Why does Switzerland have so many bunkers? | Hacker News Reader

Why does Switzerland have so many bunkers?

thedial.world

161 pointspseudolus188 comments

This is a bit random, but when I was an intern at CERN I spent a summer living in an old civil defense bunker near Geneva.

Short-term accommodation was notoriously expensive for students back then (probably even worse now), and I didn't hesitate when they offered me this unconventional housing opportunity.

The bunker had a decontamination zone, air filtering system, massive concrete doors, a large communal kitchen, and numerous small bunk beds. It was adequate for short-term use, but we encountered two main issues:

- It's remarkably easy to lose track of time without natural light cues

- Even with the air filering system wet clothes wouldn't dry properly inside

> - It's remarkably easy to lose track of time without natural light cues

What was wild to me moving to the US from France was how many office buildings have many rooms without windows: you could be in your office or in meeting rooms and there are just zero natural light. Same in doctor's offices where you're always seen in a windowless window. Would drive me crazy if I had to work there all day.

Windowless office spaces are so miserable to me. Often under-ventilated and overlit with unpleasant artificial light as well.

On this topic, something window-related that’s common in France but rare in the US is functional shutters—it’s so nice to be able to completely close a shutter outside your bedroom window and have pitch blackness, regardless of the light outside. The best you get in a typical American house is "blackout" curtains or shades that leak tons of light around the edges.

That seems to be a Mediterranean thing. Pitch black shutters are common also in Italy and (AFAIK) Spain. No idea about the eastern and southern Mediterranean.

Rolling shutters are the norm in Italy. Old houses or country houses have traditional shutters, in the latter case mostly because of aesthetics. They come in two varieties: they open like the doors of wardrobe or they slide on a rail on the outside of the wall. All of them used to be made of wood, they are PVC or aluminum now. Windows with only heavy dark curtains inside basically are not a thing.

No idea about the reason. Some random ideas. 1) no need to protect against excessive cold and wind (curtains are very useful for that) and it's ok to open a window and open or close shutters. 2) hail can break glass windows and shutters protect them. Are hail storms historically common also in northern Europe? Maybe not.

They are also common in France and Germany:

These shutters serve as insulation in locations prone to harsh weather conditions, safeguarding windows from hail damage and designed to endure strong winds.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_shutter

Insulation. When the day is hot and night cool, and humidity relatively low, use thick walls to moderate the temperature swings. Close the windows by mid-morning to block out the sun and keep the inside cool. Open them in the evening to cool off.

I strongly prefer windowless offices for work. The outside looks distracting (enticing), people walk by, the light is bright, etc. My ideal work environment would be a small room with a door that closes and excellent sound isolation and ambient lighting control. But I am definitely not typical.

More modern buildings are nothing but transparent glass. It feels like working in a fishbowl.

I'm in civil protection service in Switzerland and occasionally spend a few days at a time in one of these doing basically office work or running refresher courses etc., definitely agree on the losing track of time thing --- can't count the number of times I've come up at 4--5pm and been extremely surprised by how light or dark, sunny or rainy it was

Of course there's a technical solution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497394

Everyone seems to go for LEDs to simulate outdoor lighting for this kind of purpose, when there is another way that seems much more elegant to me: fiber-optic solar lighting.

https://www.shieldenchannel.com/blogs/solar-panels/fiber-opt...

Indeed more elegant, but also more pricey. The LED solution was $1000, which could still be affordable for a student living in a bunker. It's also easier to install, especially if you don't own the place and cannot run thick fiber bundles through the walls.

Yeah, it's something best planned with construction, and a bit pricey, but worth keeping in mind for anyone who intends to build a bunker. :)

Also not bad for high efficiency net zero type homes to supplement natural light without too many windows compromising the thermal envelope. I personally like the variability of natural light for how it keeps you connected to the outdoors. You know when a cloud is overhead or the sun is rising or setting. I've simulated sunset and sunrise with LEDs through color temp and timing but I've always wanted to experience the solar fiber type.

I’d prefer not relying on electricity

Presumably you also need a system to produce light indoors at night. You might as well have a single solution for both day- and night-time that uses renewable energy.

This is a nuclear bunker. Electricity might not be available or scarce.

By the time external electricity is not available (assuming it was ever brought in, in the first place), you probably want to lose track of time.

Oh yes, also natural light itself might be scarce.

I bet the air filtration system runs on electricity, they probably have a backup generator that lasts X number of days. After that you won't have clean air so light won't be an issue either.

The bigger cold war era civil defense bunkers around here (Czech Republic) usually have the following design for ventilation: * one or two filtration rooms, powered by electricity with optional manual backup * one or two diesel generators to provide electricity for the filtration system, lighting and other equipment * high pressure oxygen bottles for couple hours of total isolation - intended for the first few hours after a nuclear detonation when the regular filtration equpment could be overwhelmed by short halflife fallout and smoke/lack of oxygen due to the firestorm of the city arround burning

Examples of such shelters: - general purpose shleter Denis (capacity op to 2000 people): https://podzemibrno.cz/en/places-underground/cover-denis-und... - army headquarters shelter in the Vypustek cave (capacity 100+ people): https://vypustek.caves.cz/en - 10-Z shelter, Brno area civil defense headquarters (capacity 100+ people): https://10-z.cz/en/

Smaller shelters that could be found under many 50s era building were much more rudimentary, usually without idepedent source of electricity and just simple hand cranked filtration system.

Sounds to me it is closer to a student housing project that happens to be in a bunker.

You almost certainly need it for ventilation and probably water pumps anyway.

