Bomb shelters across South Korea and Japan are left unprepared in an event of an all-out military conflict breaks out as tensions escalate over the Korean peninsula's rapidly advancing nuclear weapons programme.
South Korea has nearly 19,000 bomb shelters throughout the country. They include more than 3,200 in Seoul, just 40km (25 miles) from the militarised border drawn up under a truce that stopped the Korean War but left them technically at war.
Their shelters are not built to withstand against nuclear, chemical, or biological attacks. They are mostly in subway stations or basements and parking garages in private apartments and commercial buildings designated as shelters with the consent of the owners. In Seoul, most bomb shelters have no long-term supplies of food, water, medical kits or gas masks. They can't be forced to stock up due to lack of public funding, according to an unnamed official.
In the Japanese capital city Tokyo, the remaining bomb shelters from the Second World War are no longer useable or accessible to the public and they have no plans to reuse the decades-old shelters or build new ones for now.
Source: Reuters
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