
The Cold War bunkers that cover a country - curtis
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181102-the-cold-war-bunkers-that-cover-a-country
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jaabe
We still have them in Denmark too, I can see two from my apartment. For a long
time, and possibly even today. You were required to build bunkers if you build
an apartment building. Sometimes that was done by building the basement in
such a way that it would hold storage units that could easily be converted
into bunkers. Other times it meant building actual bunkers near the apartment
complex.

A lot of the cold-war stuff was rather secret and simply build into the design
of public buildings.

My school (from age 6-14, not sure what that’s called in English) had really
wide hallways, wide doors, wide elevatory and a huge basement full of stuff
that no one outside of the school administration really knew what was. Turns
out my school had been designed and build to be converted into a hospital in
the case of nuclear war.

Later when I attended the next step in my education, my gymnasium had a water
leak. To everyone’s surprise the city closed the entire school for a week and
brought in specialists to fix it even though it would typically be up to the
local administration to do so. 25 years later we learned that the command
center bunker for our region was located under the school.

My story might sound special, it’s not. Almost every public building from that
period had a secondary cold-war purpose, but the extend of it has only
recently been revealed. It really impresses me, just how prepared our society
was, and that my generation never really noticed. Maybe our parents did but
mine have never shared much about their cold-war experiences.

Ironically the secrecy didn’t actually work. Recently when Russia opened their
soviet archives, it was revealed that they knew every location of every
command centre bunker we had, or at least admitted to having.

~~~
credit_guy
> Ironically the secrecy didn’t actually work.

If Russia knew the location of every command center bunker with less than 100%
certainty, then it did work. If instead of the actual command center they knew
the location of the 10 potential alternate locations, then they would need to
spend 10 nukes instead of 1 (pretty much any concrete bunker is able to
withstand anything but a direct hit from a megaton-size nuclear bomb). That
complicates a lot the nuclear calculus, even when you have thousands of
warheads. In the end, this may have been a small factor in the fact WW3 never
happened.

~~~
mikorym
What is the distribution between fission nukes and thermonuclear nukes?

~~~
credit_guy
Virtually all nukes nowadays are thermonuclear bombs. If your question is how
many bombs have a yield at or above 1 MT TNT, and how many below, then the
majority of the current warheads is below. More precisely, currently maybe 90%
of the US warheads have a yield between 100 and 455 kT TNT. The largest active
warhead in the US inventory has 1.2 MT TNT yield. A rule of thumb is that the
more advanced a nuclear program is, the lower the yield of their nukes, the
reason being that the a more precise missile can destroy an ICBM silo with a
lower yield.

~~~
mikorym
This is a late reply, but does this mean that even thermonuclear bombs still
direct most of their payload above the ground?

~~~
credit_guy
Nuclear bombs (both fission and fusion) direct energy symmetrically in all
directions. So any bomb detonated at or above ground level will direct half of
its energy towards space. The other half eventually produces damage on the
ground, but there are 2 models: surface burst, and air burst. The air burst
produces a shock wave that hits the ground and is reflected, and then
interferes constructively with the front of the wave that comes at an angle.
Generally strikes are designed to maximize the effect of this constructive
interference, this was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, even
this "doubled up" shock wave front is not really that destructive, so any half
backed blast resistant shelter can survive it (it doesn't even need to be a
concrete bunker, a well designed dug-out shelter will still do it). A surface
burst will vaporize a semi-sphere of ground, and no bunker will survive,
including even a missile silo, but then the blast effects will be much more
localized while the radioactive fall-out will be increased maybe one thousand
fold.

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hartror
Evan Hadfield did an episode of Rare Earth on these.

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

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RickJWagner
Interesting article. But even more interesting than the article, it makes me
wonder at how our memories work.

The article mentions Albania, which is forever etched in my memory from a skit
on the old tv show 'Cheers'. I probably hadn't seen the show for 25 years, but
I can still remember every word of this short ditty about Albania:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_tT-q8EF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_tT-q8EF0)

The power of music!

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quibono

      ‘Treasure’ of a different sort turned up in one bunker in 2004. Some 16 tons of mustard gas canisters were found in a bunker only 40km from Tirana – the US had to pay the Albanian government some $20m to safely dispose of the weapons.
    

Why was that something the US had to pay for?

