The Cavemen

For 144 years and through two world wars, Sweden has stayed doggedly neutral. But if there were a next time, could an innocent bystander sit out a nuclear war? Sweden's answer has been not to join NATO, but to spend some $200 million on the world's most" elaborate civil defense installations, including huge underground shelters. Some of Sweden's man-made caves:

P: In Vasteras (pop. 69,000) a shelter has been blasted out of the solid granite of a hill in the center of town. Constructed in two below-ground stories, the shelter accommodates 5,500 people under war conditions. It has a peacetime use as well, housing a garage, workshops, a shooting range, a 140-seat movie theater, and study rooms and a gymnasium for a girls' school on top of the hill. P: In Stockholm the Katarinaberget bomb shelter holds 20,000 people, and is the world's largest. The Swedes have also put this shelter to revenue-producing peacetime use. Currently leased to an oil company, Katarinaberget has room for 550 parked cars, a service station, a drive-in bank. A roof of granite more than 80 ft. thick makes the shelter safe against anything but a direct hit by a nuclear bomb. The ventilating system has a capacity of 1,000,000 cu. ft. of air per hour, and the Swedes have learned a lesson from the wartime bombing of Hamburg, when raging fires in the city sent superheated air surging into the shelters, suffocated and burned their inhabitants alive. In case of fire above ground, the Swedish ventilators can be shut off while built-in oxygen machines make the air livable. P: In Goeteborg the subterranean refuge extends for seven stories underground; in Malmoe the city shelter is used as a ballroom; of the four atom-bombproof Stockholm shelters, the one under Engelbrekt Church will serve as a columbarium for cremated parishioners.

All over Sweden factories are going underground. The firm of Bolinder-Munktell, manufacturers of engines, housed itself in a cave shelter shortly after World War II. More important, the Swedes discovered that building underground--in terms of construction and maintenance--often costs less. Airplanes, precision instruments, munitions, radios are also made in below-ground factories; hydroelectric power is generated in stations tucked inside mountains; cavernous hospitals are complete with X-ray rooms, operating theaters, fully equipped wards.

In a typical cave factory, workers descend by escalators, take their place at assembly lines lit by mercury lamps. The air is changed four times an hour, given freshness by the addition of ozone. Claustrophobia is avoided through the use of windows that look out on painted landscapes and cloud-filled skies.

Sweden's armed forces will go to earth with its citizens. There are underground hangars for jet planes, subterranean sea pens dug out of the sides of rock-walled fjords for destroyers and submarines; barracks, repair shops, fuel dumps and munitions depots all have granite shields.

The shelters are cunningly designed to avoid the blast effects of nuclear bombs. They have alternative exits so that people will not be buried alive if one exit is blocked. The entrance tunnels approach at an angle to the main, shockproof, 50-ton doors so that the blast cannot travel in a straight line to the door itself. Along each main entrance tunnel, cavities are cut into the wall to draw off the force of the blast. The lead-in tunnel is driven in a straight line in the hope that the force of a bomb's shock wave would travel right through the tunnel, in one entrance and out the other.

But though Sweden has more and better shelters than any other nation in the world, there are still not enough for its population of more than 7,000,000. In case of war, the cities will be emptied into the countryside. Only 50,000 out of Stockholm's nearly 800,000 people will stay behind to run essential services and to fight fires. "Permanent evacuation is the only solution," says a civil defense official. "Temporary evacuation would be hopeless. The enemy need only send over a few aircraft each day to keep people scuttling madly back and forth."

The one thing Sweden has not yet done is provide fallout protection for the evacuees. "This we must do without delay," adds the worried official. "Adverse winds could cause havoc by bringing radioactive clouds over our land from bombs bursting in Denmark or even England." As a final faint note of cheer, the state liquor monopoly, caught by the underground mania, has found a safe place to bury enough spirits so that the Swedes who survive atomic war will be able to toast their luck in a glass of aquavit.

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