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Shelter Fallout
Carp, Ontario
July, 1960
“Come on — let’s go see what’s happening at the old Montgomery farm,” Kenny said, jumping up. The game of marbles he’d been playing with his friend Jack was forgotten as yet another big cement mixer rumbled through the village.
“Those trucks go by every few minutes,” Jack said. “Whatever they’re building down there must be awfully big.”“I bet it’s a silo to shoot missiles at the commies,” Kenny said, “or maybe anew kind of weapon!”
The boys walked down the country road in the same direction as the trucks. The sounds of construction workers pounding on steel and yelling instructions floated back toward them on the warm breeze.
Coming the other way was a man in a sharp jacket, looking like he’d just arrived from downtown Ottawa, or maybe even Montreal. He saw the boys and smiled. “Do you have your top-secret clearance?” he asked the pair.
Jack and Kenny looked at each other in confusion. “No, sir.” Jack replied. “We just want to see what’s going on over there.”
The man looked around and then leaned down as if he was sharing a big secret. “It’s a doozy!” he whispered. “Tall fences, lots of Keep Out signs. When I tried going in the gate behind a truck, a fellow in uniform stopped me.” He paused for effect. “He had a gun!”
The boys gasped, a thrill of fear and excitement running through them.
The man straightened up. “I hired an airplane so I could take some photos from above. Whatever they’re building, it’s huge. Dief says it’s just for communications, but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts it’s a government bomb shelter.They’re calling it the Diefenbunker.”
He tapped the notebook he was carrying. “I think I’ve got everything I need to write my article. Have a good day, boys. And —” his voice dropped again. “be careful!” He winked and walked toward a car parked on the side of the road.
The friends waved, and then looked at each other nervously. “We can still go, but, you know... it’s almost lunch time,” Kenny started out.Relieved, Jack immediately added,“Right! We’d better get back.”
When they banged open the screen door of the tidy red brick house, they could hear Jack’s mother talking to her sister as she unloaded a bag of groceries.
“Honestly — how are we supposed to be able to afford to stock a fallout shelter? A month’s worth of canned meat, powdered milk, canned fruit and vegetables. Extra candles and bedding.Hundreds of dollars for something that might never happen!”
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“At least you have a basement,” her sister said bitterly. “It’s not like I thought about a nuclear war when I moved to my apartment building in Ottawa.”
Jack’s mother saw the boys. “Would you like egg salad or cheese and tomato for your sandwiches?” she asked brightly.
But Jack’s aunt wasn’t ready to change the subject. “Here we are, worried sick about how to protect ourselves in case there’s a bomb, and what does the government do?”
Kenny and Jack glanced at each other. Thanks to the newspaper reporter they’d met, they had a pretty good idea what the answer was.
Her face was serious as she continued. “It spends something like 20 million dollars to build that fancy shelter for all the government bigwigs while we’re out here on our own. Must be nice to be important enough to have a fallout shelter named after you!”
That’s what the reporter had meant! The prime minister’s name was John Diefenbaker, so the secret building on the Montgomery place was...
“You know what would be better? Getting rid of the bombs and the bunkers altogether,” Jack’s aunt declared. “War is terrible, whether it’s hot or cold or lukewarm. It’s time for peace!”
Jack’s mother started buttering bread. “That sounds nice. And it would sure be a lot cheaper.”
Jack looked worried. “Do you think we’d be safe in the basement if the Soviets bomb Ottawa?”
His aunt snorted, but a look from her sister changed her tone. “It’ll probably never happen,” she said, trying to be cheerful.
“And if it does, we’ll be okay,” Jack’s mother said. “All of us.” Her words were almost drowned out by yet another cement truck roaring toward the mystery down the road.
How do you keep a country running if the enemy bombs its capital city? In 1958, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker announced plans to build fallout shelters across Canada. (Fallout is the harmful radioactive stuff left in the environment after a nuclear bomb goes off.) One shelter would ensure the Canadian government continued to operate during and after a war.
The details were super top secret. But when barbed wire went up around property near the village of Carp, and hundreds of men started working on the huge building site about 40 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, it didn’t stay secret long. The government called it Project EASE, for Experimental Army Signals Establishment. Built into the side of a hill, the four-storey structure was completely underground.
In an emergency, the prime minister, governor general and other key people from the military and the government would run the country from the safety of the shelter. There would be a few CBC Radio employees to broadcast information to the public, along with secretaries, cooks and many others. The bunker was designed to house about 500 people over a 30-day lockdown. It even had its own mini hospital. Only the prime minister and governor general rated their own rooms — everyone else took an eight-hour shift on a bunk bed.
In the end, the Diefenbunker cost about $33 million — roughly $337 million today. That angered many Canadians who felt the top government people were just looking after themselves. Diefenbaker vowed he would never use it, even if Ottawa was under attack. That emergency never came.
We’ve changed the timing a bit and the people in our story aren’t real, but the newspaper reporter is based on George Brimmell of the Toronto Telegram. He took photos as his plane flew over the site of the Diefenbunker, and to the fury of John Diefenbaker, broke the big story in 1961.
The site operated as Canadian Forces Station Carp until 1994. It could have been forgotten, filled in or just used for storage. But a group of local volunteers stepped forward to preserve the building, and after CBC Radio’s Ottawa morning program did a show from the Diefenbunker, people wanted to see it for themselves. The Diefenbunker was named a national historic site and reopened as a museum in 1998. It welcomed its one millionth visitor in 2024.
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