a Class B structure, sits on a nearly 10-acre site. The property is being listed by KW Commercial realtors of Glendale, Arizona.
April 7, 2026
By Garry Boulard
Vintage Civil Defense bomb shelter poster
