Well, we even had a law which required to have one if you built a new house (see an article in German). This law is long since extinct, but according to the link above, there were 2.5 million such rooms, for a population of just 8 million people… Please note that in case of a real emergency most of those would probably have been extremely under-equipped. So,built—yes, correctly—no, and nowadays not even thought about.
What I’d heard was a bit on NPR which claimed there were only a handful of bomb shelters built in the US, and I admit I wasn’t thinking about the rest of the world.
I’m probably born a little late (1953) for the height of bomb-shelter building, but I’ve never heard second or third-hand about actual bomb shelters in the US, and I think I would have (as parts of basements or somesuch) if they were at all common.
My impression is that the real attitude wasn’t so much that a big nuclear war was unlikely as that people thought that if it happened, it wouldn’t be worth living through.
Well, we even had a law which required to have one if you built a new house (see an article in German). This law is long since extinct, but according to the link above, there were 2.5 million such rooms, for a population of just 8 million people… Please note that in case of a real emergency most of those would probably have been extremely under-equipped. So,built—yes, correctly—no, and nowadays not even thought about.
What I’d heard was a bit on NPR which claimed there were only a handful of bomb shelters built in the US, and I admit I wasn’t thinking about the rest of the world.
I’m probably born a little late (1953) for the height of bomb-shelter building, but I’ve never heard second or third-hand about actual bomb shelters in the US, and I think I would have (as parts of basements or somesuch) if they were at all common.
My impression is that the real attitude wasn’t so much that a big nuclear war was unlikely as that people thought that if it happened, it wouldn’t be worth living through.