La Svizzera potenzia i bunker nucleari mentre l’Europa si prepara alla guerra

Switzerland is planning to spend £200 million upgrading its network of nuclear shelters amid rising fears of Russian aggression.

The country already has bunker space for each of its nine million inhabitants — a situation long dismissed as paranoia by its neighbours — but it will now update and improve old structures to ensure “resilience in the event of armed conflict”.

Last week Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary-general, warned that it was “time to shift to a wartime mindset” in preparation for a broader conflict in Europe.

Neutral Switzerland may not be a member of the alliance but it has long been planning for all-out conflict. Under a 1963 law all Swiss residents, including foreigners and refugees, are guaranteed a spot in a shelter capable of protecting them from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as well as “close hits from conventional weapons”.

It has about 370,000 private and public shelters. Most people have one in the basement because developers are required to include a shelter for at least 25 people in any building with 38 or more rooms.

Switzerland plans to remove some exceptions from the rules on bunker construction. The law states that they must be made from reinforced concrete with blast-proof doors and include an emergency exit and a ventilation system equipped with filters. Larger shelters must also have an airlock to prevent the entry of contaminated air.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, civil protection offices in Switzerland received anxious calls from residents asking where the nearest shelter was.

Louis-Henri Delarageaz, civil protection commander for the Vaud canton, said that requests from people in neighbouring France for spaces in air raid shelters had to be refused. “All of a sudden … we were indeed extremely sought-after, with people wanting to know where the shelters were, where is my place, is my shelter ready?” he told Reuters.

He said that the planned upgrade was not in preparation for conflict but because the shelters needed to be maintained and kept functional.

During a recent mandatory, once-a-decade inspection of an apartment block in the village of Bercher in the Vaud canton, civil protection officers found that the bunker door would not shut and the escape tunnel, full of cobwebs, led to a deep manhole with no ladder.

The shelter was deemed unusable and the residents were given a year to fix the faults or pay £710 for a spot in a public shelter.

These are luxurious problems by comparison with non-neutral Germany, which is among the biggest weapons suppliers to Ukraine and has dismantled many of its Cold War bunkers in recent decades so that it now has public shelters for only 480,000 people, or 0.57 percent of the population.

Even at the height of the Cold War, West Germany only had shelters for just under 4 per cent of the population. In 2007 the German government decided to discontinue the “functional preservation of shelters”.

Ralph Tiesler, head of Germany’s Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), said it would take at least a generation to provide a new network of bunkers.

Given increasingly strident warnings from intelligence chiefs that Russia is preparing for a war with Nato, the BBK is reported to be working on a plan to ramp up civil protection rapidly.

It plans to identify all freely accessible buildings and private buildings that could offer protection from missile attacks, such as subway stations and office blocks. It is also working on an app that will show people their nearest shelters.

In addition, owners of detached houses are being encouraged to set up shelters in their cellars or garages.

The BBK has said that metro stations, underground car parks and basement rooms would offer good protection against a blast wave and falling debris and limited protection against radioactive environmental radiation. Stairwells or interior rooms with no windows could offer “significant protection”.

Yeah, good luck with that, dear swiss’s. Have fun in the post-nuclear wasteland…

or you could… you know… help out fucking preventing it in the first place by supporting the west with ammo!

what war ?

or instead, just shut down those russian oligarchs’ bank accounts

trash headline

Spreading fear.

This is real terrorism.

You do not want to survive a nuclear war