STÉPHANE HERZOG Before us is a children’s playground, on a little hill, with a sandpit and swings, surrounded by little houses. In the distance, there is a concrete gate. Welcome to Sonnenberg bunker, the largest nuclear fallout shelter ever built in Switzerland. We are one kilometre west of Lucerne train station as the crow flies, in the Bruchmatt district. Our guide, Zora Schelbert, arrives by bike. A teacher by training, she has been taking visitors on tours of the site since 2006. It is a part-time job, “where every visit is different”. The guide from Lucerne doesn’t live far away, but as it turns out, she would have to go elsewhere if there were an attack. Where exactly? “I asked about this on a website dedicated to these questions, but I never got a reply,” she laughs. We follow a 200-metre-long sloping tunnel. On the walls, there are orange marks, 20,000 of them. The idea came from the Unterirdisch-überleben association, which organises the visits. Each mark represents a human being, who would have been allocated one Sonnenberg bunker is drawing attention due to the war in Ukraine For a long time, Sonnenberg nuclear fallout shelter, inaugurated in 1976 in Lucerne and with a capacity of 20,000, was the largest facility of its kind in the world. A visit to this reminder of the Cold War takes on new significance with the return of war in Europe. Report. square metre of living space. This crowd would have been spread between the two motorway tunnels, protected on either side by reinforced doors. This calculation forms the basis for the Sonnenberg shelter, inaugurated in 1976. Electricity for two weeks At the end of the corridor, we access the top of a seven-storey underground building. The building is set above the A5 motorway, on the northsouth axis, where 65,000 vehicles Higher, further, faster, more beautiful? In search of the somewhat different Swiss records. This edition: Switzerland’s biggest nuclear bunker The bunker’s kitchen looks huge, but hot meals would have been reserved solely for senior personnel in an emergency. Photo: Keystone Swiss Review / July 2022 / No.3 22 Report
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