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The Cold War bunkers that cover a country
- quibono 8y ago‘Treasure’ of a different sort turned up in one bunker in 2004. Some 16 tons of mustard gas canisters were found in a bunker only 40km from Tirana – the US had to pay the Albanian government some $20m to safely dispose of the weapons. Why was that something the US had to pay for?
- eveningcoffee 8y agoProbably because the Albanian government did not have resources (or will) and US did not want to exists a change that this will end up in the black market.
- mikeash 8y agoYep, same reason the US paid for various former Soviet states to secure or dispose of their nuclear weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunn–Lugar_Cooperative_Threat_Reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunn–Lugar_Cooperative_Threat_...
- onetimemanytime 8y agoAlbanian gov then would have sold them in the black market or dump them in a river or cave. No doubt USA used corruption in the 90's to buy Russian secrets or weapons. General "Dimitri" takes suitcase full of cash and screw the glorious motherland.
- azernik 8y agoBecause global hegemony comes with certain responsibilities
- 420codebro 8y agoYou're not wrong.
- caprese 8y ago> responsibilities possibilities
- goodcanadian 8y agoA sibling comment covers it fairly well, but . . . Strictly speaking, the US did not have to pay. They chose to pay as they preferred that to the alternative: unsecured chemical weapons sitting around waiting for anyone to take them.
- massivecali 8y agoI saw a replica of one of these dome bunkers was at the 2000 World Expo in Hanover, Germany as Albania's booth display. It seemed a bizarre representation of a nation I knew nothing about.
- hartror 8y agoEvan Hadfield did an episode of Rare Earth on these. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEpkalRgvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEpkalRgvU
- RickJWagner 8y agoInteresting article. But even more interesting than the article, it makes me wonder at how our memories work. The article mentions Albania, which is forever etched in my memory from a skit on the old tv show 'Cheers'. I probably hadn't seen the show for 25 years, but I can still remember every word of this short ditty about Albania: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_tT-q8EF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_tT-q8EF0 The power of music!
- WalterBright 8y agoThe Allies made short work of the German bunkers during D-Day.
- sbzodnsbd 8y agoFirst they were made mostly to defend against the Yugoslavians and the Greeks. Also, the vast majority of them are the size of a small igloo barely big enough for two, with foot thick reinforced concrete - and they’re everywhere in an onion like structure. The idea then is that the infantry man retreats to the next layer (some 100 yards or less). Sure an aircraft an destroy anyone of them. But there are more bunkers than any Air Force can blow up. Meanwhile the invader has hundreds of kilometers of layers of bunkers to walk through. Most of the igloos are for rifle men. Every third igloo is open in the back - that’s the RPG guy for the tanks. Those big bunkers in the photos are quite rare. Finally, the “commissioning” of the igloo bunker was done by having their designer sit in one of them while the artillary hit it - they’re tough little things.
- ethbro 8y ago14/15" naval gunfire support will do that.
- WalterBright 8y agoPhosphor bombs dropped by fighters had a big role in that, too, especially the ones not visible from the ship guns. A bunker cannot maneuver or adapt under fire, meaning it's very vulnerable to modern warfare techniques. Mostly it just winds up as a trap for the unfortunates in it.
- benj111 8y agoNot all bunkers, the submarine pens were quite a challenge. "Its roof (3.40 to 7.0 metres (11.15 to 22.97 ft) of steel-reinforced concrete)" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keroman_Submarine_Base https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keroman_Submarine_Base
- jacobush 8y ago
- onetimemanytime 8y agobackground: these were placed in strategic places, the places where an invading army would likely pass. So the idea was that invading army would be attacked by well protected soldiers. They are so strong, they'll probably be here for 10,000 years. Made of super-strong concrete with crushed stone as aggregate and plenty of steel. Might even survive a direct artillery hit but of course the waves would kill everyone inside. The sad part...a decent house might have been built instead of one small bunker. There's so much steel in there that it is economically feasible for people to destroy them to sell the scrap. A lot of them met their end this way.
