Nuclear Bunkers Map: 18 Maps of Fallout Shelters and ROC Posts

Search MapIndex for fallout shelters and 195 maps come back, for nuclear bunkers 127, and many of their makers go and look. One spotter notes for each of 252 New York addresses whether the yellow sign is bent, painted over or gone; someone checking Welsh Royal Observer Corps posts marks them flooded, stripped or “90% fitted”; a California map puts each shelter’s capacity beside what the building has become. Others work from paper: a list of the posts Canada built into railway stations and lighthouses around 1963, the cellars Amsterdam meant to turn into atomic shelters in 1967, and the towns the US Strategic Air Command picked as targets in Czechoslovakia.

1. Fallout Shelters Map Canada: 1,747 Cold War Reporting Posts

   At Greenly Island Lighthouse “no construction required”: like the airport at Natashquan and the Manicouagan 5 dam, it lay above the 50th parallel. Canada built its fallout reporting posts into whatever already stood, and this map of the network around 1963 finds them in Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railway stations, RCMP detachments, customs houses on the US border, Hydro-Québec dams and the general store of Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette. Each post has its code and its fate: FRP QB33 sat in the CPR station at Maniwaki, “closed out in 1968”, and the station no longer exists; FRP BB1 in St-Michel-des-Saints was in the postmaster’s house at 991 Brassard. Others got a basement or an outside shelter, numbered like “HKFC5826” at Rivière-Bleue. One layer per province, from archival files cited down to the volume, adds the telephone, telegraph and radio links that tied the posts together, and Toronto air raid sirens “in operation as of 18 April 1957”.

   

   Objects

   1,7471,439 points, 308 lines

   Countries

   CanadaUnited States

   Made with

   Google My Maps

   Versions

   2 other versions

2. Paris Nuclear Bunker Map: 120 Shelters Under the Capital

   The anti-atomic shelter under Les Halles, meant as a civil protection command post, is filed under destroyed and vanished sites with the note “JAMAIS CONSTRUIT !!”. The researcher Dioxyde14 sorts 120 shelters in and around Paris by what became of them: 69 anti-gas shelters, 11 former anti-atomic shelters and 19 still in service, among them PC Jupiter under the Élysée, the NRBC bunkers of the Senate and the National Assembly, the Banque de France’s “La Souterraine” and a private anti-atomic shelter in Versailles. A government bunker under the Hôtel de Matignon is marked as a personal hypothesis, “non prouvé”. Le Sous-Marin, under the former colonies ministry, owes its name to its heavy watertight doors and narrow corridors; the Hôtel de Brienne was once the command post of the missile submarines.

   

   Objects

   120118 points, 2 areas

   Countries

   France

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

3. ROC Posts Map: Every Royal Observer Corps Post in the UK

   Alford appears twice, once in Aberdeenshire and once in Lincolnshire, because each point on this map is named only by its place, in capitals. Each is one of the Royal Observer Corps’ underground monitoring posts, from which volunteers were to report nuclear bursts and fallout: Braemar, Cruden Bay, Udny Station, Amlwch on Anglesey, Clova in the Angus glens. With 3,086 points, in which every post seems to be entered twice, it is a dot grid over the whole of Britain and the Isle of Man; one post, Randalstown, has strayed into the Atlantic.

   

   Objects

   3,0863,086 points

   Countries

   United KingdomIsle of Man

   Made with

   Google My Maps

4. Cold War Bunkers Poland: 1,193 Shelters, Stores and Call Signs

   Every guided tour of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture repeats that it has two cellar levels and a foundation pit only 9 metres deep, and this map calls that propaganda: “the shelter under PKiN is a legend by now”. Maciej Witeska of the Civil Defence Museum Foundation spreads 1,193 sites over ten layers: civil defence shelters under schools, kindergartens and Polish Radio, Bierut’s shelter for the government presidium, a field hospital in Wapowskiego Street that could work “anywhere in the capital” on war day, Soviet nuclear weapon stores such as Obiekt 3003 “Templewo”, and the repeater stations of the long-distance cable to the border. Military airfields carry their radio call signs by decade, “KORAL” in 1970 and “OPAL” in 1990 for Goleniów, “SKALP” for the Soviet base at Oława. A layer of Cold War tourist routes leads to the bunkers that are now museums, such as the TOPL command post at Tryszczyn, today the “Strictly Secret” museum.