Any bunker worth its salt will have on-prem generators and a lllaaarrrrgggeee fuel supply.

In high school we were having growing pangs, and so several of my classes were held in temporary trailers that had been hauled onto campus for that purpose. They were serviceable and not particularly hostile, and arguably more modern than the existing classrooms we were using anyway.

Then I graduate and enroll in a cushy university (UCSD) and come to find out, they're also having growing pangs, and so in the middle of campus we found ourselves taking classes in Quonset huts. These Quonset huts were bona fide military surplus, though it was already 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut

The Quonset huts were extraordinarily different from the classrooms and lab facilities we used on campus; they were, of course, comparatively set out in the wilderness, and very rough accommodations overall.

However, I was a commuting student, and nobody was living in Quonset huts, so after our hourlong class was dismissed, I was able to retreat to the relative comfort of home, or the Theodore Geisel library.

I worked at UCSD in one of the "temporary" classroom/offices next to the Eucalyptus Point dining hall. We had a family of raccoons under ours for several years, which I blamed on the questionable shoring and piers that supported those.

In addition, one of my co-workers was heavy enough such that he could deform the floor in one just by standing up and walking around, so much so that pens/markers would roll off nearby desks as he went past.

> In high school we were having growing pangs

weren't we all...

I wish. I never really had a "spurt" or "pangs".

It was already a pain in 2003 and the whole process looks like hunting for a job with interview process and everything.

For us it was a schock, versus the usual "you can pay it is yours", first come first served that we had back in Portugal.

However while not living in a bunker, we did have parties in some somehow converted into clubs.

>while not living in a bunker, we did have parties in some somehow converted into clubs.

Apparently in Bratislava, there is a club inside what was a fallout bunker underneath what was the king's palace but now serves as the residence of the... PM I think? Maybe president? My memory is hazy.

(Not due to the technobunker party sadly -- I was passing through on a weekday and it was sadly closed, so no uhn tiss tiss for me.)

Summer students at CERN lives in CERN Meyrin hostel nowadays. I heard that this make life much easier for them. But it is more affordable than anything in Geneva or Meyrin. And definitely would fit the low O(2) accepted students. At the expense of "gently" kicking everyone else.

Hopefully the students weren’t low O_2 when they lived in bunkers.

I realized now that I used this jargon and would have different meaning too :D

Just for reference, some people in particle physics would use this to refer to O(x) where x is the order of magnitude number. so O(2) would means hundreds. So “low O(2)” would mean low hundreds, say around 200–300.

How do you deal with the mold problem?

Control moisture in the air?

If they controlled moisture in the air then the clothes would dry properly.

Excuse my lack of experience in that matter, but with modern inventions like the watch shouldn’t keeping track of time be something that is possible?

Time is a feeling too, it’s the sense of time that goes awry. Like casinos attempt to mimic.

I worked in a casino and I don't think the owners or the design are intentionally trying to fool you any more than a department store would. You are distracted playing games and lose all track of time since it's more engaging than shopping for socks.

Casino design employs various tactics to make players lose track of time, encouraging longer play and increased spending. These techniques include eliminating clocks and windows, using maze-like layouts, and manipulating sensory experiences like lighting, sound, and scent.

I know your point is they don’t do it more than department stores do, and you might very well be right. I think it is probably hard to prove either way.

https://www.e-architect.com/articles/the-psychology-behind-c...

I've been in plenty of department stores with windows though. And I don't think I've been to any that drew a false sky on the ceiling. Many stores and malls have skylights too, although when they're the translucent ones, they might be also uplit, so you might not notice it's dark outside.

I think there's at least a difference of degree, but I think it's more than that.

Department stores want you to be intrigued and maybe pick up extra stuff on the way to the thing you actually want to buy, but they don't necessarily want you to loiter. Idle loitering doesn't get you more purchases, at least not immediately.

This is different from a casino, where the most likely thing you'll do if loitering is to sit at a table or machine and gamble more.

Pretty much everything about a casino is intentionally designed to make you lose track of time.

Source: "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas" by Schüll

https://www.amazon.com/Addiction-Design-Machine-Gambling-Veg...

Are there clocks in your casino so people can note how long they've been playing?

Why would a casino have clocks are there clocks in most businesses? Everyone and his dog has a watch or more likely these days everyone has a smartphone with a clock on it.

People used to think we pumped oxygen into the casino too. It would be a fire hazard, and expensive to buy oxygen and maintain such a system. The casino where I worked for 13 years was so cheap they took away the kleenex from the staff locker room, downgraded the toilet paper, cut out staff parties.

> Excuse my lack of experience in that matter, but with modern inventions like the watch shouldn’t keeping track of time be something that is possible?

No, just like the existence of books or the internet doesn't relieve you of needing to know stuff.

Everyone has internal sense of time that relies on external natural cues. A watch is a kludgy bolt-on that's not well integrated with one's awareness.

Your body will disagree with the watch at some point.

Imagine being stuck sick at home or in the hospital for an extended period of time - you will lose track of which weekday it is.

As someone who is semi-retired I definitely have to sometimes check to confirm what day it is.

What’s the day today?

The mind absent of daylight stimulation will develop a completely different sense of time

https://howandwhys.com/michel-siffre-time-experiment-body-sl...

26 years ago I was interviewing for a sysadmin job in an academic setting. And I was invited to my prospective coworker's office. He was a software developer, mostly, but jack-of-all-trades for the office systems. There was a lot of data processing involved.