- stoolpigeon 8y agoMy experience in driving through various parts of Albania is that they aren't just in strategic places but they were everywhere and that in much less than 10000 years they will all be gone. Even in the couple years between my lasts visits (I was in Tirana and Durrës last week) was that development is coming and it wont be all that long before Albania will be a place where people talk about the old days when things were much less expensive and more accessible. I might be wrong but to me it feels like it's headed in that direction. I may be biased, I really love Albania and so I do hope that they finally have the time, stability and space to enjoy some prosperity.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoThe 10k year thing was a guess based on their strength, not that people will keep them for future use. But yeah, development is coming and prices are through the roof, not supported by local salaries. Albania is extremely safe, any killing is targeted at specific people. Mistakes rarely happen. Again, they are not everywhere, randomly. Now roads have changed and may seem that way, but the idea was to harass an invading army. You and your father as soon as you learn the news via sirens and media, grab guns, go to a bunker and start shooting at US Imperialists ;)
- stoolpigeon 8y agoI have a long and humorous story about an accidental drive through Northern Albania. We were on a lot of small roads through little villages and farmlands and I just saw them dotted everywhere, in the middle of fields, in lots of other places. It really felt like someone had a metric based on the number built and went after it. I will say I didn't see as many in the south. But my first visit was in 2013 so a lot could had already changed by then from the old days. Interestingly enough - in line with your last comment. My son cut his leg deeply on that trip and we needed to take him to a doctor to get it fixed up. That was not difficult and the doctor was a really nice guy but at one point he said to my son, "Not long ago my job would have been to kill you." I thought it was funny but my son didn't enjoy it as much.
- jacobush 8y agoSweden didn't have the little firing posts, but a huge amount of underground space for residents to wait out bombs and fallout. Here is the government informing you were to find your nearest shelter: https://gisapp.msb.se/apps/kartportal/enkel-karta_skyddsrum/ https://gisapp.msb.se/apps/kartportal/enkel-karta_skyddsrum/
- distances 8y agoFinland still has a requirement of air raid shelters to all buildings exceeding a certain size. In practice, these often have a double function of working as storage space during peacetime.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoPoor Finland...can't change geography. Amazing what that does to you
- hdfbdtbcdg 8y agoSame in Norway. It was ignored for a while but it is being taken seriously again now.
- ed_balls 8y agoWhy? What is the threat model? Doesn't make much sense in case of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. With modern warfare they are becoming less valuable.
- lawlessone 8y agoThey should put them on Airbnb
- jaabe 8y agoWe still have them in Denmark too, I can see two from my apartment. For a long time, and possibly even today. You were required to build bunkers if you build an apartment building. Sometimes that was done by building the basement in such a way that it would hold storage units that could easily be converted into bunkers. Other times it meant building actual bunkers near the apartment complex. A lot of the cold-war stuff was rather secret and simply build into the design of public buildings. My school (from age 6-14, not sure what that’s called in English) had really wide hallways, wide doors, wide elevatory and a huge basement full of stuff that no one outside of the school administration really knew what was. Turns out my school had been designed and build to be converted into a hospital in the case of nuclear war. Later when I attended the next step in my education, my gymnasium had a water leak. To everyone’s surprise the city closed the entire school for a week and brought in specialists to fix it even though it would typically be up to the local administration to do so. 25 years later we learned that the command center bunker for our region was located under the school. My story might sound special, it’s not. Almost every public building from that period had a secondary cold-war purpose, but the extend of it has only recently been revealed. It really impresses me, just how prepared our society was, and that my generation never really noticed. Maybe our parents did but mine have never shared much about their cold-war experiences. Ironically the secrecy didn’t actually work. Recently when Russia opened their soviet archives, it was revealed that they knew every location of every command centre bunker we had, or at least admitted to having.
- credit_guy 8y ago> Ironically the secrecy didn’t actually work. If Russia knew the location of every command center bunker with less than 100% certainty, then it did work. If instead of the actual command center they knew the location of the 10 potential alternate locations, then they would need to spend 10 nukes instead of 1 (pretty much any concrete bunker is able to withstand anything but a direct hit from a megaton-size nuclear bomb). That complicates a lot the nuclear calculus, even when you have thousands of warheads. In the end, this may have been a small factor in the fact WW3 never happened.
- mikorym 8y ago
- mikorym 8y agoThat picture of Gjirokaster is rather beautiful.
- baud147258 8y agoThose bunker reminds me of an expo near Paris, on the fortifications built around Paris between the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and WW1. The idea was coming from the siege of Paris during the 1870 war and the French army built a ring of forts around Paris, at great cost. And all those forts ended up outdated when the next war with Germany arrived.