British envy Swiss nuclear survival plan

Press, 10 April 1980, Page 20

British envy Swiss nuclear survival plan

By

NEAL ASCHERSON

in London

Desperate letters from British families anxious to protect themselves against nuclear attack are cascading into the Swiss Embassy in London.

They began when a television programme discussed the weakness of British preparations and compared them with Switzerland’s extensive civil defence measures.

Dr Hans Mumenthaler, director of the civil defence office in Bern, quotes a sample letter from an Englishwoman imploring advice on shelter construction for herself and her two children. “Britain is totally unready, and nothing seems to have been done,” she wrote.

Immediately after the programme, the letters were arriving at the embassy at the rate of 50 a day. Dr Mumenthaler comments: “It is amazing .to see the condition of unpreparedness in Britain.”

The letter-writers had discovered that, to put it crudely, Switzerland intends to save its entire population

if possible, while the British Government considers that a hopeless task. The first principle of Swiss civil defence, to quote 'Dr Mumenthaler, is that “each inhabitant of Switzerland must dispose of a place in a shelter.” This degree of protection will have been achieved by 1990. At present, there are 6.3 million “protected spaces,” which would give cover to 90 per cent of the population. From 1970 to 1978, Swiss expenditure on protection against nuclear attack averaged $250 million a year. Last year, British expenditure amounted to $5O million, although the British population is nearly nine times as large as the Swiss. ■

Official estimates put the cost of equalling the Swiss standard of protection at some $lO billion. (This would provide 10 per cent of the British population with “com,plete” protection, 15 per cent with basement shelters and the rest with “family” shelters). In a speech shortly before his murder last year, Lord

Mountbatten implicitly derided the idea that civil defence could be effective against nuclear attack. “No help can be expected for the few mutilated survivors in any town to be sent from.a neighbouring town. There will be no neighbouring towns left, no neighbours, there will be no help, there will be no hope,” he said. This sort of catastrophism appalls the Swiss. Dr Mumenthaler insists fiercely: “You will survive!” Neither do the Swiss understand the official British approach: secret bunkers for an elite with the powers of life or death, able to emerge and reassert State control over the part of the population which has survived.

From its deep shelters, the Swiss Federal Government will endeavour to govern. If communications with the headquarters of Switzerland’s 27 cantons are cut, then the cantons will take on the duties of the Federal Government.

In other words, the normal democratic authorities- will attempt to go on functioning. No regional “commissioner” would be granted dictatorial powers, as is intended in Britain.

The Swiss begin with the advantage that most of their houses have always been constructed with basements. All new houses, factories and offices must now be equipped with proper shelters; in areas where buildings are mostly old, the local authority has to provide public shelters. All men between the ages of 20 and 60 who are not drafted into the army must do civil defence duty and training. Copyright, London Observer Service.