Canadians fearing nuclear apocalypse flock to visit Cold War bunker

A shed on a hillside on the outskirts of Canada's capital hides a Cold War bunker that has been fielding a surge of queries since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, asking if it is operational. It's now a museum, so the answer of course is no. Gravel packed around the structure was meant to mitigate shocks from a nuclear strike, while everything inside is secured, including toilets mounted on rubber. 'There was always a lot of nuclear saber-rattling back in the 60s with (Nikita) Khrushchev and his shoe banging at the UN and 'We will bury you' speech, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis,' he says. That dread has returned, as Moscow steps up its nuclear threats. And the daily barrage of calls has persisted, she said. 'That fear is still very real. Anxieties are coming back. We're seeing remnants of the Cold War with the global tensions.' And on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his country would suspend its participation in the New START nuclear arms treaty with the United States -- though Moscow's foreign ministry later said it still planned to abide by its regulations. After 30 days, when radiation was expected to drop to safer levels, 'some lucky person would be chosen to go above ground to see what our post-apocalyptic world looked like and how we were going to rebuild the country,' McGuire said. Decommissioned in 1991 at the end of the Cold War, it reopened as a museum in 1998 and welcomes close to 70,000 visitors a year. Some 2,000 government and private bunkers in back yards or basements were built across Canada at the onset of the Cold War, far fewer than in the United States or Europe, estimates Andrew Burtch, a Cold War historian at the Canadian War Museum. 'The solution that many countries came to,' he said, 'was some form of underground (facility) to protect against the main effects of the nuclear bomb, be it the blast, radiation or heat.' 'The idea was that the Russians would not waste their bombs or missiles on Canada but rather target them at the United States,' Burtch explained. 'Now we find ourself back in the position where we were,' he lamented. 'So it's quite a disconcerting time.'

Canadians fearing nuclear apocalypse flock to visit Cold War bunker

"When Russia invaded Ukraine, we had a lot of public inquiries about whether this museum still functions as a fallout shelter," Christine McGuire, its executive director, told AFP.