| Life inside Britain's Cold War nuclear bunker |
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| Investigations | |
| Written by Steve Boggan | |
The Cold War bunker's control room.
As you stand in the torchlit cold, with the doorframes collapsing from dry rot and with water dripping down formative stalactites, the room is strangely filled with the voices of Harold Macmillan, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher, and you find yourself shivering. But not from the chill. Until two years ago, the existence of this complex, variously codenamed Burlington, Stockwell, Turnstile or 3-Site, was classified. It was a huge and closely-guarded secret, the place where the government and 6,000 apparatchiks would have taken refuge for 90 days during all-out thermonuclear war. Solid yet cavernous, surrounded by 100ft deep reinforced concrete walls within a subterranean 240-acre limestone quarry just outside Corsham, it drives one to imagine the ghosts of people who, thank God, never took refuge here. Yesterday, echoes of the Cold War returned when President Vladimir Putin threatened to turn Russia’s nuclear missiles towards Europe again if the US persisted with its plans for a vast missile defence shield. And, suddenly, it felt like we were being transported back 20 years and more, to a time when the existence of a last-stand facility like Burlington was a given and to a period when we wondered not if, but when “it” would happen. There is a whole generation of young adults who, thankfully, know nothing about living with the promise of mutually assured destruction and of the tragically pointless doctrine of “Protect and Survive”, so we are here to tell them what it was like. And to ask the question: What would happen if we were attacked today? The Corsham Tunnels began life as an underground quarry producing what came to be known as Bath stone. Although limestone had been mined here since Roman times, serious quarrying took off in the years after 1837 when Isambard Kingdom Brunel began work on Box Tunnel, a huge engineering project that would result in the world’s longest subterranean stretch of railway on the main London to Bristol line. Before you enter the tunnel beyond Chippenham you will see a small industrial line branching off into the earth on the right hand side. That gave access to the digs. Before the Second World War, the military began using the site as the largest munitions storage depot in Europe. And while war in Europe raged in the early 1940s the area to the south, known as Spring Quarry, housed an underground aircraft engine factory, far beyond the reach of the Luftwaffe. After the war came the threat of nuclear weapons and, in 1956, planning started for Burlington, the facility that would become the government’s command and control centre, and the 34-acre site was surrounded in concrete. During the Cuban missile crisis, when the placement of nuclear warheads on the US’s doorstep brought the superpowers to within a hair’s breadth of all out war, the facility stood ready. And throughtout the Cold War, Burlington was stocked, upgraded and improved, ready for the worst. The need for Burlington was established in the early 1950s by defence planners who estimated the destructive effect of 132 atom bombs falling on the UK. In London, they said, 422,000 would be killed, 241,000 seriously injured. In Birmingham the numbers were 127, 000 and 72,000. In Manchester 98,000 and 57,000. In the Clyde area, a similar number, and so on. In 1955, however, William Strath, head of the Central War Plans Secretariat, reported on the effects of an attack by the much more destructive hydrogen bomb and Cabinet was truly shocked. The Strath report, which was not declassified until 2002, said: “If no preparations of any kind had been made in advance, a successful night attack on the main centres of population in this country with 10 hydrogen bombs would, we estimate, kill about 12 million people and seriously injure or disable 4 million others.” At the time, that was almost one-third of the population. And, of course, there would be many more deaths as a result of radioactive fallout. Strath was the first to point out the devastating effects of thermonuclear weapons; a 10 megaton H-bomb would cause complete devastation in an area of 28 square miles. In his seminal work on Cold War nuclear planning, The Secret State (Penguin), Professor Peter Hennessy refers to a conversation between the Russian premier Nikita Khruschev and the British Ambassador to Moscow, Sir Frank Roberts, at a ballet performance in 1961 in which they got involved in morbid banter about the results of a thermonuclear conflict. During that, Khruschev said his military planners thought “several scores of bombs” would be targeted on Britain - not the 10 of Strath’s estimates. Strath recommended a programme of shelter building for the population but estimates put the cost at £1.25 billion. At today’s prices, that would amount to £22.875 billion. It was considered too costly and so military planners determined the best form of defence was the guarantee of immediate retaliation against an aggressor. And to do that, someone would have to be tucked away safely ready to push the button. Burlington is divided into 24 areas branching off concrete routes with names like West Main Road and North West Ring Road. There are vast stores with chairs still wrapped in brown paper, crates of loo roll, mountains of stationery - some bearing the words Top Secret - and thousands of chunky black telephones from the 1960s, still in dusty cardboard boxes. There are pots, pan scrubs, stacks of beds and row upon row of dour metal wardrobes that would have filled dormitories where civil servants, typists, telephonists and maintenance workers would have lain, wondering what had become of their families above. On an electric buggy that would not look out of place in the lair of a James Bond villain, Andy Quinn, the complex manager, takes me to visit the bunker’s hospital in Area 10, where limestone is painted pastel green and pale yellow. There are canteens with cups and saucers that have never been used. Ornate coffee machines, still bearing their labels, sit, still shining, in a wide troglodyte café. In Area 6 is an industrial-sized bakery. In Area 16, a BBC broadcasting studio. In Area 21, five communications centres for the intelligence services. In Area 8, off East Main Road, is the communications centre run by the civilians of the GPO - the nationalised General Post Office - where bank upon bank of telephone exchanges stand like dominoes waiting to be pushed over. Walk through a door and you see two long rows of hardwood workstations for telephonists - 54 in all - with their 1950s-style wires and sockets, unused and strangely beautiful. At one, a flip directory, dated January 1967, gives quick access to vital and not-so-vital numbers: HQ Coastal Command, Northwood 26161; RAF Fairford, Fairford 511; Ministry of Defence, Whitehall 7022; And, with a staggering pointlessness, Portsmouth Careers Information Centre, Portsmouth 21938. 
