Paris decided instead to go underground for the atomic bomb proof telecom hub. Well, unless they moved it in the past 25 years (i.e. last time I worked in there).
It was equally dystopian, with offices with fake windows + artificial light + window treatments, a square with bistro tables to hang out.
I remember being slightly warmer than a normal office building. I guess the AC was either not properly sized, or just running at the minimum as barely anyone was working there actively at the time.
But the cool factor, was how we accessed it from the ground. There was a little structure that looked like the toilet structure for the adjacent park. You buzz, the door unlock, you enter, there is a guy behind a glass door, you show ID, and he unlock the elevator, and you go down to your subterranean floor. Felt like Jame Bond :)
It is the same in Geneva as the telecom "room" is underground somewhere in the city where everybody goes but nobody notices. You also access it via a nondescript small "hut". Good memories indeed.
The history of this building in the 70s and 80s puts the official paranoia behind phreaking and hacking in more context. When you see that this building is as much a key symbol that represents power as it is a single fully functional and modular switching machine - and where it stands in the middle of the center of the world economy and american supremacy - to hack what this indestructable concrete obelisk represented was a real threat to the projection of power.
If The Phone Company was vulnerable to some rogue geniuses, everything else was up for grabs.
"In an eighteen-month period in 1971 and ’72, the FBI counted an astounding (and almost entirely forgotten) 2,500 domestic bombings: roughly five a day."
I thought the gameplay was so weird with all those black blocks. I didn't get past the first 30 minutes, I just got so bored. I was expecting a mystery game with a complex story.
Apocalypse proof? We need something like an IPX scale. Maybe this is like AP5: able to withstand small-arms fire, molotov cocktails and, I dunno, zombie mandibles? But not cruise missiles, direct artillery fire, or giant transforming robots.
Making something "nuclear hardened" is evidently not as high a bar as one might suppose. Setting aside that I don't know of any actual standards it appears that what's required is an ability to withstand a certain overpressure and provide some amount of radiation shielding. A windowless, reinforced concrete building would do pretty nicely without even trying for extra credit. I guess the idea being that nuclear-proof is impossible for normal, baryonic matter: a near enough blast from a big enough bomb will vaporize anything.
I have worked in a number of nuclear hardened facilities. Some more than others. There certainly are robust standards for this, as I recall quite a bit of fuss around even the small details. Typically what you see is everything is electrically isolated. On-site power, EMP hardened with shielding everywhere. All mechanical and electrical equipment suspended. Several feet of concrete on all sides. They told us it was intended to withstand near impact and I believed that it could. At least structurally. I’m not sure the people inside would fare the same.
I also spent some time inside Cheyenne mountain. That is next level hardening. I have no doubt you could hit it with 50 nukes and the people inside would hardly notice. Of course, other than it specifically being their job to know that we’re being nuked.
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If The Phone Company was vulnerable to some rogue geniuses, everything else was up for grabs.
SF author John Brunner had a contemporaneous story, reflecting that, titled The Inception of the Epoch of Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid (https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?66700 ). The name seems to come from an 1863 English book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water-Babies,_A_Fairy_Tale... )
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/the-real-buildings-that-in...
Maybe I should give it another try.
Making something "nuclear hardened" is evidently not as high a bar as one might suppose. Setting aside that I don't know of any actual standards it appears that what's required is an ability to withstand a certain overpressure and provide some amount of radiation shielding. A windowless, reinforced concrete building would do pretty nicely without even trying for extra credit. I guess the idea being that nuclear-proof is impossible for normal, baryonic matter: a near enough blast from a big enough bomb will vaporize anything.
I also spent some time inside Cheyenne mountain. That is next level hardening. I have no doubt you could hit it with 50 nukes and the people inside would hardly notice. Of course, other than it specifically being their job to know that we’re being nuked.
Sure it and its equipment might survive but everything around it will be fried by the blast and its EMP. So who you're gonna call?
Maybe the Deep Underground Command Center if that had been built might have survived that kind of strike:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Underground_Command_Cente...
Which in fact they did, but they didn't withstand the heat from the fire afterwards.
I kinda doubt this kind of statement since then.
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https://atlasofplaces.com/architecture/long-lines-building/