Just in case.

In the "and now for something completely different" category -- I always thought of the Swiss as having a military that was mostly good for ceremonially guarding ceremonial things.  

But apparently that's just a front, because Switzerland's military has been busy building booby traps:

[T]he Swiss military has, in effect, wired the entire country to blow in the event of foreign invasion. To keep enemy armies out, bridges will be dynamited and, whenever possible, deliberately collapsed onto other roads and bridges below; hills have been weaponized to be activated as valley-sweeping artificial landslides; mountain tunnels will be sealed from within to act as nuclear-proof air raid shelters; and much more. 

From a 1984  book by John McPhee called La Place de la Concorde Suisse:

"To interrupt the utility of bridges, tunnels, highways, railroads, Switzerland has established three thousand points of demolition. That is the number officially printed. It has been suggested to me that to approximate a true figure a reader ought to multiply by two. Where a highway bridge crosses a railroad, a segment of the bridge is programmed to drop on the railroad. Primacord fuses are built into the bridge. Hidden artillery is in place on either side, set to prevent the enemy from clearing or repairing the damage."

And you thought the little knives were clever:

McPhee points to small moments of "fake stonework, concealing the artillery behind [them]," that dot Switzerland's Alpine geology, little doors that will pop open to reveal internal cannons that will then blast the country's roads to smithereens. Later, passing under a mountain bridge, McPhee notices "small steel doors in one pier" hinting that the bridge "was ready to blow. It had been superceded, however, by an even higher bridge, which leaped through the sky above—a part of the new road to Simplon. In an extreme emergency, the midspan of the new bridge would no doubt drop on the old one." 

By the time you get to the end of the blog post, you'll be convinced that the Swiss intend to singlehandedly repopulate the planet after the doomsday device goes off -- and that they have some chance of succeeding.  But the book is Cold-War era; maybe they haven't been keeping it up for the last 20 years, who knows?

Comments

[LeeAnn Balbirona]

I saw a little bit of this on Rick Steve's travel show. Hidden artillery and hillside bunkers are regularly maintained and in working order. I hadn't heard about the explosives system though. Interesting!