Albania hopes to lure tourists with Communist nuclear bunker

In its swords-to-ploughshares drive, the Socialist government has already announced plans to open an island fortress to tourists and auction off the country's decrepit Soviet and Chinese fighter jets.

The small Balkan nation has no end of useless military installations and weaponry, a legacy of the paranoid, isolationist regime that ruled it with an iron fist for about 50 years after the end of World War II.

Fearing invasion by a host of imaginary enemies — imperialists, social-imperialists (as other Communist countries deemed ideologically unsound were termed) or restless, land-hungry neighbors — Albania's regime had about 700,000 concrete bunkers of all sizes built across the country.

[...] its smaller sibling in downtown Tirana is tapped to become a museum of the Communist era, sparking complaints from Albania's conservative opposition party that the governing Socialists are trying to glorify the country's dark past.