ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
When you think of Switzerland, what comes to mind - the snowcapped Alps, incredibly good chocolate, Swiss cheese? What about nuclear bunkers? Switzerland happens to be home to more than 370,000 underground nuclear bunkers. Each of the alpine country's 9 million citizens is guaranteed a space in one of them. And right about now, you might be asking, why? Well, I wondered that, too, so I went there to find out.
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SCHMITZ: From the outside, the Sonnenberg nuclear bunker in Lucerne looks innocent enough. Its entrance is in the middle of a children's playground. But past the seesaws and swing sets, carved into a hill, is a thick, blast-proof door that, when opened, exposes a narrow, well-lit tunnel that gently descends as far as the eye can see.
ZORA SCHELBERT: Just one thing - because of the temperatures outside, this access tunnel has become wet.
SCHMITZ: Yup.
SCHELBERT: So this part is a bit slippery, depending on your shoes. As soon as we're inside the building, it'll be dry.
SCHMITZ: OK.
SCHELBERT: Just make sure to walk down carefully.
SCHMITZ: OK. Yeah. Sounds good.
My Swiss bomb bunker guide is Zora Schelbert. She's caretaker of the Sonnenberg bunker. It was built in the 1970s to house 20,000 people in the event of a nuclear war.
SCHELBERT: And back then, 20,000 people constituted a third of our city's inhabitants. So every third person in the city of Lucerne was once supposed to be sheltered in this bunker.
SCHMITZ: If a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were to happen, officials reasoned at the time, Switzerland, an historically neutral nation, would likely not suffer a direct hit but would be in the path of nuclear fallout from its non-neutral neighbors. So they supplied diesel-powered generators in this bunker that had enough fuel to power it for two weeks.
SCHELBERT: Yeah. After two weeks, no more food, no more water, no more power. And today, civil defense also say that the duration of stay depends on what the problem is outside. And as we can see currently in the Ukraine or Israel, this makes total sense because as long as it's a conventional war, people seek shelter temporarily, and then you...
SCHMITZ: Yeah.
SCHELBERT: ...Can leave again.
SCHMITZ: In other words, instead of scrapping its nationwide network of bomb shelters after the Cold War ended, Switzerland doubled down and kept building them, guaranteeing every one of its 9 million citizens a bomb shelter space just in case.
DANIEL JORDI: There were a couple of political discussions, especially in 2010, 2011. There was a discussion in the Parliament to finish with the system.
SCHMITZ: Daniel Jordi, vice director of Switzerland's Federal Office of Civil Protection, says in 2011 when the national Parliament was debating whether to scrap all these bomb shelters, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan melted down after a massive earthquake and tsunami.
JORDI: And they came to the conclusion that it's good to have those shelters as a national reserve to protect the people in a real emergency.
SCHMITZ: And that means that every residential building in Switzerland is required to either build a bunker with proper blast doors and ventilation systems, or developers have to earmark funds for a nearby bunker maintained by the state. Swiss citizens have to pay an upfront fee between 1,700 to around $3,500 for the maintenance and construction of these shelters. And in peacetime, which due to its neutrality is the norm in Switzerland, these bunkers are usually turned into wine cellars, saunas, or in the case of the University of Bern, storage.
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SCHMITZ: OK. We're not going to get locked in here, are we?
SILVIA BERGER ZIAUDDIN: No, no, no.
SCHMITZ: Good (laughter).
Professor Silvia Berger Ziauddin guides me to the door of the nuclear bunker underneath the history department building.
BERGER ZIAUDDIN: And these are these are the lock systems, right? So you have to put that out, and then you lock it like this.
SCHMITZ: I mean, this door is nearly a foot thick.
BERGER ZIAUDDIN: Yes.
SCHMITZ: And it's made out of, like, solid concrete.
BERGER ZIAUDDIN: Reinforced concrete.
SCHMITZ: Berger Ziauddin is an expert on the history of Switzerland's network of nuclear bunkers. She says bomb bunkers are rooted in the idea that this tiny Alpine nation has, for more than a century, served as an island of calm surrounded by a sea of chaos.
BERGER ZIAUDDIN: It was already developed in First World War, actually, so the idea of this island with a sea of destruction around it. And then in the Second World War, it was the same island metaphor that was developed again. And in the Cold War, the island metaphor was transposed to the nuclear shelter.
SCHMITZ: Berger Ziauddin says the Swiss government cultivates this idea through the country's schools. Each year, she says, many students spend a week learning about these bunkers as part of a civil defense-centered curriculum.
BERGER ZIAUDDIN: Where we have to draw civil defense shelters, you have to watch civil defense movies. You had to go to the shelter and eventually sleep in the shelter for one night, for example.
SCHMITZ: Berger Ziauddin says at the end of the week, kids would present their drawings to their classmates.
BERGER ZIAUDDIN: But then, also, kids that talked about their drawings and said, OK, in the upper level of my drawings, OK, there's destruction and death and chaos. And underneath, it's warmth, and it's security. And you have the shelter and the family, and you have a pet, and the mother is cooking, and the father is reading. And it's like - the imagery was really persistent for kids.
SCHMITZ: But Berger Ziauddin says the reality of life in a nuclear bunker is a far cry from how Swiss children imagine it.
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SCHMITZ: Do you ever get claustrophobic coming down here?
SCHELBERT: No. No.
SCHMITZ: Back at the Sonnenberg nuclear bunker underneath Lucerne, my guide, Zora Schelbert, leads me past the bunker's hospital with bright-green walls, a stylistic holdover from the 1970s, to the fourth level of the bunker, a security station complete with three prison cells, all painted bright yellow.
SCHELBERT: It's 16 spots for 20,000 people. And over the last few decades, doubts then were raised as to whether this would have been enough, given the circumstances that lead to people entering. That's why I think it's fair to say that the size of the facility and the problems that come with such a big mass of people - be it social problems, psychological issues - this can be considered one of the factors that contributed to downsizing.
SCHMITZ: And that's part of the reason why, in 2002, Switzerland's government reduced the Sonnenberg bunker capacity from 20,000 to just 2,000. Its floors filled with bunk beds, a prison and a hospital all deep underground have been repurposed over the years as overflow housing for refugees, asylum seekers and the homeless - a use that had been widely criticized. It has not been used, though, for its original intent, a bunker to protect people from a nuclear fallout. But the Swiss government continues to spend tens of millions of dollars a year to maintain it and hundreds of thousands of other bunkers throughout the country, just in case.
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