The Blast Doors Are Open

In 1959, a deep underground fallout shelter was commissioned by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker as part of his government’s reaction to rising threats of nuclear conflict between the West and the Soviet Union. Nicknamed the “Diefenbunker” by opposition politicians, the massive four-level, 9,300-square-metre underground fortification was capable of withstanding a five-megaton blast from 1.8 kilometres away.

Today, as old apprehensions have been rekindled by the USSR’s primary successor nation, Russia, and its war with neighbouring Ukraine, the site allows visitors to travel back in time to the 1960s and the fear of nuclear attack.

From the national capital, a short drive west through the Ottawa Valley takes you to what is now officially named the Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum. After parking, walk over to the white building with the big Diefenbunker sign and enter the blast tunnel.

Military restrictions prohibited the prime minister from being accompanied by his wife, Olive, and for that reason John Diefenbaker was rumoured to have refused ever to use the facility. In fact, he never visited his namesake bunker. The only prime minister to do so was Pierre Trudeau — and he was so underwhelmed that he reduced its funding.

Building the bunker took eighteen months and required about twenty-five thousand cubic metres of concrete plus more than 4,500 tonnes of steel. It was the first recorded use of the time-saving critical path construction method in Canada. The bunker became operational in 1961, and the site remained active as military base CFS Carp until it was decommissioned in 1994.

The Diefenbunker was the largest and most important of a series of similar, strategically located Emergency Government Headquarters built across Canada, most of them in rural areas near cities. The others were closed by the 1990s, although items recovered from some of them have been used in the Diefenbunker museum.

There, visitors can walk through underground facilities that were designed to protect 535 people for thirty days, with air filters and positive air pressure to prevent radiation infiltration. Storage was available for food, fuel, fresh water, and medical supplies — all the presumed necessities for a subterranean city in lockdown. Cold War life in the Diefenbunker would have been restrictive. The spaces visitors see today are small, and there would have been no outside light, unless you were sent up top to check things out after a nuclear attack. Then you would have had to pass through a decontamination chamber to get back in.

Twenty-first-century techies will enjoy the special cryptographic areas with telecommunications equipment like the Signal Transmission and Receiving Distribution first-generation computer system, magnetic tape machines, mainframes, individual operator screen terminals, old hard disk and RAM cards, plus Geiger counters and rotary phones. All were state-of-the-art then but are now amusing artifacts.

Walk into the cavernous and nowempty Bank of Canada vault that was intended to store the country’s gold reserves. It was called the “Special Storage Area” by workers during construction. Opening the vault required co-operation. Two people opened a small door to equalize internal and exterior pressure, then four people with different combinations to four locks opened the main door.

Then there is the escape-room experience called Escape the Diefenbunker. It is considered the world’s biggest such game room, because participants have sixty minutes to investigate one entire bunker level — more than two thousand square metres — for clues and codes that will help them get out.

The Diefenbunker was designated a National Historic Site when CFS Carp was decommissioned. The site remained empty until the founding of the museum in 1997. It opened to the public the following year, and in 2022 federal funding of $600,000 was granted to upgrade facilities and to improve exhibits.

Tours exit through the museum gift shop that offers Cold War and 1960s memorabilia, including spy gadgets, postcards, books, vintage games, mugs, retro candy, and bunker apparel and accessories. There are even Nuclear Blast hot sauce and Bombs Away shot glasses.

IF YOU GO