And at the centre of it all, like the lair of a queen bee in a hive, is Area 17 with its smaller rooms, bricked from floor to ceiling. Here, there are buttons on the walls to summon staff and what appears to be an ensuite bedroom, the only one in the complex. No-one knows for sure, but the assumption is that this is where the Prime Minister would stay. There was no provision for his family. From here, contact was to have been maintained with 12 regional centres. The telephone exchanges were mechanical, not electrical, so they would be unaffected by electromagnetic blast. Communications cables were buried and reinforced, and the optimistic expectation was that they would still work after the nuclear devastation. Across the country, burrowed closer to the surface, were 1,563 monitoring posts occupied by members of the Royal Observer Corps. In the event of an attack, it was their job to assess the power of individual detonations and relay information to Burlington and regional command centres, local police, hospitals, utilities providers and other agencies. They would also notify siren operators who would give an estimated four-minute warning. Local councils, too, had their underground bunkers. Some are now used for storage. Others, like one in Cambridge, have been retained and upgraded, today housing “emergency planning” facilities with half an eye these days on possible attacks by terrorists using chemical or biological weapons. After these facilities were notified of attack - if they didn‘t already know - responses would be determined by who was left alive, but the Strath report predicted that sometimes necessarily uncompromising martial law would take over. During the 1970s and 1980s, a series of pamphlets and a public information film, under the umbrella title of Protect and Survive, was produced advising the populace on what to do next. Now widely derided, it contained such advice as using doors as indoor lean-tos to defend against fallout. In eerily fatalistic tones a Protect and Survive film suggested stockpiling food and water and gave advice on how to dispose of bodies. Whether any of this amounted to an effective civil defence programme is a moot point. Professor Hennessy says it did not. “There never was anything approaching adequate civil defence from atomic weapons,” he says. “But when the H-bomb came along, they realised that unless they put vast amounts of money into shelters, then it was pointless.” Critics often point to the building programmes of some Scandinavian countries which required that some kind of bunker-type protection should be provided with all homes. But they were only able to do this because they were not nuclear powers. If a nuclear state had initiated such a programme, its enemies would have read it as a prelude to war. “With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ending of the Cold War, the threat of all-out nuclear war diminished,“ continues Prof Hennessy. “Now, of course, it would be a rogue state or terrorists who could deliver something nasty in Europe. I think it is more likely now than at any time in my lifetime that the nuclear taboo could happen, but in a strange way people have sort of learned to live with it.” Perhaps the reason for that is the expectation that an attack by a terrorist organisation or rogue state might wipe out one city, but it would not obliterate us all. That, too, seems to be the thinking of government. For about six weeks I tried to find out whether there was a modern civil defence plan to defend the public from thermonuclear war. The Ministry of Defence said it was not its responsibility, try the Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat. Not us, said the Civil Contingencies Secretariat - we co-ordinate plans, but we wouldn’t draw up a plan for nuclear war. Try the Ministry of Defence. And so on. It would appear that there is no national plan for nuclear war. In 1989, after the Berlin Wall was torn down, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was shown a £40m estimate for a re-fit of the Corsham Bunker. She refused to pay, arguing that it was no longer necessary. Until 1992, Corsham was maintained as a command and control centre, just in case. In Frame Room 3, which boasts 1970s-style telephone switchgear, the last page of a maintenance logbook reads: “2/3/92. System switched off.”. The Royal Observation Corps bunkers were sold off and the 12 centres of devolved control were decommissioned (although some experts believe they never really got off the ground after the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament disclosed their whereabouts in the 1960s). Protect and Survive slipped into historic ignominy and the four-minute sirens were abandoned. One emergency planner told me: “In 1997, we were told not to consider the possibility of nuclear war at all.” And it is by no means scandalous that there is no national plan for war. Why should there be when war is not looming? As part of the government’s contingency planning, it has what is called the Domestic Horizon Scanning Committee constantly looking for risks in the distance, and nuclear war isn’t one of them at the moment. Instead, the most serious of the planning is focused on