The Silo Books Reveal the Nuclear Waste Cover Story That Hid an Apocalypse Plan

Before we can understand what is really going on in the Silo TV series, we have to go back to the before times, to when the silos were first created. Since the show is adapted from the books, I'm going to walk through what the books tell us, mostly leaning on Shift, the book that shows how the construction began. Everything that follows shows this was not an afterthought and not an experiment that went wrong later. It was planned right from the beginning.

Donald Keene drew the silo as a student exercise before Senator Thurman turned it into something else

The man who designed the silos is a first term congressman from Georgia named Donald Keene. In the show he has been given a different name, and if you have been watching Helen drag him around all season, that is the architect, though by this point in the show he does not seem to want to be involved. Donald has a degree in architecture he never really used. Back in school he drew an underground structure as a student exercise, and years later Senator Paul Thurman came to him and asked him to finish it by adding levels and other useful features.

Being presented with something like that, of course you would see it as an opportunity. A senator showing deep interest in a project you had already discarded, and being a young politician, he agreed without thinking twice. Choosing Donald, even though he was not a famous architect, was the smartest move Thurman made, because a famous architect would have drawn questions and might have kept copies. An unknown one accepts the deal and is even grateful for it. Donald did not know the real intent behind the project.

Thurman did not stop there. He put his own daughter, Anna, on the project as the engineer, and Anna is Donald's ex. Whether Donald knew that going in, I cannot tell, but probably he did, and I think that choice was deliberate, because a team with a personal history is not one that files complaints. Donald saw the whole thing as a favor, since he owed the senator his career and got to work with the senator's own daughter. There was no whistleblowing here.

CADFAC was sold as a nuclear waste facility so no one would ask why they were digging so deep

The project is called CADFAC, an underground nuclear waste storage project in Fulton County, Georgia, and because it is hard to get permission to build a nuclear waste facility, the silos are sold as shelters alongside it in case anything goes wrong. That is how you show the public a safety measure is in place. But the holes are far deeper than that. Ask yourself what else on earth lets you legally dig that deep. What other civilian project gives you the right to excavate over a hundred levels, pour that much concrete, run that much sealed power and water, and truck in that much material for years, then classify it as a national security matter so no journalist, inspector, or county official ever gets to walk the site.

Nothing does that except nuclear waste. The cover story is really just the way they get a permit to put the project up, and I am not going to sugarcoat that as a cover story. This is a lie, and this is how the silo began, with a lie. I have already traced that chain of lying all the way down to Bernard elsewhere, so what I am adding here is where the chain actually starts, not in the silo, not at Dulles on a permit application in 2049.

Thurman's cancer treatment revealed that nanotechnology was already loose in the world

Thurman got sick with cancer and was treated with nanotechnology, tiny machines that go into a man and rebuild him from the inside, and he walked out of that hospital healthy and, I would argue, completely changed, because he had now personally felt what those machines can do. Then Erskine, the doctor on the founding team, brought him the finding that changed everything: the nanos were not coming, they were already here, in the water, in the air, in people, in Thurman himself.

These were medical nanos, industrial nanos, military nanos, decades of them drifting around the world with nobody responsible for cleaning them up and no one to hold accountable. Left uncontrolled, it could end the entire human race. In the show it is no longer Thurman but the trillionaire who boasts about being the one with the money who carries that fear. According to him, it takes only 300 dollars to wipe out everybody. He is scared, and he is not wrong to be. I explained before why a billionaire who got rich off the very thing would be the first person on earth to fear it, so I take that as settled. What matters here is what he does with that fear.

The founders decided to trigger the apocalypse on their own schedule rather than wait for it

If the poison is already inside everyone, there is no cure. So instead of waiting it out or trying to defend against it, why not trigger it at your own convenient time, once your own people are already safely underground? Let it burn through the surface population and come back in five centuries once the last of it has died out with the last of the bodies. "These are not my words, please. That is exactly how the plan went." The apocalypse was planned and scheduled, meant to arrive exactly when it was required.