His office featured a Sun workstation on his desktop, and a desk piled rather high with paperwork and whatnot. There was absolutely no wall clock anywhere to be found. His workstation's desktop also did not feature a clock. There was really no indication of the passage of time in that space.

I drank in the import of this, and I asked him if it was true, and he agreed readily. I was sort of amazed. But it was also quite humbling that he could construct such a space, where he could basically throw himself into his work and dedicate as much time as necessary, until his stomach or fatigue drew him back into the real world.

People did commonly wear watches as well. I'm somewhat bemused to recall that, around the time of the Apple Watch announcement, so many people scoffed that young people don't wear watches any longer. Of course, we see how that went and they have timepieces in their pocket in any case.

I'm actually not sure if, after a recent post-fire rebuild, if I will have a readily viewable clock in my kitchen or not.

I mean, we just have integrated pocket-watches.

Past, present and future is nothing but a stubborn illusion!

I recently found out there in a command bunker (K85) smack in the middle of Stadelhofen, Zürich. It was only declassified in 2009. The primary access is via the tunnel. The 30m shaft was originally used while constructing the tunnel but was never filled in and turned into the bunker. It went into operation in 1989 and closed in 2009 but is still used as an emergency tunnel exist in case of a fire etc.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@mikealpharomeotangoindia/video/74960... (in Swiss German)

I envy these European countries, who can manage to do things collectively that make sense to do collectively.

Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individualism: you're all on your own."

> Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individualism: you're all on your own."

Switzerland is about half the size of Maine. Not everything is about your perceived failings of American culture.

What does size have to do with it? Switzerland also has less GDP, less tax revenue and less people to build things.

Because when you're talking about federal/nation level spending it is easier to get people to spend money on a bridge or institution they have some chance of being able to drive to within a day rather than convincing a guy in Montana why he should be paying for native Hawaiian culture in some remote village in the Pacific he can't afford to visit and will probably be kapu'd out of by someone screaming about haoles.

As the nations grow in size you generally end up splitting into states that have more localized incentives and/or you have a more brutal central apparatus like in the large states of China/Russia.

> Switzerland is about half the size of Maine. Not everything is about your perceived failings of American culture.

But this is. This is about attitudes, not size.

Building bunker capacity for every citizen is definitely about size. The US is incredibly spread out compared to most European countries.

And even culturally, population size determines attitudes. How do Europeans feel about Brussels? Can you imagine the commission building an EU-wide bunker system?

> Building bunker capacity for every citizen is definitely about size. The US is incredibly spread out compared to most European countries.

Not really, it's per capita, not per area. There's nothing physical about America that would prevent it from requiring developers to add a shelter to every housing unit or in every housing development, like Switzerland does. Likewise, there's nothing physical preventing America from building and maintaining public shelters in denser urban areas.

The article also mentioned Sweden has public bunker capacity in urban but not rural areas. There's not physical reason American could not do something like that.

It depends on whether you want to build bunker capacity for every citizen or just the half that live in cities. It's just cities, you have to convince all the suburban and rural citizens to pay for it.

You could imagine this being accomplished at a city-wide level out of city budgets and local taxes, but again this just reinforces the point that size is a problem.

Sweden's population is more concentrated in cities than the US's population. In the US, rural voters have a dramatically outsized influence over the senate.

Switzerland has 4 languages and even more highly different cultures and yet ...

The US achieved a lot collectively, they created a really public education system for instance.

My impression is that "public" is a very politically charged term in the US. Lots of people are suspicious of anything "public".

You'd be right. Public schools are thought of as second rate.

It's kind of amazing - friends of mine consider private school (which cost as much as a college education when I was young) to be a must-have. Imagine paying 20-40k a year for your kid's high school, or sometimes grade school! And these are very successful people who went to public school themselves. One is a college flunk-out.

My wife and I don't have kids, so I guess I don't get it. I suspect it's not just about education, but also classism, trying to ensure the kids end up in the right socio-economic class when they grow up.

Local public schools vary dramatically in quality. A perfectly rational parent could have grown up in a good public school and when looking at the school that is assigned to their children based on where they moved to decide that private school is right for their kids given the public option they're faced with.

A valid point. But - at least a couple people I know are choosing not to send their kids to better public schools than they themselves attended.

Private school is about "who you grow up knowing" not merely a "better education".

> Private school is about "who you grow up knowing" not merely a "better education".

Maybe at the very elite end, but I don't think that applies generally. No one's going to Catholic School (IIRC, the biggest single type of private school in the US) because of "who you grow up knowing," for instance.

That's not a counter-argument. If your child spends his entire childhood primarily knowing folks that share your religious views, he's going to be better at honoring those views as an adult. Ergo, as a parent that knows that, religious school promises a curated "who your children know" even if that "who"'s attributes are "my kind of religious" rather than "my kind of wealth".

...

but at least in my local area those two things overlap nigh-identically.

Ahhhh see that makes more sense.

US colleges however seems about the same level of education one receives in the 3 yrs of high school in Europe.

Switzerland is one of the few examples where such collective large-scale (i.e. state-run) endeavours still work.

In many other countries it’s rather crumbling infrastructure and massive public spending and bureaucracy with little to show for.

That's a fairly sophomoric take, to be honest. Not only is Europe a large place which can't be homogenized into one culture, so is the US. Unless you really think California and Texas will approach a problem the same? Or New York vs Alabama?

And a lot of these "collectivist" things in Europe are being proven to have been underwritten by the US defense budget, and now that that's no longer the case, uncomfortable conversations are starting to occur on the eastern side of the pond.

