The Doomsday Room

By Laila Andersen

In a backyard surrounded by apartments lies the emergency center at Torshov. Down a basement staircase, behind a half-meter-thick concrete door, lies one of the most special objects in the protection plan for telecommunications cultural monuments; a secret doomsday room. Before the 1990s, the Norwegian Telecommunications Authority owned this entire block. Today, everything has been sold.

Nødsentralen er en direkte konsekvens av kald krig, og frykten for total utslettelse. Noe mange er engstelig for også i dag. Hele kvartalet var arbeidsplasser for Televerket; Verksteder, montørbase, lager, bensinstasjon og Åsen sentral der nødsentralen lå i kjelleren til høyre ved den øverste parkeringsplassen

Let's go back to October 1962: For 13 dramatic days, the world held its breath. Never before have we been so close to a nuclear war. The Cold War between the Eastern and Western powers reached its breaking point when the Soviet Union decided to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba, with a range of reach to major American cities. The United States, for its part, already had intermediate-range missiles aimed at the Soviet Union from Turkey.

Now intense negotiations began between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev – both with their fingers on the nuclear button. At the last minute, the Soviet ships that were heading to Cuba with weapons turned back. The crisis was called off, but the world community was shaken. Doomsday had never felt closer.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a wake-up call for many nations. Also for Norway's civil preparedness. The emergency center at Torshov is one of the few remaining testimonies of civil preparedness. This is where 12 unsuspecting switchboard ladies from the national telephone company were ordered from the Telegraph Building at Kongens gate 21 in the event of an attack.

Communication is often one of the first things to be affected in war. We see this in regimes today and how those in power try to suppress freedom of expression. That is why, in the early 1960s, there was a plan for how the switchboard ladies (or switchboard officers as they might have called themselves today) would be transferred here. Of course, they knew nothing. The plan was top secret.

The smell in the bunker is strong from moisture damage, and hits us when we open the heavy door. On three of the walls there are hangers for outerwear, enough hooks for a small school class. The hooks are painted the same color as the concrete walls, a moss-green shade that is consistent throughout the three rooms of the emergency center.

We open the next door into a sort of control room. Presumably a workplace for three people, because there are three office chairs in the room. We have to interpret the interior and documentation, because there is no one left who can tell us about the secret emergency center.

The objects and the room itself bear witness to the efforts society was prepared to make in the event of a nuclear war. The switchboard ladies probably had to endure long, confined days in the bunker. We can read this from jars of Aspirin in the medicine cabinet, among other things. The same is said by a stretcher leaning against the wall in the study, and the dry toilet in the cubicle next to it.

Otherwise, it's mostly technical equipment down here: a cable board, a switchboard with an old-fashioned telephone receiver, and a logbook with the handwriting "Åsen Emergency Center". In the middle of the room hangs something reminiscent of a modern fuse box. Next to each lever is a small lamp. Here it is always on. I don't think anyone knows that the connection is still intact. When we were down last, in November 2025, it was still on.

In a document dated 1964 from the Telegraph Board it states, among other things:

"The emergency center is located in one of the shelters in Åsen Central. It will function as an emergency center for Oslo in the event that the Oslo national telephone cannot function, or the city centers in Oslo and Bærum are completely or partially out of service.

The emergency center consists of 12 telephone tables of type M, with the necessary stands for cable termination, transformers, line switches, relays, etc. A stand for WT 100 tone telegraphy equipment with 36 channels has also been installed. The telephone tables are installed with jacks and lamp strips for 120 long-distance connections, 120 local lines, 100 combined CB/LB subscriber lines and 100 LB subscriber lines

At the very bottom of the bunker is the switchboard ladies' workroom, equipped with 12 switchboards. The room is not large, and just the thought of the hectic activity that would have unfolded down here gives you a migraine. Why did Telenor choose to place the alarm center here? Åsen Telebygg is located above the main long-distance cable that runs out of Oslo. This means that all calls out of Oslo went through this. Behind a hatch in the room is the way into the cable shaft.

The reason this is a manual telephone exchange is probably because the enemy would probably have made the automatic telephone exchange useless. You are very vulnerable in war if everything is automated and digitalized, but the switchboards also had a connection to the automatic telephone exchange. Originally, the rooms for the emergency exchange were a shelter.

Fortunately, the equipment at the Åsen emergency center was never used. The Soviets never attacked Norway. The office chairs and dry toilets were allowed to keep their plastic. The secret emergency center was left unused and forgotten. Until the Telemuseet in the mid-1990s began preparing a protection plan for telecommunications buildings and installations on behalf of the Norwegian Televerket.