Norway’s Cold War military bunkers are in use again: “If you end up in a war, how do you fight Russia?”
Tensions with Russia have led to Norway reopening their Cold War bunkers.
It may sound like something out of a James Bond film, but Norway has long concealed fighter jets and military equipment within snow-capped mountainside bunkers—and now, some of them are being reopened.
During the Cold War, the Norwegian armed forces constructed approximately 3,000 underground bunkers to protect and conceal their arsenal of weapon systems and specialised vehicles.
Now, with war raging in Ukraine, two of these specialised facilities have been reactivated as operational military bases.
Near Norway’s border with Russia, north of the Arctic Circle, sit the hangars at Bardufoss Air Station and the naval base at Olavsvern. Carved into a mountainside and shielded by roughly 900 feet (275 meters) of solid gabbro rock, Olavsvern features a 3,000-foot (909-meter) exit tunnel complete with a massive blast door.
According to the BBC, the hangars have been opened to “help the resilience and survivability of Norway’s F-35s in the face of a Russian attack". The war in Ukraine has shown the world how vulnerable such expensive aircraft can be when on the ground, with drone strikes a real possibility and an effective tactic. Therefore, the Norwegians have decided to move theirs to the aforementioned mountain bases in order to protect them from any possible trouble from Russia.
On Russia, Andreas Østhagen, a senior research fellow at Fridtjof Nansen Institute puts the decision in simple terms to the BBC: “in around 2006-2008, there was a confluence of things. There was a lot of investment going into Russia’s Northern Fleet, along with the resumption of Russian military exercises in the Arctic for the first time since the Cold War, and Russia’s growing interest in the exploitation of Arctic resources”.
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“Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union,” he continues. “But from a Norwegian security point of view there are the same issues. How do you deter Russia and, if you end up in a war, how do you fight Russia?”
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