Do you have examples of the underwritten things? I haven’t heard of this

I'm not saying there are line items in the US defense budget for European programs. I'm saying the existence of NATO and the guarantee of a robust US response to any attack on a member has allowed Europe to prioritize doing other things with their tax bases and budgets than fund robust militaries.

And that a lot of the scoffing online about how Europe is somehow more "enlightened" than the US by having more generous social safety nets is at least partially due to said social safety nets being able to be paid for because the US is guaranteeing military support in the event of a crisis.

Now, under Trump (whether or not you agree), there are going to have to be some hard choices in European capitals on how to fund a military deterrent to Russia if the US policy is "maybe we will, maybe we won't." Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is still the law of the land, but a Trumpist government may decide to provide only the bare minimum support needed.

The whole 'military explains everything' point isn't really accurate. Many US troops stationed in Europe were paid for by Europe.

Most US military spending was on things other then Europe. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, non have anything to do with Europe.

Lots of military spending was needed even if the US had been by itself. And the US made lots of money selling military equipment to Europe.

Depending on what nations you compare it to, the difference during the cold war was a few % of GDP. Not enough to explain all the difference in social and other state programs. As the difference in spending is often 15-20%pt or more.

So the real difference is clearly willingness for taxation and social programs. And of course nations like Finland and Sweden were never part of NATO.

In 1989 average NATO military spending was 4% of GDP, in 2014 it was dropped to 1.4%. The peace dividend is real, but it don't explain everything.

European countries had cheap higher education and healthcare in 1989 as well, even with higher military spending (and higher than USA has today, which is roughly 3.37%). Estonia and Poland both spend more than the US, and they both manage cheap higher education and public healthcare. This indicates that it's also a choice of priorities, where European countries seem more willing to increase taxes for these kind of services.

Personally I think it has something with the sense of belonging, where Europeans belong to a country, most of them with less than 30 million people. Americans are one in 350 million, so it makes sense to me that it's harder to feel 'part' of the same tribe as the other 350 million people.

But you are right that Europe will have to face some hard choices, both because we get less support from the US, and because Russia is more aggressive than before. Personally I am quite convinced that in 5-10 years most European countries will still have cheap higher education and healthcare, but maybe higher taxes.

> Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is still the law of the land, but a Trumpist government may decide to provide only the bare minimum support needed.

Or a Trumpist government may decide to provide no support at all, given how they have treated "the law of the land" so far.

Pulling out of NATO or just not honoring Art. 5 wouldn't be unthinkable for Trump, and your comment is relevant to GP's and to the thread; I don't know why you're getting downvoted.

Downvotes are supposedly for culling irrelevant comments, not to express dislike, or am I confusing things?

People are downvoting you, but you're absolutely right.

Funny enough, when talking about European problems I've often found that downvotes happen in the (US) morning (when the Euros are still awake) and upvotes happen in the (US) evening

My (probably naive) take on this is that America / the American Dream is founded on this principle of individualism / "boy done good" / "everyone can make something of themselves", and thus maybe a deep fear of collectivism? So:

1) wide dislike of any sort of social support mechanism (no public healthcare, poor support for the elderly / infirm / etc)

2) long history of anti-socialism and major fear of anything more radical, "reds under the bed" etc etc

3) little funding going towards big public infrastructure projects - I had a link to a well researched article - but can't now find it - talking about how US roads, powergrid, etc, is all crumbling away because nothing has been invested in significantly for decades

4) things like private prisons, all with profit-making as motive rather than anything wider such as societal good being considered

As a lefty, this all makes me chuckle - the idea that anyone could be foolish enough to think they can do anything alone without a huge lifelong support network just seems ridiculous. Even the most "self-made" founder who "came from nothing" has had to lean heavily on buses, trains, schools, universities, medical aid, electricity, their families, friends, the internet...

As someone once said, no man is an island - or I guess "it takes a village to raise a child" - so paying it forwards or backwards in taxes is a no-brainer if you think about it rationally.

Here endeth the socialist lesson.

I'd love someone to explain HOAs to me. They seem very prevalent in the USA. And it's the opposite of "freedom."

HOA’s are prominent in the US because they and the restrictive covenants imposing them were a way to replace de jure public racial discrimination and segregation with technically-private-but-legally-durable racial and cultural discrimination. The explicit racial aspect has since been made legally unavailable, but they remain a tool to enforce outward cultural conformity, which has a strong racial valence.

Or they provide for maintenance of the common areas (mowing, plowing) and maybe some minor amenities. Or the houses are basically built into a country club.

I find that the places where there are insane HOAs are just as insane in the houses that aren't under HOAs.

> Or they provide for maintenance of the common areas

HOAs do that, yes, but that's not why they are so pervasive in the US, even in non-condominium style developments, and intrusive in their government of what goes on in non-common areas.

I think you'll find that they're vastly different in different parts of the USA.

Around here you have Zillow reporting "HOA dues: $25/yr" and similar.

I’m not sure what point you think Zillow reporting the current dues amount makes one way or another about the historical reason they are so prevalent.

Pretty sure that's what Zillow does anywhere where there are HOA dues, sure.

The US had civil defense, air raid sirens and fallout shelters. Students practiced duck and cover. The paranoia was real. It led to the star wars defense program and out spending the Soviet union until they collapsed.

Switzerland is surrounded by belligerents who have historically been at war with each other. France vs Italy. Italy versus Austria and Germany against everyone.

Your take ignores the history of accomplishment in the US. The founding, the constitution, settling the continent , building great cities, industrialization, defeating Nazis, building the Interstate highway system, landing on the moon and placing satellites in space, creating world changing technology to name but a few.

