In the Wall Street Journal article of Saturday, June 25, ‘2011, “Swiss Renew Push For Bomb Shelters”, the American reporter criticizes the Swiss government for being paranoid and building way too many bomb shelters.They claim that Switzerland, which is of course mostly German, is home to more nuclear bunkers per capita than any other nation. After all there are 300,000 bunkers for only 7.6 million Swiss with 1 million places to spare. It is the home of the 1978 law that requires every new building to have a bomb shelter.

The reporter goes on to expostulate with the Swiss government that the Cold War is now 2 decades in the past. Why are they afraid? This is naive. Germans were shaken to the core by the events of the last century, not just the Cold War when Germany was divided into two parts, but World War I and World War II with the hyper-inflation of the 1920’s between those cataclysms. They can be excused for thinking that the bombs are still falling. Of course the nuclear incident in Japan in March didn’t help either and caused both Merkel and the Swiss government to close down nuclear reactors for good. But the real bugaboo is the defeat of all things German in the last century’s wars, an event that Germany is trying to cope with by burying itself in economics.