
The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers - baazaar
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/in-case-of-emergency_the-forgotten-underground-world-of-swiss-bunkers/42395820
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johansch
This one in Stockholm, Sweden is also sized for 20k people. It also predated
the Swiss one by about 20 years. (!)

[https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarinabergets_skyddsrum](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarinabergets_skyddsrum)

Google translate link:
[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fsv.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FKatarinabergets_skyddsrum&edit-
text=)

In a typical Swedish utilitarian way it was designed with two uses in mind:

a) peace-time: parking cars

b) war-time: securing people

Here's a sketch: [http://hjak.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/kbgt-
ritn.jpg](http://hjak.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/kbgt-ritn.jpg)

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
It's totally normal to have peace-time usage for bunkers. Here's one
underground bunker being used as swimming hall in Finland.
[http://mirstran.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/11/bassein.jpg](http://mirstran.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/11/bassein.jpg) Actually bunkers are plentiful in Finland
because building those is mandatory. Not many countries build bunkers as much
as Finland. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-
raid_shelter#Finland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-raid_shelter#Finland)
Also subway tunnels and underground parking halls, many (underground) sport
halls are pre-equipped with massive blast doors.
[http://www.vastavalo.fi/albums/userpics/10913/normal__MG_419...](http://www.vastavalo.fi/albums/userpics/10913/normal__MG_4194.jpg)

~~~
johansch
You guys are even closer to the russians, and have actually fought with them
within the last 100 years...

~~~
digi_owl
At the same time they stay out of NATO etc to avoid poking the bear...

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bkkk
The cellar of my home in Switzerland also acts as a bunker and has massive
concrete doors (0.5m thick). When I was a kid, inspectors came by to check
that enough water and food was stocked and not too much stuff inside the
cellar. There was also a list of which bunkerless neighbour you have to host
in case of emergency.

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carsongross
The swiss are an inspiration.

I hope that the swiss spirit is not submerged in the ever-rising tide of
internationalism.

~~~
partycoder
Swiss bank secrecy is in part what allows criminals and dictators around the
world to ruin and enslave entire nations for money.

~~~
Kenji
As someone who has worked at a Swiss bank: This might have applied a couple of
decades ago. Especially in the last decade, Swiss banks introduced rules to
overcome this problem with international customers. Smaller banks started to
turn down US customers right away (like the one I worked at). It has become
dangerous for bank employees and banks themselves to support criminals like
you mention. There is zero tolerance for money laundering. While it is far
from perfect, the financial sector has matured in that regard.

~~~
ceejayoz
To my knowledge, these rules came from intense diplomatic pressure from the
US, not from some internal realization that it wasn't ethical. I wouldn't be
at all shocked if subtler approaches to dealing with tainted money have been
adopted.

~~~
chmars
Yeah, and now US banks and Delaware-based entities are in the same business …
cui bono?

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thatrascaltiger
John McPhee's book "La Place de la Concorde Suisse" covers the history and
culture of the Swiss army, and spends a bit of time talking about the bunkers
in Switzerland, including the secrecy around them. Worth a read if this stuff
interests.

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mprev
There's a data centre deep in the heart of a former Swiss bunker near Zurich.
You can get VMs there from Exoscale.ch

~~~
legulere
Also pionen in Stockholm: [http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-
most-super-de...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-
designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/)

~~~
rvschuilenburg
There's also one in The Netherlands, "CyberBunker". They have an interesting
history:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker)

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roel_v
I used to be a youth camp counselor when I was college-aged. I went to
Switzerland many times; of which 4 or 5 times to a large 'hotel' that had
several stories of bunker underneath. It was rumored to be a full hospital,
fully equipped and ready to do surgery within 12 hours. Another rumor was that
some kids (somewhere between 12 and 15) of a group of my organization once
went on an 'exploration expedition' in the middle of the night, and then
couldn't find their way out. One of them then did find a way out, and thought
the best thing to do was to find a phone in one of the manager's offices and
call his/her parents (1000 km away) with the story that 'he escaped from an
underground abandoned hospital and his friends were still stuck' (in the
middle of the night). Which (allegedly) then caused the parents to call the
national emergency center, who called the Swiss emergency, who called the
villages major (still in the middle of the night), who send in an emergency
team (obviously the major would have known about this hospital but, as this
rumor goes, the story of what was happening got worse and worse every time it
was retold; Chinese whisper style).

