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Why does Switzerland have so many bunkers?

Inside the underground civilian shelters.

I learned the expression “Chernobyl baby,” an idiom equivalent in meaning to the anglophone, “Your mother must have dropped you on your head.” I went to the basement of my own building, home to over 100 families, to visit our on-site nuclear shelter, currently divided with raw wooden barriers into 10 separate caves, or storage spaces. In addition to the father and son, there are two Londoner tourists with the very broken German of very good sports; an Austrian family of four who’ve relocated to Lucerne from Vienna, and who were drawn to the bunker after seeing a TV documentary; a rowdy group of young friends on a Sunday lark; a middle-aged couple from the nearby town of Aarau; and two attentive Swiss 30-somethings in hiking boots who refuse to speak to me. There are tall stacks of dry toilets — glorified gray plastic buckets — of the kind still allocated to shelters today, and which protect against the spread of feces-borne disease; emergency water tanks; and internal phone lines to facilitate easy communication between departments and floors.

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