This raises a question in my mind as a US citizen. The US is planning on spending a trillion dollars to update our nuclear weapon stockpile. Are we also spending another trillion to update our civil defense shelters? One doesn't make much sense without the other.

> Are we also spending another trillion to update our civil defense shelters? One doesn't make much sense without the other.

No. I did some research around the start of the Ukraine war. IIRC, the US Civil Defense program was always half-ass and has been pretty much non-existent for my entire lifetime.

There are places where it happens in America, its just very hard to do that in such a large country without leaders that want to make it happen. Its much more profitable for politicians to have a population that doesn't want to work together and keeps fighting each other for transgender rights when they can't make ends meet and are one step away from being homeless.

I think the last chance we had for a politician that was somewhat visionary was with the first Obama term but he was too entrenched in the politics to actually drive any real change, with all that bipartisanship bullshit. Now they will just continue to invest in driving a wedge between the population to prevent them from noticing they're in a class war.

Another way to look at it is through the lens of nationalism. Other countries, which have formed around nations (which are groups of people with a collective identity), have an inherent need to care for "their" people. Slovakia is 83.8% Slovak. Portugal is 87.8% Portuguese. Poland is 98.8% Polish. [*]

America is a country of immigrants. Apart from the brutally oppressed indigenous population, everyone is from somewhere else. Hence the Americans' obsession with heritage (the Italian-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Black Americans, etc.), and even grouping as blocs based on their ancestry - it is because they don't see themselves as being an American nation?

[*] This can be a problem in its own right, e.g. the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians by Serbians, the players in the Balkan war each wanted "their" people on "their" side of the border, and murdered or displaced others to make it so. Also, to be fair, a number of European countries no longer collect nationality/ethnicity, including the Swiss, possibly because they don't want such maps to exist for any future nationalists to make use of.

Not sure, there have been moments of unity in the country, but you need someone inspiring to make that happen or a common enemy everyone can rally against, like what is happening in Canada right now. We're missing this inspiring factor, nations are mostly a made up construct, you can definitely build it one way or another.

Considering that America has contributed much more good to the world in general than any other country, I'd say whatever attitude America has is the right one. But I can say that it's not the attitude that you claim it is.

Camouflaged Military Bunkers of Switzerland (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331474 - Dec 2020 (119 comments)

The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12430234 - Sept 2016 (50 comments)

And why does it have so many bankers?

Swiss bankers live within a levenshtein distance of 1 from a bunker

That's bonkers.

Only Swiss bunkers, though.

Underrated comment.

This is mentioned in the John McPhee book referenced elsewhere in the thread, because there is actually an answer: when the cantons stopped fighting and Switzerland/Helvetica Confederation was formed, the Swiss finance/banking system developed to handle all the money being brought in by those folks acting as mercenaries and being paid to fight other people’s wars.

During this Russo-Ukrainian war I was astonished that civilians will emerge from bunkers after some really intense fighting in a city, like Avdiivka or Bakhmut, fights where the entire city was leveled. I didn't think anyone could survive in there.

Turns out not only were Soviet structures all reinforced and even able to survive nuclear blasts, but they also have bomb bunkers underground.

Subway stations all over the eastern block were built to serve as bomb shelters when needed.

Nowadays this is used mainly during heavy rains, as the gates are watertight:

https://bi.im-g.pl/im/0/9990/z9990270IHG,W-srode-Jarek-Kowal...

When this picture was taken the trains would skip this station, but were otherwise functioning as normal.

>FTA: Switzerland, population nearly 9 million, has more bunkers per capita than anywhere else in the world — enough to guarantee shelter space to every single resident in the event of a crisis. (Sweden and Finland are a close second, covering all major cities.)

well, using the 1-based index as they have chosen above, and as a good C programmer preferring 0-based indexes, I'll have to put Israel as number 0 on the above list. In the Israeli building codes, every home (i.e. every apartment too) has to have a bomb shelter, and as a result, they all do.

quibble: they are not necessarily "underground" depending on your definition of bunker, bomb shelter, etc; so for example they are contained within apartments, a bit like a "panic room", or really exactly like one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkhav_Mugan#Types

----

quibble 2, entirely different subject but while I'm here, what "everybody" calls a "sand trap" in golf is not called a "sand trap", it's called "a bunker" in golf.

Fun fact, Finland also has a lot of bunkers, for more obvious reasons, enough I believe to host their whole population.

The TLDR : they are obliged to have bunkers for a given population in an area thanks to Russian military aggression over the years.

> Finland has around 50,500 civil defence shelters with space for about 4.8 million people

https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/1410869/finland-has-civil-def...

Similarly, my home country Sweden also has a bunch of civil defense shelters, built during the cold war if I remember correctly, as we've been scared of the Russians for a long time too.

> There are around 64,000 civil defence shelters in Sweden, with space for around seven million people. Shelters can be found in various types of buildings, such as residential and industrial properties, and are marked with a special sign. In peacetime, a civil defence shelter can be used for other purposes.

https://www.msb.se/en/advice-for-individuals/civil-defence-s...

Anyone growing up in Sweden would recognize these orange/blue triangles indicating a shelter, and the large metal doors in your apartment-building cellar, where you store old shit you no longer use.

Its the hood that maketh the bunker a good idea..

For anyone interested this the bunkers and their history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bPIaHg11mI

Germany, Austria, Italy and France: With friends like these who needs enemies? :)

Austria is also militarily neutral. Not a part of NATO and >60% of Austrians were always against joining NATO.

