Swiss review nuclear protection

Press, 9 July 1986, Page 16

Swiss review nuclear protection

By

Peter Conradi

of Reuters in Lucerne, Switzerland

For the thousands of motorists who drive through it every day, there is little to distinguish the Sonnenberg tunnel from the many others that mark the route through the Swiss Alps on the way south to Italy. From a speeding car, you cannot see the 1.5 metre thick concrete blast doors and you can only imagine the thousands of bunk beds, portable toilets, and cans of food piled just behind th? tunnel walls.

The tunnel, set in a hill just outside the lakeside town of Lucerne, is not just part of a major north-south motorway. It is also Switzerland’s largest nuclear shelter and a showpiece of its massive commitment to civil defence.

However, in the aftermath of the explosion at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear reactor in April, critics have begun io wonder if vast expenditure here on shelters during the last 20 years would provide any protection in the event of a disaster nearer home.

“Our whole civil defence policy is based on nuclear war where rising political tension is expected to give the Government two or three weeks to prepare the people,” Mr Heinz Mueller, general secretary of the Civil Defence Union, a private group, told Reuters.

“But Chernobyl shows' that civil catastrophes can be a problem."

Like other countries, Switzerland began building shelters in the 1960 s amid fears that growing tension between the superpowers could erupt into nuclear war.

When cold war gave way to detente in the late 1960 s and 19705, the dust began to settle on most countries’ shelters. But the Swiss carried on building, committed to providing a place in a shelter for all their population by the year 2000 as an integral part of their policy of armed neutrality. Under the ambitious scheme, all homes and offices built since 1966 must have a bomb-proof

shelter in the basement These account for 85 to 90 per cent of total places. The rest are housed in public bunkers, the largest of which is Sonnenberg. It has room for an underground community of 20,000 people, complete with sophisticated air and water filtering, operating theatres, prison cells — and a safe deposit room to store the family valuables. The programme has cost around half a billion Swiss Francs (about 5NZ523.28 million at today’s prices— a year over the 20 years but, true to the Swiss passion for getting value for money, the shelters are designed to have other uses in peacetime. A look into an average private family shelter is likely to reveal wine bottles, skis and boxes, while many public shelters are used as youth clubs or rented out as practice rooms for rockbands. At Sonnenberg, the beds and emergency toilets would actually be set up on the motorway tarmac. The fact that shelters are not empty and ready for immediate

use is the problem, say the critics.

Mr Mueller’s group is worried that while shelters are required by law, it is only since the beginning of the year that new ones have had to be equipped with the emergency equipment, beds and other items necessary for survival.

Under the new law, people who already have shelters have a 10-year grace period in which to equip them. “Of course you can use them in an emergency," said Mr Mueller. “But without toilets, beds and so on you are going to be forced out after a few days, radio-activity or not.” It takes 50 hours to get the Sonnenberg tunnel completely ready for mass occupation, 10 to 12 hours of it just to close the massive blast doors.

However, local officials point out that it could be occupied almost immediately in the case of a sudden emergency. Unlike most shelters, all the equipment is already there, including several days’ supply of a special long-life emergency gruel for use

once normal food supplies run out Mr Hans Mummenthaler, director of the Federal Office for Civil Defence, is unimpressed by criticism of the ideas behind Swiss civil defence policy. He also rejects charges, heightened by the Swiss authorities’ restrictive information policy in the early days after Chernobyl, that not enough is done to inform the public. “In the case of sudden danger through radio-activity, we can get a first and quite substantial degree of protection by ordering people to stay at home, go down into the cellar or their, shelter,” Mr Mummenthaler said in a recent interview. As for information policy, Mr Mummenthaler said that every Swiss telephone directory carries several pages of multi-lingual instructions telling people what to do in case of emergency. Chernobyl would prompt the authorities to take a close look at many aspects of Swiss civil defence policy, but there was no need to turn it on its head, he said.