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The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers

swissinfo.ch

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Re: The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers

#31

Post by PhantomGremlin »

chiph wrote: post #26
finid wrote: post #23

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?

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 ident…

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.

Re: The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers

#32

Post by rbcgerard »

badminton1 wrote: post #3
carsongross wrote: post #2

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

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

There are two side of that coin - take WW2 for example - some Swiss banks catered to Germany helping expropriate and conceal their loot, while others played a role in safeguarding assets from illegal/immoral expropriation...in a sense you can't have one without the other...

Re: The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers

#33

Post by kalleboo »

chiph wrote: post #26
finid wrote: post #23

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?

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 ident…

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

From what I can read, it seems to be mainly Switzerland and Scandinavia.

In Sweden during the cold war it was a requirement for many building permits to add a bunker to the basement, so we still have 65,000 bunkers with about 7 million seats. It's very common to go into the basement of e.g. a library or apartment building and have to pass through massive protection doors with air filters. I doubt any of them are still stocked with food/supplies anymore though.

Re: The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers

#35

Post by [deleted] »

dominotw wrote: post #11
eli wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that still the case? I thought Swiss secrecy isn't what it used to be. Anyway, some people would argue that strong privacy protections are a good thing even if they help bad guys.

Don't you think they can just wipe the slate clean of decades of money laundering with zero consequences? What about millions of lives that were lost/affected by this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_black_money#Black_money...

[deleted]

Re: The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers

#36

Post by vacri »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #31
chiph wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ident…

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 wa…

Bunkers are also useful against conventional bombing.

Re: The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers

#38

Post by zdkl »

hkjgkjy wrote: post #20
badminton1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And taking over the torch of tax evasion/financial privacy (two sides of the same coin?) is Bitcoin etc. Who needs a bank in Switzerland when you can just have a 50 character long private key?

In fact bitcoin makes it harder to conceal transactions from your peers. Wallets are pseudonymous and can be correlated to IRL identities if used similarly to traditional banking accounts/physical wallets. Just because you can't correlate identities doesn't mean you should expect the network to guard your "financial privacy".

Re: The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers

#40

Post by 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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