Calculating the Apocalypse: The Unexpected Career of the Swiss Nuclear Bunker Silvia Berger Ziauddin

Calculating the Apocalypse: The Unexpected Career of the Swiss Nuclear Bunker Silvia Berger Ziauddin

Imagine a nation with security cells in every home. Five decades ago, this vision materialized in Switzerland. At the height of Cold War saber rattling in the early nineteen sixties, a federal construction law obliged the Swiss authorities to build three hundred sixty thousand private nuclear shelters, the majority of them in the basements of family homes. To this day, twelve billion U.S. dollars have been invested in constructing highly standardized nuclear shelters for the population. By two thousand six, the protection ratio reached one hundred fourteen percent, meaning Switzerland currently has more protective spaces than inhabitants. The survival infrastructure in the private sphere not only left massive scars in the country's soil, however; nuclear bunkers made in Switzerland have had a global impact. Since the nineteen seventies, design codes and bunker technology from the alpine republic have represented a global benchmark from the United States to Saudi Arabia. And Swiss shelter know-how is still in demand. The ever-growing "survivalist" movement, for example, heavily relies on Swiss ventilation technology when equipping doomsday shelters. How did a country that defined itself as neutral and never took center stage in the Cold War's recurrent international crises become a hub for bunker design and technology? How was the expertise in the alleged "periphery" accumulated? And how did it materialize into concrete and generate such international momentum?

The Emergence of Swiss Vertical Defense

There have been few peacetime eras in which the specter of war was so vividly present in so many people's minds as the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties. In Switzerland, four "hot" phases significantly exacerbated the feeling of being under threat and proved to be catalytic for the emergence of the Swiss system of civil defense: the Korean War of nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty-three, the Suez and Hungarian crises of nineteen fifty-six, and the Berlin and Cuban crises of nineteen sixty-one and nineteen sixty-two respectively. During the Korean crisis, military air-raid protection corps were established in support of the population, and the Federal Council required property owners to install air-raid shelters in new buildings to protect against shrapnel and debris. Referenda held after the dual crises of nineteen fifty-six put civil defense and the right to civil protection on a constitutional basis and assigned responsibility for both to the civil authorities. The construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis in turn forged the legislative anchors of civil defense. The Swiss parliament in nineteen sixty-two voted in favor of the first phase of the new civil defense legislation, covering the organizational and service requirements for civil defense. In nineteen sixty-three, it passed the Federal Shelter Construction Law, which foresaw the installation of modern nuclear shelters for all new buildings in communes with over one thousand inhabitants. In nineteen seventy-one, this provision was extended to all municipalities. Each inhabitant of Switzerland, including registered refugees and immigrant laborers, would receive a protective space to which the public sector contributed at least seventy percent of the cost.

Switzerland's endeavor to roll out a blanket system of vertical defense is properly understood only if considered against the country's guiding principles. Particularly pertinent is a concept propagated since the early nineteen fifties by the government and the military alike; namely, that a "total war" necessitates a "total national defense." Consequently, not only military but also civil forms of defense were enormously expanded. Another motive for the defensive efforts was the belief that Switzerland was a "special case." This mindset, particular to national security officials, had been reinforced by the belief that the Swiss had survived the vicissitudes of the Second World War unscathed thanks to their own determination and strong deterrents - the latter symbolized by the Swiss militia army, which was based in a highly fortified alpine bastion, the so-called "redoubt." The shared memory of being spared from an attack by Nazi Germany and mythologies flourishing around the redoubt fostered strong support for civil defense. In addition, values perceived as "Swiss" that strengthened the politico-cultural movement of "spiritual national defense" played a decisive role: love of freedom, independence, neutrality, military readiness, and the rejection of everything foreign. This "cultural fortification system" served to encourage a "hedgehog" mentality and legitimized both cultural and political isolationism. Switzerland morphed into an inwardly highly-integrated defense community, which also left a strong legacy for civil protection. The fully self-sufficient "hedgehog" should be formed up again to dissuade potential attackers. Bunkers not only fit perfectly into this picture of a fortified country whose citizens would never submit to subjugation. Advocates of the idea also embraced the redoubt myth by promoting private shelters as "citizen redoubts" that replicated the alpine military fortress. Furthermore, the idea of a "survival island" for the middle-class family, that "primary cell of democratic society," resonated well with the notion that Switzerland was a chosen model republic, apt to survive as an isle of the blessed in a sea of destruction and death.

Ever since the Swiss had started to build elaborated tunnels through the Alps in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to advance transport and trade, the vertical axis represented the inherently Swiss axis of colonization. Thanks to this conquest of the underground, as well as the subsequent rereading both of the underworld and of mountain ranges as protective zones, there was little expectation that the public might baulk at the idea of retreating below ground. By choosing the alpine marmot as the mascot of Swiss civil defense, the authorities made the most of these associations of subterranean spaces. In Swiss civil defense propaganda, marmots warned of air raids by emitting a whistle, whereupon all animals were to retreat nimbly to their underground caves.