Jen and Will's North American Adventure!: The Diefenbunker

About half an hour’s drive from Ottawa is the Diefenbunker. It was built during the Cold War, back when Canada’s proximity to the USA was a little more dangerous than it is now. 535 people could be housed in the bunker and it was designed to be lived in for 30 days while the air literally cleared of any radioactive stuff. Not sure if 30 days would actually be enough for radioactive stuff to clear, but hey, I’m not the expert. That was if the bomb was dropped around the Parliament area. And was a blah blah tonne bomb. Only to find out after the war that the USSR actually had a bomb that was about 100 times that. Uh-oh!

The bunker houses a lot of authentic 60s, 70s and 80s gear, including TVs and telephones, which Will and I recognised from our childhoods and had a giggle over. The computer system took up a whole room and was installed in the 80s. Apparently its capacity is less than what our digital camera can hold! Crazy! I think it cost a few million dollars too. The bunker is on four levels and includes an old school hospital area with operating room, cafeteria, several meeting rooms, lots of offices and tiny bunk rooms. The Prime Minister’s suite was pretty bare and the single bed said a lot! No priority to Mrs Prime Minister in the 535 head count!

The bunker hasn’t been in operation since the 1990s, so they’ve managed to restore it pretty well. The huge chamber where they were supposed to keep the gold (somehow gold loses its value if it comes in touch with radioactive material) until the war ended or at least it was safe to come out was never used. It had a door that was approximately 7 tonnes and looked pretty solid! Around the exterior of this chamber was a walkway with mirrors at each corner, so that the one guard on duty at the front didn’t have to move to see if anyone was trying to break in. And I guess it needed the walkway/tunnel so that people couldn’t dig through into the gold stash.

There was also a blast tunnel so that the full force of a bomb wouldn’t wipe out the front of the building, as well as decontamination shower section for anyone seeking refuge. Apparently you had to scrub pretty well, ‘cos if you didn’t get past the Geiger counter the second time, it was bye bye and you were kicked back outside.

The whole bunker reminded me of a spy movie like James Bond, or a Cold War movie. We’d just watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, so it totally made me think of that. Also I’ve always been fascinated by the Cold War and all the paranoia of that time, so it was so interesting to see the crazy precautions nations took to protect their leaders. Well it wasn’t so crazy to them at the time, but did they really need a desk for the Minister of Mortgages?

Anyway, well worth the visit!!