Swiss Fort Knox banks on disused nuclear bunkers

THE mountain didn't look quite right. Up close, its rock face was the giveaway, with its fading makeup of camouflage paint that seemed not to have been retouched since the cold war.

The guard seemed out of place, too, standing sentry in his black uniform over a quiet clearing near this Swiss ski resort better known for its free-range billionaires.

The oddness was just beginning. The guard punched a few buttons, and a weathered hatch in the mountain opened. Inside, at the end of a narrow cavern of a hallway, there was a second thick door leading to yet another door, this one three and a half tons and looking as if it should be guarding a bank vault.

Christoph Oschwald was giving a tour of what he called the Swiss Fort Knox, one of two former bunkers in the bowels of the Alps that companies run by him and his business partner, Hanspeter Baumann, have leased from the Swiss military. Where officers once prepared to defend their country, the pair now claim to operate some of the world's most secure computer server farms, protecting the terabytes of multinational corporations and individuals alike. If only the military could find more tenants like them.

At a cost of tens of millions of dollars annually, it maintains a system of about 26,000 bunkers and fortifications throughout the Swiss Alps meant to deter attacking armies. But today, as a neutral country facing no immediate threats, Switzerland is undergoing a prolonged soul-searching over the role of its military, including the need for the bunker system. Defence minister Ueli Maurer has raised a storm by suggesting it was time to have "an honest debate" about closing most of the bunkers or converting them to other uses.

"Our position is that as long as Switzerland is engaged outside the country, it's out of the question to weaken the defence system for our country," said Ulrich Schler, a member of the parliament's security committee from the right-wing Swiss People's Party.

That might seem eccentric, but the bunkers and other fortresses occupy a special place in Swiss history. The first was started in 1885 at the strategic St Gotthard Pass to discourage invaders from using the new rail route to cross the Alps.

In the Second World War, with Switzerland fearful of an invasion by Nazi Germany, the landlocked country developed the Rduit, or redoubt, strategy. Swiss forces fortified themselves in the mountains and squatted on the two rail connections to the south, which were crucial to the Nazis' passing coal and steel to their Italian allies. The message was simple, Swiss historian Jurg Stssi-Lauterburg said: "The day you attack us, the lines will be cut, then you will have to fight for them, and we will defend them, and in the end we will destroy them."

The deterrent helped. Though the Nazis drew up plans to invade Switzerland in 1940 and 1943, they never acted on them.

During the cold war, the bunkers, containing everything from anti-aircraft guns to command posts, were maintained and modernised, and still more were built, often with extraordinary efforts at concealment. Today, a visitor can hardly go for a hike without passing a curious door in a mountainside that looks like access to the Batcave, or a faux chalet with trompe l'oeil shutters.

But times have changed. "They're useless," said Christian Catrina, head of security policy for the federal department of defence, civil protection and sport. "And they need money. In most cases we'd be glad if someone would take them off our hands for no price. But that's impossible because of environmental regulations. You can't close the door and throw away the key."

Closing them is expensive - estimates are 625 million, far surpassing the millions needed annually to maintain them.

Indeed, for many conservatives and many older Swiss, the bunkers are a symbol of their nation's determination to remain independent and neutral. "The fortifications are psychologically very important," said Kurt Spillmann, an expert in security policy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Back under the mountains of Gstaad, Oschwald, a 54-year-old former air special forces officer, leads visitors on a tour of the kind of recycling the defence minister might embrace: an underground nuclear blast-resistant bunker Oschwald's companies have spent millions upgrading to serve as a hardened computer server farm.

Do a bunch of ones and zeros warrant the protection of a spare nuclear bunker? "Information - data - is everything today," replied Oschwald, and not just for companies. One married billionaire keeps his electronic "little black book" at the Swiss Fort Knox, he said. If someone were to get her hands on that, said Oschwald, it could cost him millions.