BAGNOLO SAN VITO, Italy — Across a footbridge from a busy shopping outlet surrounded by verdant fields in northern Italy, workers in a nondescript warehouse are preparing for a nuclear attack, its radioactive fallout and the end of the world as we know it.
“We have found ourselves in the midst of this giant cyclone of demand,” said Giulio Cavicchioli, as he showed off an underground air filtration system that “cleans” radioactive particles, nerve gas and other biological agents and played a video tour of a nuclear shelter that was “ready to use.” His company, Minus Energie, has gone from working on 50 bunkers in the past 22 years to fielding 500 inquiries in the past two weeks.
“It’s a hysteria for construction of bunkers,” he said, driven by the fear of Russian nuclear warheads reaching across Europe. “It’s much scarier now.”
In the days since President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia launched his war on Ukraine, and put his nuclear forces into “special combat readiness,” the intensifying violence and the legacy of two world wars has revived fears in Europe of nuclear calamity for the first time in decades.
Europe has already spent two years on high alert against the pandemic. But now the manifestations of its anxieties and desires for self-defense have shifted from the masks, vaccines and lockdowns of Covid to the bunkers, iodine pills and air raid sirens of nuclear war. » | Jason Horowitz | Saturday, March 12, 2022
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Siena.
