Silvia Berger Ziauddin, a Swiss cultural historian at the University of Bern, said this was partly because studies on the long-term impacts of nuclear fallout were not shared with non-NATO countries. Although retreating to Alpine fortresses was the preferred method of deterrence in Switzerland as early as 1880, the country did not introduce a requirement for new homes to be built with personal fallout shelters until 1963, well after the development of thermonuclear weapons.
By 1968, according to Historic England’s Wayne Cocroft, much of Britain’s civil defense infrastructure had been put under “care and maintenance”-effectively, sealed and retired.īut in Europe’s nonaligned and nonnuclear states, the view was quite different.
RAID ALERT DUBLIN WINDOWS
Instead of building bunkers, Britain advised citizens to hide under stairs or block their windows with books-while investing ever-greater sums into their own nuclear weapons. “So after the development of the thermonuclear bomb, … they actually sort of gave up on civil defense.” “There was this realization in the United Kingdom that as a nuclear power, they would probably receive an attack with everything the Soviets had,” Farboel said. Not to be outdone, by 1961, the Soviets had unveiled their own megabomb, Tsar Bomba, which was nearly four times stronger than the U.S. And in 1954, civil defense was forever transformed by the first public test of the hydrogen bomb-a weapon with 1,000 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan-by the United States in the Marshall Islands. While governments were building better bunkers, they were also developing more powerful bombs. “I have never in my life seen anything like that.” government,” said Bradley Garrett, a geographer and bunker explorer at University College Dublin and author of Bunker: Building for the End Times. “There are sleeping quarters, an industrial kitchen, an underground lake, BBC broadcasting facilities, a library with every document and map required to reconstitute the U.K. At the war’s end, when the Iron Curtain was built and strategists prepared for a conflict between the Soviet Union and the West, governments poured millions of dollars into building vast subterranean citadels, such as the United Kingdom’s Central Government War Headquarters in Wiltshire, England. It also included extensive public bunker building programs, first in Germany and then across Europe. Governments in the United Kingdom, Germany, and elsewhere responded with so-called civil defense: the organization of society to ensure the resilience of civilian life in war.Ĭivil defense involved planning for evacuations from major cities, training civilians to douse firebombs, and developing mass propaganda instructing the public in emergency preparedness. While World War I saw only limited bombing, new technologies like incendiary bombs-used by Allied forces to shocking effect in Dresden, Germany, and across Japan-were deployed in World War II to terrorize citizens and break their resolve. In Europe, bunker-building is practically as old as the airplane.
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