chemical, radiological, nuclear or biological attack by terrorists. That is our modern threat, and the planning for it is covered by the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act. Designed to “deliver a single framework for civil protection in the United Kingdom capable of meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century”, it is divided into two parts - one dealing with local arrangements for civil protection, and one spelling out emergency powers. Briefly, in any major incident, ranging from an outbreak of bird flu to the detonation of a dirty bomb, there would be two categories of responders: 1) the emergency services, NHS and local authorities, and 2) those on the periphery, such as the Health and Safety Executive, and transport and utility companies. Usually, a “Gold commander”, the most senior police officer at the scene, would take charge. If the incident involved chemical, biological or nuclear material, specialists with protective clothing, vehicles and equipment from the Health Protection Agency would become involved. If biological weapons had been used, quarantine zones would be set up and vulnerable people would be given vaccines. Laboratories at Porton Down, the former military research centre, are staffed 24/7 so blood samples could be quickly tested and the relevant vaccines issued. In the event of a chemical attack - such as nerve gas - some antidotes and medical attention could be given quickly, but responders would be limited in what they could do. Most nerve agents simply dissipate and, while causing high anxiety, a single attack would probably not cause many fatalities. Which brings us back to nuclear explosion and the associated problem of radiation.. The modern view is that terrorists would probably go for either a dirty bomb, which would spread radioactive material, or a small nuclear device. Responding to a dirty bomb would involve decontamination of the site closest to an explosion - simply put, washing an area and affected individuals and taking away the contaminated water. Depending on winds and the concentration of the radiation, this could affect the health of many individuals. A nuclear attack would inevitably kill many people, but it is unlikely there would be a Corsham-style bunker to take control of the situation. The assumption is that government would continue - even if the attack were on London. Because the Civil Contingencies Act devolves responsibilities, local and regional teams bordering the affected area would swing into operation. All the responders, categories 1 and 2, and emergency planning officers from every local authority in the country, conduct regular exercises covering a range of scenarios, and those I spoke to believe they are ready for almost anything. “The threat from nuclear attack began diminishing from the time the Berlin Wall came down,” says Marc Beveridge, director of the Emergency Planning Society. “Over the past four or five years, since 9/11, there has been a lot of work undertaken on our abilities to deal with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents, either as accidents or acts of terrorism. “There has been a lot of liaison between all the agencies involved and a lot more focus on generic capabilities. There are robust plans in place for all eventualities.” He argues that these arrangements would swing into action in a multiple nuclear attack and we agree to disagree that this amounts to a plan. It is simply impossible to prepare for such devastation. Who would be left to put the plan in place? The emergency powers section of the Civil Contingencies Act enables the government, predictably, to make desperate law on the hoof and to devolve power to “Regional Nominated Co-ordinators”, presumably police or military. Gun law would follow. What would be done to physically safeguard the government is unclear. According to a spokeswoman at the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, Corsham has not been superseded by some new bunker. “That’s a myth,” she says. Others I speak to simply smile and chuckle. So, would all this planning save anyone in the event of a nuclear war? It might, but in such extremes only the survival of executive power would matter to government planners. There never really was a plan to save you and me, and there never really could be. However, there is one piece of good news. While I was researching this piece, one Ministry of Defence official told me that he expected some warning mechanism would be put in place if ever nuclear war became a realistic threat. “There would be some way to issue a five-minute warning,” he said. Five minutes? It used to be four. So, perhaps there is progress of a kind. Now, not only will you have time to boil an egg before you are obliterated; you will also be able to have it hard-boiled if that’s what takes your fancy. A version of this article first appeared in The Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk. To see pictures of the Corsham nuclear bunker by Graeme Robertson go to Eyevine pictures at http://www.eyevinearchive.com/Search/SearchResults.aspx?sm=Basic&cid=468&All=corsham Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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