We also went on multi-day hikes, and we'd stay in some of these bunkers in the
mountains (the whole of Switserland is mountains, but I mean far away from
villages or houses - smack dead in the middle of the mountains). We got a tour
once from the 'grounds keeper' as it were of the bunker we were at. In the
kitchen was a hatch in the floor; it was an air tight hole to put bodies in,
because it was quite likely that people would die while inside (either because
of pre-existing wounds or due to the stay in there). It never made much sense
to me that you'd put such a hole right where you'd normally be cooking (how
would that work - 'hey guy peeling the onions, move other because we have
another one here'?), but it was too deep to be a storage hole, didn't have
anything that indicated being water storage like pump holes or so, so I just
nodded and thought 'not sure if surviving a nuclear holocaust is worth it, if
you have to spend 6 months in this place for it - and then go out and have to
rebuild the world'.

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AlBentley
Below the ski resort of Verbier (Swiss) there is bunker which has been
converted into a hostel. I've stayed there for a week and it is very bad, and
this is just sleeping there at night. Think tiny 3 story bunks, 10+ person
dorms, 2 showers and almost no communal area.

[https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_Review-g198848-d306983-...](https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_Review-g198848-d306983-Reviews-
The_Bunker-Verbier_Canton_of_Valais_Swiss_Alps.html)

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jacquesm
Here is one in Amsterdam, hidden under a subway station (Weesperplein).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_My_uLAMAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_My_uLAMAY)

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finid
From the comments, it seems there are bunkers designed for the masses in many
European countries, but none in the USA.

There has to be at least one, right?

~~~
chiph
Not sure about "many" European countries. Switzerland is certainly the only
one who went to extremes on it.

"None" is the wrong answer for the US as well (but the number might be
approaching it). In the 50's and 60's the Civil Defense group published books
on how to convert a basement into a shelter, or dig one in the back yard.
Faced with the immense cost of building community shelters, they instead went
about identifying which buildings would be designated as shelters (with
minimal-if-any engineering work to see if they'd hold up under the air
pressure of a nearby blast). You would see the shelter signs pretty
frequently, along with their designed occupancy. A few shelters were stocked
with food, water, radios, Geiger counters, and so on. But even that expense
was deemed too great. These days the signs are very rare.

Oh, and lots of propaganda films were produced to assure people that nuclear
war was survivable.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J3HOaU9E5U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J3HOaU9E5U)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_You would see the shelter signs pretty frequently, along with their designed
occupancy._

The approach to this in Manhattan in NYC was beyond farcical. Yes there were
shelter signs at various buildings. Presumably their basements would be able
to hold a few hundred people each. But consider:

1) what would an H-bomb or two do to Manhattan?

2) if alive, how do several million people survive in Manhattan if there is no
water supply?

3) even if there is water, for how long will a few cases of moldy food feed
them?

4) what about waste and hygiene? That many people will produce a lot of poop.
Does it all stay in the basements if the sewage system isn't functional?

5) etc. As I said, the situation couldn't have been more absurd if it was
deliberately written to be a farce. Manhattan wasn't the place to be hunkered
down during a nuclear war. The movie Escape From New York depicted a Utopia
when compared to what reality would have been.

Thankfully we never had to use any of those shelters during a real war.

~~~
vacri
Bunkers are also useful against conventional bombing.

~~~
chiph
Depends on whether your bunker location is known, and/or if it's considered to
be high-value. Conventional weapons like the GBU-28 that can penetrate 30
meters of earth or 6 meters of reinforced concrete make any bunkers that
aren't very deeply buried obsolete.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-28](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-28)

It's also possible that with today's precision guided bombs that successive
impacts of "ordinary" 2000-lb bombs on the same exact spot could destroy a
bunker.