Surely this is related to their (brief) Soviet occupation? I always thought it was a miracle that they didn't end up behind the Iron Curtain.

Soviet union definitely condititioned them to sign the neutrality initially, but like I said, every single opinion poll going back 70 years was always decisively in favour of keeping the neutrality.

They also could've joined the EU somewhat earlier, but have refused to do so until the EU changed its rules about NATO membership. Up until 1995, every EU member was also a NATO member.

That is how you ensure your neutrality.

Not directly related, but I don't that model works anymore. Switzerland is landlocked and surrounded by the European Union that unlike the independent neighbors of the past applies pressure coherently. Over the years Switzerland seems more and more aligned with both EU and US and I don't think they have much of a choice.

They have a choice to a point but today, isolating is regressing; there's a lot of money to be made if you have healthy relationships with your neighbours.

That logic applied in WWII when Switzerland was surrounded by Axis powers and they nonetheless got excellent outcomes by officially remaining neutral. The model will probably keep working until someone invades them.

And yet it is the Swiss who waged wars in all these countries - as mercenaries.

The last two wars between the Swiss and their neighbours were in 1531 and during Napoleon - who in the end admired the Swiss confederacy and helped rebirth it in its modern form.

Being the source of mercenaries is literally the opposite of waging war as the country.

That they weren’t waging war does result in excess men who someone else can pay to wage war for them though.

Young men with nothing to do, no gainful employment, are the curse of many a nation. Civil unrest.

Mercenaries outsource the problem.

>Being the source of mercenaries is literally the opposite of waging war as the country.

Patently wrong: Swiss Neutrality explicitely bans mercenary work by any Swiss citizen.

Maybe in the modern era, specifically since 1848, but [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_mercenaries].

“The young men who went off to fight, and sometimes die, in foreign service had several incentives—limited economic options in the still largely rural cantons; adventure; pride in the reputation of the Swiss as soldiers; and finally what military historian Sir Charles Oman describes as a pure love of combat and warfighting in and of itself, forged by two centuries of conflict.”

Either way, being a mercenary is explicitly the opposite of ‘fighting for your country’, which is the point I was making.

Interesting, considering the Vatican Swiss Guard.

>The Swiss Guard is considered an elite military unit and highly selective in its recruitment: candidates must be unmarried Swiss Catholic males between 19 and 30 years of age,...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Guard

> Patently wrong

No, but you just haven't understood that they were talking about the past :-).

It does now, but Swiss mercenaries were a target of Thomas More’s satire in Utopia.

Doesn't the Vatican still have a Swiss guard? I wonder how that works

There is an exception for them.

Thats the fate of all mountainous countries with population surplus? They used to send children to work abroad in medieval times. They often were used as cannonfood armies and mercenaries. Same thing in Afghanistan. Should have introduced the canton system to the taliban. Much more reasonable model for that area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_children

Mercenaries were very common at the time and Switzerland shares the languages of its neighbours, which probably makes it even easier to seek "employment".

Switzerland waged wars with all of these 'countries', before the were primary mercenaries.

If you want to read more about the topic and about the readiness of the Swiss army, I can recommend a short book by John McPhee called La Place de la Concorde Suisse

Russia. Thats the answer.

This is my reminder to add to my family's emergency stockpile for the month. Probably should do some rotating of my stock too.

Isn’t the move to never rotate stock? You’d probably be happy with that 10 year expired can of beans if you were reduced to just that in your resource war scenario.

Wait until you see Albania.

"Concrete military bunkers are a ubiquitous sight in Albania, with an average of 5.7 bunkers for every square kilometer (14.7 per square mile)."

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania

Founded in the idea to make it too expensive for Nazi Germany to invade.

But in the end it was more successful to just trade with Nazi Germany, buy stolen Jewish gold and stolen gold from occupied countries, send back Jews to be killed, deliver raw material for arms and sell weapons to the Nazis to not be invaded.

[Edit] Sorry, thought this was well known.

* NYT / "The (Not So) Neutrals of World War II"

> https://archive.is/kogL7#selection-275.0-275.37

* "For reasons that are still uncertain, Hitler never ordered the invasion. One theory is that a neutral Switzerland would have been useful to hide Nazi gold and to serve as a refuge for war criminals in case of defeat"

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenbaum

* "In 1998, a Swiss commission estimated that the Swiss National Bank held $440 million (equivalent to $8.5 billion in 2024) of Nazi gold, over half of which is believed to have been looted."

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gold

* "Switzerland laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen assets, including gold taken from the central banks of German-occupied Europe"

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na...

* "The Boat Is Full"

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_Is_Full

* "Seven studies released on Friday by the Independent Commission of Experts (ICE) show that the lion’s share of Swiss munitions exports went to the Axis powers."

> https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/banking-fintech/swiss-supplied-...

* "The studies found evidence that the Swiss authorities only superficially inspected goods traffic transiting through Switzerland allowing the Nazis to transfer essential products, possibly even war material, from Germany to Italy and north Africa."

> https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/banking-fintech/wartime-probe-r...

The problem with ChatGPT is: People who have only limited amount of knowledge should not use it. Bunkers were built in phases and many during the cold war. Bunkers in houses started in the sixties. So your statement is not true. Because Switzerland was not prepared, they had to resort to other means.

> Switzerland’s policy to provide shelter to every single resident in the event of a crisis was first enshrined into law in 1963.

Your rant has nothing to do with the article.