   

   Objects

   1,1931,172 points, 21 lines

   Countries

   PolandUkraineBelarus

   Made with

   Google My Maps

5. Fallout Shelter Signs Map: New York's Missing Signs

   At 8 E. 3rd St. only a faint impression remains on the wall; the sign itself, the note says, is now owned by a collector in Atlanta. This map of 252 fallout shelter addresses in New York City is a sign spotter’s census. At 116 E. 63rd St., 1200 York Ave. and many more the verdict is “MIA sign”; elsewhere the sign has been painted over, cut up, “chopped at the bottom” or “painted red for some reason”. Some survive where nobody looks, in an alleyway on East 64th Street, at the back of a corridor on West 83rd, on Cortlandt Alley but visible from 56 Franklin. One at 154 W. 93rd St. is “in surprisingly good condition”, and at 75 St. James Ave. the spotter “wouldn’t mind owning the apartment next to the sign”.

   

   Objects

   252252 points

   Countries

   United States

   Made with

   Google My Maps

   Versions

   1 other version

6. Nuclear Weapons Storage Map: West German Special Ammunition Sites

   “Sondermunitionslager Golf” at Großengstingen held, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, one of the best-kept secrets in Germany; today a civilian company stores explosives in one part and private owners and clubs use the 16 bunkers of the next. The layer of former nuclear weapons stores of the Federal Republic gives most sites their American custodial detachment, the 5th USAFAD at Dünsen from February 1963 to May 1992, and at Wahner Heide notes Honest John warheads and atomic demolition munitions for the 1st Belgian Corps. For Fischbach a contributor has translated a long account of the security in Area 1. Across the old border the same map draws the Stasi’s estates as outlines and marks Prenden as reserved for the GDR’s National Defence Council and Objekt 5005 at Biesenthal as the Mielke bunker.

   

   Objects

   723723 points, 4 lines, 187 areas

   Countries

   GermanyFranceItalyand 8 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

7. Atomic Shelters Map: Amsterdam's 1967 Plan

   The atomic cellar at Damrak 66, meant for 140 people, is now part of the anatomy museum Body Worlds. This map lays out the public shelters Amsterdam planned in 1967, 88 places with their intended capacity: 160 people under the Stedelijk Museum, 265 at the Korte Prinsengracht, now a bicycle cellar, 1,000 in a viaduct on the Ruys de Beerenbrouckstraat. The city meant to shelter people in bridges over the Amstel and canals, in the Westerkanaal lock, a pedestrian tunnel, a clothing factory and Artis zoo, and in the open-air theatre of the Vondelpark. Some were built and serve as storerooms today, a few are noted as delivered, such as the one in the old pumping station at Postjeskade, for 80, and at Kuinderstraat it was unclear even in 1967 whether the tunnel would ever be one.

   

   Objects

   8888 points

   Countries

   Netherlands

   Made with

   Google My Maps

8. Government Bunkers Map: America's Continuity of Government Sites

   A layer called “Likely Spots” is where this map gets bold: a rumoured congressional bunker at Fort McNair, exhaust and intake vents and recent underground construction at Fort Myer, a tunnel “linked to White House bunker construction?”, and a golf course with “lots of weird things”. The confirmed sites come first: Raven Rock, Mount Weather, Cheyenne Mountain, the Vice President’s bunker at the Naval Observatory and FEMA’s regional bunkers in Denton and Denver. Retired ones follow, among them the Greenbrier bunker, AT&T’s hardened sites and abandoned New York State emergency management bunkers at Oneonta and Batavia. Mount Pony, once the Federal Reserve’s, now belongs to the Library of Congress, and Granite Mountain is the Mormon Church’s deep underground hardened storage.

