Switzerland shedding its bunker mentality

By Thomas Burmeister Feb 23, 2012, 3:06 GMT

Zurich - Nowhere else in the world is the concentration of underground bunkers so high as in Switzerland. The Lausanne-based International Olympic Committee has never deliberated on the matter, but if bunker building were an Olympic sport, the Swiss would be gold medallists.

Switzerland has a population of eight million people and enough bunkers to house them and space for a couple of hundred thousand more. Experts have calculated that by 2006 the 'coverage ratio' of bunkers to the Swiss population was 114 per cent - a record that no other nation can boast.

In the meantime over 20 years have passed since the end of the Cold War and the Swiss have realised that they may have overdone it when it comes to bunkers. At the beginning of the year the Swiss government relaxed regulations governing the construction of private bunkers.

That decision means private home builders can look forward to a considerable reduction in construction costs. The 1963 legislation setting out obligations to build bunkers, which has been criticised as a 'relic from the past,' remains largely in place. But in the future only buildings with more than 38 rooms will be required to have a bunker. Until now the legislation dictated that homes with eight or more rooms required one.

In the future anyone planning to build a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva will not have to consider how an ugly steel-reinforced bunker door will look beside the wine cellar. But anyone who already has a bunker at home will continue to have regular inspections from the authorities. 'All bunker doors, emergency exits and ventilation machinery must be easily accessible for inspection,' according to the regulations.

Even the former head of the justice and interior affairs department in the canton of Zurich has recognised the trend against bunker-building. 'Switzerland's bunker mania from World War II is absurd,' said Markus Notter in an article in the Neuen Zurcher Zeitung newspaper.

There are many countries in the world that lay out rules for bunkers. In Israel, for example, there are enough bunkers to house two-thirds of the population. Germany, on the other hand, where millions of people were housed in bunkers during World War Two, has relatively few bunkers today compared to Switzerland.

According to journalist Danielle Mariani, the omnipresence of bunkers in Switzerland is due to the Swiss mentality: 'The Swiss long for safety and to be able to secure themselves from all dangers.'

Supporters of Switzerland's bunker laws would put the counter-argument that the country was surrounded by NATO states which were a potential target for a Russian attack during the Cold War. 'Neutrality does not protect you against radioactivity' went one slogan from the 1960s.

But today even the Swiss military appears to be no longer obsessed with bunkers. Since the end of the Cold war the Swiss army has decommissioned two-thirds of its bunkers. Fifteen hundred have been sold including a former ammunition bunker in Upper Bern with four chambers and a fantastic view of the mountains.