From the article,

"That DNA is inherited directly from World War II, when bunkers were already an established part of Swiss military strategy. In the early ‘40s, when neutral Switzerland was entirely surrounded by Axis powers, the army famously stocked the Swiss Réduit (“National Redoubt”), a series of military fortifications in the central Alps dating to the 1880s, with supplies and ammunition to prepare for a potential Nazi invasion."

From my post,

"Founded in the idea to make it too expensive for Nazi Germany to invade."

This is the definitive history, as researched by an independent commission in Switzerland:

https://www.uek.ch/en/index.htm

Making accusations and finding biased sources is easy. Living with a bully next door is not.

Switzerland went above and beyond "accomodating a bully next door": they enabled its rearmament of Germany post-WW1, circumventing the Versailles Treaty; and they sheltered the Nazi networks (e.g. François Genoud) and money post-WW2, helping the neo-nazi rise in Europe and the juntas in South America - again, Germany wasn't in a position to bully the Swiss. Switzerland and the Swiss banks made absolutely no effort to come clean after 1945 until they were forced by international pressure 50 years (!) later.

And until 1997 and a famous documentary, L'Honneur perdu de la Suisse - which was censored until 2006 - the Swiss had absolutely no memory of their real role during WWII.

And see how they treated Paul Gruninger after the war: https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/12882741-paul-gruninger-trait...

"Making accusations and finding biased sources is easy"

The report says exactly what I'm saying,

> "send back Jews to be killed"

From the report: "The measures agreed in August 1938 to turn back unwanted immigrants were implemented ruthlessly; [..] It even happened that border guards struck refugees with the butts of their rifles to bar them from crossing the border"

> "sell weapons to the Nazis"

From the report: By far the most arms were sold to Germany and Italy, e.g. page 200

> "buy stolen Jewish gold and stolen gold from occupied countries"

From the report: "During the Second World War, Switzerland was the most important market for gold from the territories controlled by the Third Reich. Almost four-fifths of the Reichsbank’s gold shipments abroad were arranged via Switzerland."

So basically Dwarves who were digging for mithril and other minerals and awakened Balrog. Im curious is there a map that maps Europe on to Middle-earth and what would the Baltic states be :)

Switzerland is more well known for their Gnomes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_of_Zurich

I think Tokien seriously took inspiration from various European peoples to create the Middle-Earth races.

He did visit spent a summer as a young adult hiking near Lauterbrunnen, which he modeled Rivendell and the Misty Mountains after.

I recently spent a few days hiking near Lauterbrunnen. It was as close to “magic” as I have ever felt

I keep hearing a lot of new Zealand is that way, too

Why the need to attack and lie? That's a poor behavior and a typical propaganda I've often seen from webs around topics like nanochips in vaccines or pro-putin ones (or simply joint work of gru and fsb massive electronic propaganda departments).

Not going to address all that bullshit since that would be a long post, just a random one - Hitler had very detailed plans on invasion of Switzerland and treating it similarly to Austria, simply deprioritized it. Just look at the map, everything around was firmly in Axis, they were not going anywhere, he could just starve them.

The cost of invasion for him would be massive for next to 0 gains - tons of hard-to-conquer mountains, fiercely defensive population that hates to be subjugated, and as Machiavelli said 'most free and most armed nation in the world".

They were not saint, simply neutral, it doesn't seem you understand the concept quite a bit.

Also heard about how they were accepting refugees and jews to the point of clearly facing famine (since they had nowhere to go), then famous 'Das Boot ist voll' happened, and they kept bringing them in regardless? Show me any nation in modern history when facing such existential threat with no hope that would behave so morally. Good contrast ie with current US admin treatment of almost all foreigners. Also helped secretly allies ie set up and access command post in Campione d'Italia - technically an Italian territory but surrounded by Switzerland. And so on...

If you perceive a statement of verifiable fact as an attack, it's about you not about the fact.

"lie"

Where?

"bullshit"

Not an argument.

"Hitler had very detailed plans on invasion of Switzerland"

Yes - see the links of my post. But he didn't. And it was not my argument.

"Show me any nation in modern history"

Whataboutism is still not an argument.

Your parent comment was flagged as not worthy of this forum (not by me), enough said about quality of your 'facts' :)

It just means, 2 or more people flagged it. No absolute truth about quality involved.

I would say, some facts were presented, but in a flame war inducing style. So flagging was likely warranted by normal expectations.

Happy now? I guess when you can't win an argument you shut it down. Love it though <3 fits the topic! Switzerland shut down the discussion for 50 years, living off stolen gold and Jewish bank accounts.

More lies, I wonder where that fierce hate comes from, have you ever wondered about that?

If you would come up with facts in a reasonable way we can discuss them one by one, but you seem to lack that skill. There is some truth to them, and some are twisted half truths ignoring other facts, and rest are outright lies. Maybe next time.

Just one thing - Switzerland never shut any discussion, again a lie, its more free country than most western ones. Half the articles you posted are from Swiss webs, and if you ever followed their media, this is discussed consistently.

I don't hate Switzerland, I love Switzerland. I got my first video games there. I love the food. I love the language. I love Jassen.

"If you would come up with facts"

I gave several sources, I read the official Swiss report and quoted from it to support my statements. Contrary to that, you have stated "lie" a dozen times without any fact or source or any detail.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'in the end it was more successful'

All these polices operate together its not like the first did one, then the other. Depending on the situation the adjusted policy many times. And they also had many polices that you didn't mention, like an active air war and air defense against Germany (and the allies at time). I don't know what you are basing the claim on that one was more successful then the others.

Also, why are you using a fictional movie as source for anything? I do not think people were actually kicked out, only denied entry. At least I have not read about that, anybody can provide a source for that?