   

   Objects

   335335 points

   Countries

   United States

   Made with

   Google My Maps

9. Czech Bunker Map: 260 ÚŽ-6 Shelters of the Czechoslovak Army

   The ÚŽ-6 is a standard shelter of the Czechoslovak army, and this collector has tracked 260 of them across inland Czechia, 78 of the ÚŽ-6a type, 25 of the ÚŽ-6b and a handful of oddities such as an “atypical double object” at Myslív. They sat at radar stations, airfields, rocket regiments’ field positions and command posts, and each entry gives the unit where it is known. The notes are a field log: one at Telecí is accessible with its outer sheet-metal doors preserved, one at Mezihoří filled in, one at Rohozná was built as late as 1989. Entries marked +++ are not yet in the database, found from aerial photos or forum talk, and one guidance post at the Bechyně airfield “was offered for sale”.

   

   Objects

   260260 points

   Countries

   Czechia

   Made with

   Google My Maps

10. Fallout Shelter Map California: 460 Shelters and What They Became

    Oakland’s Clay Street Garage was a fallout shelter for 2,620 people; the Hotel Wagner is now Cape and Cowl Comics, the Travelers Hotel the LUX pub and club. This map takes California’s Civil Defense lists and goes to each address: Oakland’s from newspaper articles, Fresno County’s from a 1975 public shelter map the county library dug out for the author. The Fresno entries count blast spaces and fallout spaces by category, from Pine Flat Dam to Shelter #31, the Mennonite Brethren Church in Reedley, for 152. Almost every entry ends with the same verdict, “No signs present”, and often “long gone”; one store “looks abandoned now though”.

    

    Objects

    460460 points

    Countries

    United States

    Made with

    Google My Maps

    Versions

    1 other version

11. Hungarian Bunker Map: 1,093 Bunkers of the Southern Defence Line

    Between Nagylak and Baja, along its southern border, Hungary built a Cold War defence line, and this map numbers its 1,093 bunkers, depots and trenches one by one. Every entry has a block number, a type and a verdict: shelters, machine-gun bunkers, observation posts and tank firing positions are “romos”, ruined, “járható”, passable, or “hiányzó”, missing, and some lie on private land. A separate layer marks the depots of bunker domes, numbered by block like everything else.

    

    Objects

    1,0931,093 points

    Countries

    HungaryRomaniaSerbia

    Made with

    Google My Maps

12. 1965 Fallout Shelter Map: Washington, DC

    One reader grew up as a pastor’s son playing in the fallout shelter of Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church; another threw a party in the District Council’s shelter the day Skylab fell. This map places the 1,624 shelters of the June 1965 Community Shelter Plan for Washington, DC, and readers keep writing in about the signs: one hangs at Gallaudet University’s Elstad Auditorium, one at the 7th Street side of a former department store on H Street NE, one used to be at 1361 Irving St NW until it was removed a few years ago. The author checks each tip against Street View, notes where a sign hangs (“On the back of the building (Mt. Pleasant side)”, “By garages. Good condition.”) and admits when it cannot be seen.

    

    Objects

    1,6241,624 points

    Countries

    United States

    Made with

    Google My Maps

    Versions

    1 other version

13. ROC Bunker Map: Royal Observer Corps Posts Checked in Wales

    “CONFIRMED - 90% fitted” says the note at Llanfair Talhaiarn, a Royal Observer Corps post that still holds most of its equipment. This map of 197 posts, many of them master posts, from Lairg to Lyndhurst, carries the field notes of someone working through Wales. Llandudno is “REMOVED”, Marianglas “Confirmed - Flooded”, the Marconi post near Caernarfon “Dry but stripped”, Llanbedr “in a private garden”. In mid Wales one post is “Confirmed as a ROC post, but not listed on the de-mob list - Needs a close inspection”, and at Llysfaen the post is gone, but there is “evidence of larger bunkers to the North West and to the East of the site”.