Three years later there was a national convention held right on the CADFAC grounds, a big political event with tents, dignitaries, security and the works. Then the planes came. On site that day were the senator, the doctor, the psychologist, Donald himself, Anna the engineer, and Charlotte, Donald's sister, back from flying drones in Iraq. The ground they stood on was right where the nearest shelter was, and these were exactly the people who needed to end up underground. The show has its own nano attack at the Dulles tech corridor, but that is a separate event from this convention, and as at episode 8, we have not been shown the show's own end of the world yet. In the books, the convention attack was never an outside enemy. It was the same people who built the silos, and Donald went underground when the planes dropped and the whole world burned.

Inside the silo, the pact, the memory pills and a buried gas line show the deception never stopped

A shelter obviously needs air, water, food, power, medicine and a way out. That much I agree with. But then what is the book called the Pact doing there? There is a water supply and pills that make people lose their memory, rules that say you can never leave, an IT department that exists to bury the past, and an algorithm sitting over all fifty silos, scoring and ranking them, watching for the one that gets out of line.

Worst of all is a gas line, pipes running out from Silo 1 and branching into every one of those communities, built into the structure from the start rather than bolted on later. I have made that case before, so what I want people sitting with now is the timing of it. When the first family walked into Silo 18 and got handed their pact and their apartment, the pipe that would one day kill their grandchildren was already in the wall behind them, and not one person in that family would ever know it was there. "That is not a safety feature. That is a terminator with a date on it."

Silo 1's freezers and rotating shifts kept the same founders running the plan for centuries

Silo 1 is different from the other 49. There is no farming society down there, no families, no generations, only freezers, where the people who built the silos go into cryosleep and get thawed out in six month rotations to run the grid before going back on ice while somebody else takes the watch. Donald wakes for his first shift in 2110 and is confused, because he does not remember signing up for this role.

The waking that was never meant to be his turn comes about a century later, and it is Anna who pulls him out herself because a silo has gone dark and the founders are quietly losing control of their own grid. There is a terrible justice in that, since the punishment the founders designed for everybody else, erasing memories, they quietly built for themselves too. They need the shifts because the plan runs 500 years, and no ideology survives 500 years of ordinary people passing it down. Nature takes its course, people age and die, and the founders cannot rely on their own grandchildren to keep the mission going, so they have to keep themselves alive and running it over and over until it is finished.

Only one silo out of fifty was ever meant to survive and repopulate the earth

By "everything is over," they meant only one silo out of the 50 was meant to repopulate the earth, which means the other 49 were always going to be wiped out. The algorithm picks the population that scored best on obedience and stability, and the chosen get to the place they call the seed to repopulate the earth. Thurman wanted the knowledge of what he did to die with the people who could testify to it, so he had to kill people across 49 silos. The pipes were always going to be used.

The show has changed the founders, but I think it still keeps their motives intact

Howey's founders are a senator, a doctor and a psychologist, government men working the machinery of the state. The show's version puts a trillionaire at the front of it instead, moves Helen from being Donald's wife to a journalist with a byline and a spine, and gives Charlotte her own squadron and a mission to Iran that lets her survive the outbreak that follows. All these changes could carry the story somewhere the books never went.

But I like what is going on in the show, because we can still see the founders as real people with motives who value lying over the truth. I had heard word the finale was titled Troy, which happens to be the name Donald Keene wakes up under in Silo 1, so the show might not drift too far from the books after all. We now know the silos were never built to save humanity from the end of the world, but so that a small number of people could choose the number of humans who get to continue, which means the end of the world had not yet happened. We were about to see it. Donald was deceived into designing the shape of it without knowing what he was really building. The show seems to be doing the same thing with that trillionaire, who may believe he is saving people, or may see this as a way to make a name for himself, or to profit the way billionaires do. What his real motivations are was still something I was waiting to see play out.

What do you think that trillionaire's real motivation turns out to be?