We still have them in Denmark too, I can see two from my apartment. For a long time, and possibly even today. You were required to build bunkers if you build an apartment building. Sometimes that was done by building the basement in such a way that it would hold storage units that could easily be converted into bunkers. Other times it meant building actual bunkers near the apartment complex.<p>A lot of the cold-war stuff was rather secret and simply build into the design of public buildings.<p>My school (from age 6-14, not sure what that’s called in English) had really wide hallways, wide doors, wide elevatory and a huge basement full of stuff that no one outside of the school administration really knew what was. Turns out my school had been designed and build to be converted into a hospital in the case of nuclear war.<p>Later when I attended the next step in my education, my gymnasium had a water leak. To everyone’s surprise the city closed the entire school for a week and brought in specialists to fix it even though it would typically be up to the local administration to do so. 25 years later we learned that the command center bunker for our region was located under the school.<p>My story might sound special, it’s not. Almost every public building from that period had a secondary cold-war purpose, but the extend of it has only recently been revealed. It really impresses me, just how prepared our society was, and that my generation never really noticed. Maybe our parents did but mine have never shared much about their cold-war experiences.<p>Ironically the secrecy didn’t actually work. Recently when Russia opened their soviet archives, it was revealed that they knew every location of every command centre bunker we had, or at least admitted to having.
Evan Hadfield did an episode of Rare Earth on these.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEpkalRgvU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEpkalRgvU</a>
Interesting article. But even more interesting than the article, it makes me wonder at how our memories work.<p>The article mentions Albania, which is forever etched in my memory from a skit on the old tv show 'Cheers'. I probably hadn't seen the show for 25 years, but I can still remember every word of this short ditty about Albania:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_tT-q8EF0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_tT-q8EF0</a><p>The power of music!
<p><pre><code> ‘Treasure’ of a different sort turned up in one bunker in 2004. Some 16 tons of mustard gas canisters were found in a bunker only 40km from Tirana – the US had to pay the Albanian government some $20m to safely dispose of the weapons.
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Why was that something the US had to pay for?
I saw a replica of one of these dome bunkers was at the 2000 World Expo in Hanover, Germany as Albania's booth display. It seemed a bizarre representation of a nation I knew nothing about.
Sweden didn't have the little firing posts, but a huge amount of underground space for residents to wait out bombs and fallout. Here is the government informing you were to find your nearest shelter: <a href="https://gisapp.msb.se/apps/kartportal/enkel-karta_skyddsrum/" rel="nofollow">https://gisapp.msb.se/apps/kartportal/enkel-karta_skyddsrum/</a>
background: these were placed in strategic places, the places where an invading army would likely pass. So the idea was that invading army would be attacked by well protected soldiers. They are so strong, they'll probably be here for 10,000 years. Made of super-strong concrete with crushed stone as aggregate and plenty of steel. Might even survive a direct artillery hit but of course the waves would kill everyone inside. The sad part...a decent house might have been built instead of one small bunker.<p>There's so much steel in there that it is economically feasible for people to destroy them to sell the scrap. A lot of them met their end this way.
Those bunker reminds me of an expo near Paris, on the fortifications built around Paris between the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and WW1. The idea was coming from the siege of Paris during the 1870 war and the French army built a ring of forts around Paris, at great cost. And all those forts ended up outdated when the next war with Germany arrived.