    

    Objects

    197197 points

    Countries

    United KingdomUnited States

    Made with

    Google My Maps

14. Government Bunker Map: Germany's Regierungsbunker in the Ahr Valley

    West Germany’s government was to sit out a nuclear war in tunnels in the Ahr valley, and wolly79bn has mapped what shows above ground of them, building by building. The 54 objects carry the official building numbers: BW161 is the kitchen exhaust of section 1, BW173 the exhaust of its emergency generators, BW186 the exhaust of the ABC area, and BW194 the emergency exit “Bunte Kuh”. BW191 is drawn as a line, the connecting tube between two ventilation shafts. A few entries still read “???”. Beyond the bunker lie its antennas, a post office bunker and the Sonderbetriebsstelle Kesseling, which sent sound and picture over radio relay links to the federal police radio station 20 kilometres away.

    

    Objects

    5440 points, 10 lines, 4 areas

    Countries

    Germany

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

15. Sofia Bunker Map: 158 Shafts, Shelters and Tunnels

    “Ако се загубите следвайте червените стрелки”, if you get lost follow the red arrows, says the note at a 15-metre open shaft in South Park. This map of 158 underground places, most of them in Sofia, is an explorer’s notebook: the Reduta bunker’s entrance is in a shack and is reached through its roof, a shelter under a shoe factory needs a shovel, an entrance at the Zemlyane power plant has been welded shut. The writer admits doubts (“I may be wrong about the number of entrances”) and remembers going down a school’s shelter once in second grade without remembering anything. Under the National Palace of Culture there is “a thick armoured door in the wall”, and the “Bronx” tunnel starts in an underpass.

    

    Objects

    158140 points, 15 lines, 3 areas

    Countries

    Bulgaria

    Made with

    Google My Maps

16. ROTOR Radar Bunker Map: Britain's 1950s Early Warning Stations

    ROTOR was Britain’s post-war radar defence, and this map places 48 of its stations, most with a link to the site’s report on Subterranea Britannica. Some bunkers changed role later: Kelvedon Hatch, Hack Green, Skendleby, Shipton and Bawburgh were sector operations centres or radar stations that became regional government headquarters for a nuclear war. The points run from Saxa Vord on Unst and Faraid Head to Ventnor, Treleaver in Cornwall and Killard Point in Northern Ireland, with Barnton Quarry in Edinburgh as both a ROTOR centre and a regional seat of government.

    

    Objects

    4848 points

    Countries

    United KingdomIsle of Man

    Made with

    Google My Maps

17. Bunker Museums Map Germany: Cold War Bunkers to Visit

    This is the map for going inside: the IGZD lists Germany’s bunker, border and military museums with addresses and websites. Its bunker layer holds the Bundesbank’s bunker at Cochem-Cond, the NATO bunker at Kindsbach, the GDR defence ministry’s main command post at Harnekop, the bunker town of Wünsdorf and the emergency seats of the state governments of North Rhine-Westphalia at Kall-Urft and Schleswig-Holstein at Lindewitt. The smaller ones are just as specific: a fully working private collection from a warning office in Quickborn, an atomic bunker in Cologne’s underground, and in Czech Borovno a former Soviet special weapons store.

    

    Objects

    103103 points

    Countries

    GermanyCzechiaNetherlands

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

18. Nuclear Target Map: SAC's 1950s Targets in Czechoslovakia

    Roztoky, outside Prague, was on the US Strategic Air Command’s list for penicillin and streptomycin. This map takes the declassified target list of the 1950s and places 239 targets in Czechoslovakia, each town with its numbered categories: 275 “Population”, 248 military installations, 386 railway junctions, 188 power stations. Larger towns get a designated ground zero, Praha DGZ B or Ostrava DGZ C, with long lists of stores, factories and command posts; Příbram is listed for processed lead, Náchod for tyres and power. A second layer adds the airfields, from the same list.

    

    Objects

    239239 points

    Countries

    CzechiaSlovakiaAustriaand 2 more

    Made with

    Google My Maps