SWEDEN: The Cavemen

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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:

¶ 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. ¶ 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. ¶ In Göteborg the subterranean refuge extends for seven stories underground; in Malmö 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.