Here some information about the denial of asylum:

"According to the Bergier Commission final report, during the Second World War, Switzerland granted asylum to 25,000 Jews while denying around 20,000 refugees (of which a significant portion were estimated to be Jewish) admission to the country in total.[42] However, Serge Klarsfeld, the French-Jewish historian, activist and Nazi Hunter stated in 2013 that the Swiss authorities rejected fewer WWII Jewish refugees than believed. Based on his own research, Klarsfeld claimed that the number of entry denials was closer to 3000."

> The report on arms revealed that from 1940 to 1944, 84 per cent of Swiss munitions’ exports went to Axis countries.

Of course more trade goes to Axis in this period, as Switzerland was surrounded by the Axis on literally all side.

And Switzerland was in desperate need for food and coal. It would have been literally insane not to sell things like munitions to Germany in that situation.

It doesn't excuse their treatment of "Righteous Among the Nations" like Paul Gruninger.

https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/12882741-paul-gruninger-trait...

I'm not excusing anything, rather trying to present a coherent picture, rather then presenting a view that seems to focus on making Switzerland look as possible.

Treatment of Paul Gruninger wasn't good, nobody is questioning that. But he was just fired, not shot or imprisoned. A reasonable punishment for what he did. And the people he let in were not evicted.

And that despite rejecting some, many Jews were accept into Switzerland and survived the war that somehow isn't talked about much. And of course the Swiss Jews survived the war unlike most other places in Europe.

Somehow Switzerland is made out to be a villain when in reality they did a lot and resisted more then many other states would have in the situation. Switzerland didn't do as much as they could have, but that's true for pretty much every nation. Given of how terrible and hopeless the Swiss situation seemed, I think overall their conduct in WW2 was pretty reasonable.

Literally every nation that traded with Germany, received gold stolen from Jews, Austria and Czechia. That includes the US and everybody else. But Switzerland is somehow uniquely singled out and is talked about in this context far more then anybody else.

>And Switzerland was in desperate need for food and coal.

Switzerland went through WWII without suffering much - and never came clean after WWII until the 1990s, remaining a rear base of nazi and neo-nazi networks during the second half of the XXth century.

Why are you moving the goal posts? That doesn't really have anything to do with the original post or argument. Is the goal of your post to just come up with as much negative stuff about Switzerland as you can manage?

Also its a waste oversimplification to claim 'never came clean until 1990'. That is only in regard to one specific issue and discussion and managing of that issue had been ongoing for a long time.

> remaining a rear base of nazi and neo-nazi networks during the second half of the XXth century.

And it was a base for anti-nazi networks threw-out the war as well.

And politically Switzerland was never close to being extreme right wing or joining the nazis. Switzerland is a free country that is open to lots of foreigners and international organization of all kinds. Including spy agencies from every country under the sun.

What official government policy support nazi networks? What exactly do you want Switzerland to do?

>Also its a waste oversimplification to claim 'never came clean until 1990'.

Excuse me, but I was there in the 1990s when the documentary "L'Honneur perdu de la Suisse" was aired and the during the debate around the Nazi bank account and the stolen Jewish goods or abandonned Jewish bank accounts.

The Swiss authorities, both private (banks) and public, resisted any inquiry until they were forced to, mostly by American Authorities who threatened to ban Swiss banks from operating in the USA.

The documentary cited above led to trials against the documentary makers and the television network, and a ban on any diffusion until the European court of Justice ruled in their favor after ten years of legal strife.

Your reaction shows that most Swiss refuse to engage with what was clear war profiteering and collaboration *before, during and after WWII" with the Nazis and their successors. Even official accounts nowadays admit this: https://www.ekr.admin.ch/publikationen/d710.html

>What official government policy support nazi networks?

Blocking Jews from seeking refuge and sending them back to Germany; not because of fear of German retaliation, but fear of "Verjudung" - "jewification".

>What exactly do you want Switzerland to do? During the war, After the war, admit it, instead of refusing any attempt to right wrongs or even threatening with lawsuits anyone who talks about it.

https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/12882741-paul-gruninger-trait...

With such large accusations I was honestly expecting sources.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweiz_im_Zweiten_Weltkrieg In German.

As someone from the region: I also have read this a few times in different sources over my life, with no controversy about it at all. This is pretty much how it is written in the history books and it also makes sense.

Thank you for the link. I'm learning.

Can you use Google or LLM chatbots? Because it's all public information everyone can find.

I get that you want sources, but this is a veeeeery known fact, at least for europeans, I guess. That's one of the first things which gets mentioned about Switzerland if you ask others to describe it.

It's like asking for sources when someone talks about the US having been to war with [INSERT RANDOM COUNTRY].

I’m as much a fan of thoughtless AI forwarding as the next HNer, but this seems like a fair situation for it:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68199e8e-5ad4-8012-8026-09fa353b60...

Chat gpt is known to make up citations and quotes. You shouldn't reference it unless you've checked every one for accuracy.

o3 is known to use web search to reference documents directly and be perhaps a bit overly diligent when it comes to double checking itself. Of course it can still make mistakes, but for something like this that’s a lot less likely than with 4o. Besides, I didn’t reference it, I just shared the results of a query as a third party to the thread (who decided to take as much time checking the claims as the two comments above me). Although it seems that the info is all coming from Wikipedia anyway so I might as well have shared that.

Because they are a rough state, with a banking system needed by organised crime as well as dictators, warlords etc. All those bunkers because they rightfully fear to get pay back for centuries of being the "Schurkenstaat" that they are. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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