Civil protection agency chief says country is ill-prepared for conflict and calls for urgent upgrades to cold war shelters

Germany is drawing up plans to rapidly expand its network of bomb-proof bunkers and shelters, the government’s most senior civilian protection official has said, warning the state needs to be prepared for an attack from Russia within the next four years.

Ralph Tiesler, the head of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), said Europe’s largest economy needed to wake up to the reality of conflict, and that in its current state Germany was inadequately prepared.

“For a long time, there was a widespread belief in Germany that war was not a scenario for which we needed to prepare. That has changed. We are concerned about the risk of a major war of aggression in Europe,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung news outlet.

  • B-TR3E
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    012 hours ago

    Not even in the days of the cold war there was remotely enough bunker capacity for everyone. What for anyway? Want to spend the next 100 or 1000 years in a subterranean hole? Good luck with that. Waste of money and resources but probably just the pipe dreams of some beaurocrat in a mostlly irrelevant institution.

    • Drusas
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      78 hours ago

      What are you even going on about? This is about bomb shelters, not fallout shelters that you’re expected to live in for decades.

    • @Zenith@lemm.ee
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      59 hours ago

      The article says they want enough to shelter a million people, “everyone” isn’t the goal