As I’ve already explained ad nauseam, when I first started work in Sweden, it took me a while to get orientated. Besides the logpile of bureaucracy I had to work through and the general reluctance of colleagues to tell you what you needed to know unless you knew the right question to ask, I had to break the code of finding out which room I was supposed to be teaching in.
So it wasn’t long before I’d accumulated a basic wordstock of useful Swedish terms like lektionssal (lecture hall), språklaboratorium (language lab) and bibliotek (library).
To be honest, most of these posed no great problem. Even with my limited language ability, it didn’t take too long to work them out. Vilorum presented more of a difficulty, until I was agreeably informed that it was a place with a bed where you could rest up during the day.
But one room continued to puzzle me. It was labelled skyddsrum. My first attempt to find out what this meant was met with an embarrassed smile and a change of subject. Either I hadn’t phrased the question accurately enough, or this was a dedicated site for that famous freedom of sexual expression we associate with the country.
In the end, I had to ask my students. This in any case proved to be the quickest way of finding out anything of relevance to my immediate survival.
‘It’s a shelter,’ they explained.
‘Inside a building?’ I asked.
‘Against bombs,’ they replied.
‘Aah,’ I said. ‘How do I know when to hide?’ I asked.
‘Fredrik will tell you.’
‘?’
Hesa Fredrik, or hoarse Freddie was the siren that went off every first Monday of every third month, and which had scared the secretions out of me until I realised these were only drills.
Since at the time of asking, Sweden was a non-aligned country, this all seemed to me to be erring a little too much on the side of safety. But then who was I to talk? I was from a country that was separated from the Big Bad Bear to the east by a few thousand kilometres and a fair stretch of water – not to mention a whole raft of nuclear weapons.
Still, I was curious. How could a room protect you from a conventional bomb, let alone a nuclear one?
It turns out that these areas are made with reinforced roofs, ceilings, walls and doors, which answers the first part of the question, if not the second. Apparently, they are capable of withstanding shock waves, debris and, due to a self-contained ventilation system, even radioactivity. Which kind of answers the second part, although it doesn’t explain how exactly. I mean, has anyone actually tested this ventilation system?
Or the plumbing for that matter. Toilets (bring your own paper) are self-contained, but the stuff that goes down it has got to go somewhere, especially if the electrics are knocked out. But don’t worry overmuch. Many of these shelters come with full tool kits. So if all else fails, you can build yourself an ark.
I never did find out who had the key to the university’s shelters. But I guess I shouldn’t have been too worried. Apparently this is no Doctor Strangelove scenario. Including private apartment blocks and workplaces, along with the huge dedicated shelters existing in some places, it’s claimed that over 7 million of Sweden’s population can be accommodated in them, with the largest capable of holding 60,000 on its own. Unsurprisingly, the only people not really catered for are those living in the countryside. Along, I suppose, with uninformed tourists and immigrants.
Even 30 years on, I still find this breathtaking. It turns out that only Switzerland has more shelter space per head of population. The Swiss are even more famously neutral, and unlike Sweden with its recent enlistment in NATO, they continue to be so. They’re also farther away from Russia.
So, I have to ask. Do the Swedes and Swiss have so many shelters because they are/ were neutral, or are they neutral because they have so many shelters?
In a sense, I get it. You’ve got no allies that have signed on the dotted line, so if you’re invaded no-one’s going to come running to help. But that didn’t seem to bother Sweden much during the Second World War. When the Germans were winning, Sweden sold them their iron/ steel and allowed them free access to the country. When the Germans were losing, the Swedish government simply adjusted its client base and emerged as one of the few winners out the conflict.
Whatever the answer, it does beg further questions. Like, why would one want to survive a nuclear war in the first place? And does this tell us, once again, something about the Swedish mindset – a reflection perhaps of a cautious approach to life in general? Or a belief that everything is fixable if you only think enough about it in advance?
If so, then joining NATO is an odd way of ensuring your safety. I would have thought having troop bases and no doubt nuclear weapons silos on your territory was more likely to make you a priority target. I mean, knock these out, then you can move on to the easier countries.
Admittedly, Russia is no-one’s favourite neighbour, as the Ukraine can testify. But if even a partial reason (or pretext) for the invasion of that country was its ambition to join NATO, then the Swedish government’s decision to go ahead with membership looks like courting disaster. Add to that the question of the desirability of joining that particular club, and the whole issue looks misconceived.
After all, despite the high-sounding rhetoric, the USA – effectively the leader of the alliance – is hardly a role model either for the quiet life or the morally righteous policy line. In a similar fashion to Russia, it has, since its inception, been intent on aggrandising itself at the expense of its neighbours. When it’d bought, stolen or borrowed its fifty states, it turned to picking up ‘unincorporated territories’ like Puerto Rico and making sure the non-incorporated ones were ‘safe for business’ by getting rid of leaders that were not inclined to favour American companies over their own.
And we haven’t even mentioned Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Iraq. The list goes on. Where the casus belli is not ostensibly economic, it’s classified as ‘defending democracy’. Which in the case of the Cuban crisis basically came down to ‘uneven-playing-field syndrome’. As in, it’s perfectly permissible for us to have nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey and so within striking range of the USSR. But don’t try the same in our backyard, feller.
Pause for breath.
And for an attempt at redressing the balance in response to Transatlantic yelps of protest. ‘So what about World War Two?’ I hear them say. ‘Didn’t we just save your butts there, bud?’
Well, yes, I’m obliged to admit. And adrenalin-boosted your economy out of depression in the process, so you emerged as the other clear winner from the war. Helped not least, by a Lend-lease arrangement that effectively bankrupted post-war Britain and helped to subsidise the ostensible loser of the war through the Marshall Plan. (Just out of interest (pun intended), the American loans to Britain were finally paid back only in 2006.)
Sour grapes, I’m sure. But hardly an argument for American altruism.
And note, we haven’t even touched on the egregious Donald-Trump factor yet. If this strutting egomaniac gets re-elected in November, then Sweden has just jumped onto a boat without a captain and with a severely damaged rudder.
No matter. Like it or not, we’re in. So we had better grin, bear it and get used to being colonised by five-star ghettos of foreign troops that are a law unto themselves. Literally. Any criminal offence committed by a member of the occupying forces, whether inside or outside the bases, will not be subject to Swedish jurisdiction.
Yee-hi! I’m tempted to join up in the US Armed Forces myself.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the present Swedish government has just announced its plans to combat the climate change crisis. It aims to build ten new nuclear reactors over the next 20 years. Not the least startling aspect of this is the projected time-span. No country has ever managed to build so many in such a short space of time. Not even, I think, the Soviets whose health and safety regulations could have danced on the head of a pin.
It’s also worth pointing out that in 1980, opposition to atomic power in Sweden had reached such a pitch that the government of the time decided to hold a (non-binding) referendum on the issue. To which the answer was a resounding no to nuclear – a result that was clearly influenced by the accident the year before at Three Mile Island in, you’ve guessed it, the USA in 1979. Not that the government suddenly brought a grinding halt to nuclear power in the country. But it did stop building new reactors. And even, eventually, started to decommission some of the others. The ultimate aim was to have phased out the generation of nuclear energy completely by 2010. This did not happen.
To sum up then, in the near future we’re likely to have nuclear missiles on our soil making us a prime target for pre-emptive strikes, along with a plethora (I’ve always wanted to use that word) of atomic power stations waiting to be classed as collateral damage.
So much for the Swedish obsession with safety. As in, there goes another good theory.
Letters from Sweden 