Not sure about "many" European countries. Switzerland is certainly the only one who went to extremes on it.
"None" is the wrong answer for the US as well (but the number might be approaching it). In the 50's and 60's the Civil Defense group published books on how to convert a basement into a shelter, or dig one in the back yard. Faced with the immense cost of building community shelters, they instead went about identifying which buildings would be designated as shelters (with minimal-if-any engineering work to see if they'd hold up under the air pressure of a nearby blast). You would see the shelter signs pretty frequently, along with their designed occupancy. A few shelters were stocked with food, water, radios, Geiger counters, and so on. But even that expense was deemed too great. These days the signs are very rare.
Oh, and lots of propaganda films were produced to assure people that nuclear war was survivable.
You would see the shelter signs pretty frequently, along with their designed occupancy.
The approach to this in Manhattan in NYC was beyond farcical. Yes there were shelter signs at various buildings. Presumably their basements would be able to hold a few hundred people each. But consider:
1) what would an H-bomb or two do to Manhattan?
2) if alive, how do several million people survive in Manhattan if there is no water supply?
3) even if there is water, for how long will a few cases of moldy food feed them?
4) what about waste and hygiene? That many people will produce a lot of poop. Does it all stay in the basements if the sewage system isn't functional?
5) etc. As I said, the situation couldn't have been more absurd if it was deliberately written to be a farce. Manhattan wasn't the place to be hunkered down during a nuclear war. The movie Escape From New York depicted a Utopia when compared to what reality would have been.
Thankfully we never had to use any of those shelters during a real war.
Depends on whether your bunker location is known, and/or if it's considered to be high-value. Conventional weapons like the GBU-28 that can penetrate 30 meters of earth or 6 meters of reinforced concrete make any bunkers that aren't very deeply buried obsolete.
It's also possible that with today's precision guided bombs that successive impacts of "ordinary" 2000-lb bombs on the same exact spot could destroy a bunker.
> Not sure about "many" European countries. Switzerland is certainly the only one who went to extremes on it.
From what I can read, it seems to be mainly Switzerland and Scandinavia.
In Sweden during the cold war it was a requirement for many building permits to add a bunker to the basement, so we still have 65,000 bunkers with about 7 million seats. It's very common to go into the basement of e.g. a library or apartment building and have to pass through massive protection doors with air filters. I doubt any of them are still stocked with food/supplies anymore though.
There has to be at least one, right?