Jean-Marc Fellay from ORCOC External link, the local emergency planning organisation for nine villages in western Switzerland, told swissinfo.ch External link what would happen after an alarm sounded.
Potassium iodide can provide protection from radiation. This year the exercise was held near the Mühleberg nuclear power station in canton Bern. It involves a number of federal bodies in charge of emergency response, including the Federal Office for Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss, and the Spiez Laboratory External link. His office has a federal centre of expertise for exceptional incidents, called the National Emergency Operations Center External link, and a laboratory in Spiez with a monitoring and emergency task force to deal with a major nuclear or radiological event in Switzerland.Ī general emergency exercise is carried out every two years in the vicinity of one of the four nuclear power plants. He says civil protection measures are more geared towards “catastrophes and emergencies”.
Pascal Aebischer from the Federal Office for Civil Protection told swissinfo.ch that there was no perceived acute threat of a nuclear war that might affect Switzerland and, as such, “in the area of civil protection, no specific measures are being considered”. If Switzerland were to take a direct hit from a nuclear bomb, there would clearly be widespread devastation, as you can see by testing different types of virtual bombs at this google interactive site External link. Experts seem to agree that you cannot prepare for a direct hit, you would simply have to react.īut what if a nuclear bomb were to be detonated somewhere else in the world, blowing a radioactive cloud over Switzerland? It seems that the small Alpine country is prepared for such a scenario, as it is for an accident at one of its five remaining nuclear power stations.
In October, former US Defence Secretary, William Perry, told the International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe External linkthat the threat of a nuclear attack is at its highest level since the Cold War. Alex is not alone in fearing some kind of nuclear attack. This was a question sent in to us by Alex, one of our readers, when we asked them what sort of things they would like to know about Switzerland. 50 years after the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was signed (1968), there are still about 10, 000 atom bombs spread around the world, 93% External linkof which are owned by Russia and the US. At the same time, a nuclear escalation cannot be ruled out between India and Pakistan. Pyongyang is seeking to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the United States.
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