![]() ![]() “So after the development of the thermonuclear bomb, … they actually sort of gave up on civil defense.” “There was this realization in the United Kingdom that as a nuclear power, they would probably receive an attack with everything the Soviets had,” Farboel said. Not to be outdone, by 1961, the Soviets had unveiled their own megabomb, Tsar Bomba, which was nearly four times stronger than the U.S. And in 1954, civil defense was forever transformed by the first public test of the hydrogen bomb-a weapon with 1,000 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan-by the United States in the Marshall Islands. While governments were building better bunkers, they were also developing more powerful bombs. “I have never in my life seen anything like that.” government,” said Bradley Garrett, a geographer and bunker explorer at University College Dublin and author of Bunker: Building for the End Times. “There are sleeping quarters, an industrial kitchen, an underground lake, BBC broadcasting facilities, a library with every document and map required to reconstitute the U.K. At the war’s end, when the Iron Curtain was built and strategists prepared for a conflict between the Soviet Union and the West, governments poured millions of dollars into building vast subterranean citadels, such as the United Kingdom’s Central Government War Headquarters in Wiltshire, England. It also included extensive public bunker building programs, first in Germany and then across Europe. Governments in the United Kingdom, Germany, and elsewhere responded with so-called civil defense: the organization of society to ensure the resilience of civilian life in war.Ĭivil defense involved planning for evacuations from major cities, training civilians to douse firebombs, and developing mass propaganda instructing the public in emergency preparedness. While World War I saw only limited bombing, new technologies like incendiary bombs-used by Allied forces to shocking effect in Dresden, Germany, and across Japan-were deployed in World War II to terrorize citizens and break their resolve. ![]() In Europe, bunker-building is practically as old as the airplane. ![]()
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