~~~
eveningcoffee
Probably because the Albanian government did not have resources (or will) and
US did not want to exists a change that this will end up in the black market.

~~~
mikeash
Yep, same reason the US paid for various former Soviet states to secure or
dispose of their nuclear weapons.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunn–Lugar_Cooperative_Threat_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunn–Lugar_Cooperative_Threat_Reduction)

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massivecali
I saw a replica of one of these dome bunkers was at the 2000 World Expo in
Hanover, Germany as Albania's booth display. It seemed a bizarre
representation of a nation I knew nothing about.

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jacobush
Sweden didn't have the little firing posts, but a huge amount of underground
space for residents to wait out bombs and fallout. Here is the government
informing you were to find your nearest shelter:
[https://gisapp.msb.se/apps/kartportal/enkel-
karta_skyddsrum/](https://gisapp.msb.se/apps/kartportal/enkel-
karta_skyddsrum/)

~~~
distances
Finland still has a requirement of air raid shelters to all buildings
exceeding a certain size. In practice, these often have a double function of
working as storage space during peacetime.

~~~
hdfbdtbcdg
Same in Norway. It was ignored for a while but it is being taken seriously
again now.

~~~
ed_balls
Why? What is the threat model? Doesn't make much sense in case of a terrorist
attack or natural disaster. With modern warfare they are becoming less
valuable.

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onetimemanytime
background: these were placed in strategic places, the places where an
invading army would likely pass. So the idea was that invading army would be
attacked by well protected soldiers. They are so strong, they'll probably be
here for 10,000 years. Made of super-strong concrete with crushed stone as
aggregate and plenty of steel. Might even survive a direct artillery hit but
of course the waves would kill everyone inside. The sad part...a decent house
might have been built instead of one small bunker.

There's so much steel in there that it is economically feasible for people to
destroy them to sell the scrap. A lot of them met their end this way.

~~~
stoolpigeon
My experience in driving through various parts of Albania is that they aren't
just in strategic places but they were everywhere and that in much less than
10000 years they will all be gone. Even in the couple years between my lasts
visits (I was in Tirana and Durrës last week) was that development is coming
and it wont be all that long before Albania will be a place where people talk
about the old days when things were much less expensive and more accessible. I
might be wrong but to me it feels like it's headed in that direction. I may be
biased, I really love Albania and so I do hope that they finally have the
time, stability and space to enjoy some prosperity.

~~~
onetimemanytime
The 10k year thing was a guess based on their strength, not that people will
keep them for future use. But yeah, development is coming and prices are
through the roof, not supported by local salaries. Albania is extremely safe,
any killing is targeted at specific people. Mistakes rarely happen.

Again, they are not everywhere, randomly. Now roads have changed and may seem
that way, but the idea was to harass an invading army. You and your father as
soon as you learn the news via sirens and media, grab guns, go to a bunker and
start shooting at US Imperialists ;)

~~~
stoolpigeon
I have a long and humorous story about an accidental drive through Northern
Albania. We were on a lot of small roads through little villages and farmlands
and I just saw them dotted everywhere, in the middle of fields, in lots of
other places. It really felt like someone had a metric based on the number
built and went after it. I will say I didn't see as many in the south. But my
first visit was in 2013 so a lot could had already changed by then from the
old days.

Interestingly enough - in line with your last comment. My son cut his leg
deeply on that trip and we needed to take him to a doctor to get it fixed up.
That was not difficult and the doctor was a really nice guy but at one point
he said to my son, "Not long ago my job would have been to kill you." I
thought it was funny but my son didn't enjoy it as much.

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WalterBright
The Allies made short work of the German bunkers during D-Day.

~~~
willvarfar
Yeah I was surprised how the pictures show bunkers in hillsides, their
gleaming concrete dome exposed and very visible.

It would be such a little thing to dump the earth they excavated when building
the bunker back on top of the thing and spread it around so grass grew etc,
hiding the damn thing.

Imagine being a soldier sat in one. It would give the feeling of 'please shoot
at me!' rather than the feeling of security, surely.

~~~
WalterBright
Even when the bombs don't penetrate the concrete, the shock waves are
disabling to the inhabitants. Since the bunker is in a fixed position, once
the artillery is zeroed in on it, you just pound it till it breaks, and
there's nothing the inhabitants can do about it. Ground attack airplanes
firing at the gun ports, enveloping the bunker with napalm, phosphor bombs,
etc., all are effective and fairly cheap to do.

For accounts of this by survivors,

"D Day Through German Eyes" by Eckhertz

~~~
willvarfar
My point about camouflaging it by having a nice turf over it was to avoid its
position being fixed in the first place.

~~~
bluGill
What is the point? either you construct it in secret and hope the secret is
safe (no spys!), or you construct it in public so the enemy already knows
where it is. In the first place you hope the enemy doesn't know. In the second
place you know the enemy already knows so you mitigate that by either having
so many that the enemy cannot deal with them all, and/or you mitigate by
making the strong enough to withstand an attack.

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baud147258
Those bunker reminds me of an expo near Paris, on the fortifications built
around Paris between the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and WW1. The idea was
coming from the siege of Paris during the 1870 war and the French army built a
ring of forts around Paris, at great cost. And all those forts ended up
outdated when the next war with Germany arrived.

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mikorym
That picture of Gjirokaster is rather beautiful.

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lawlessone
They should put them on Airbnb

