Secret Bunker

“Even the use of one nuclear bomb would inevitably lead to an all-out nuclear exchange.”

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, 1981

“Yes, there could be a limited nuclear war in Europe.”

US President Ronald Reagan, 1981

The long tunnel leads beneath the lush English countryside, secured by steel shutters, bombproof doors and an 18-inch reinforced concrete ceiling, designed not to just keep Russians and rioters out, but workers in.

Today, visitors to Kelvedon Hatch, Essex, smile at the “Secret Nuclear Bunker” road signs directing people to the tourist attraction located just 20 miles from Central London. But for those who lived through the brinkmanship of the Cold War, the facility’s existence would have been little to joke about, had they known.

“I think in our naiveté we thought that, in all probability, the Russians would bomb the bunker and so at least we would be dead,” said landowner Michael Parrish, one of few locals who knew about the site at the time, since the Air Ministry chose his family’s land for its location, and acquired it through eminent domain.

But like most of the local population, the family had little chance of survival if the worst happened: “We had no spot in the bunker,” Parrish said.

From Radar to Art Treasures

Built in 1952 to resemble a farm cottage above ground, the layered, 80-foot-deep bunker served as an early warning facility for the first 15 years of its existence, using radar to track incursions by Soviet aircraft and alert the RAF.

As radar technology – development and deployment of which during WWII was led by British scientists — was passed on to and improved by the Americans, the facility was briefly run by Civil Defence. Later it was converted into a regional government headquarters. With a capacity to house some 600 people, and fitted with a small hospital and BBC broadcasting studio, it was intended to serve the Prime Minister and senior cabinet members during and after a nuclear war. Three more bunkers around Britain were intended to house select civil servants and to store national art treasures.

“But what was the point in preserving them, who would be around to appreciate them?” Parrish said. Parrish’s family re-acquired the decommissioned site from the government in 1994 and opened it to the public.

Best Kept Secret in Town

History books about the area recount how, during initial construction, local girls would go dancing with air force workers who were bussed to the site each day.

But while the population was generally unaware of what was hid beneath the fields, the prospect of MAD – mutually assured destruction – was a constant facet of the 40-year nuclear stand-off.

The Soviet threat was incessantly conveyed through TV and radio dramas, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and events like the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, said Sanjay Fernando, who attended school in the area throughout the 1980s yet said he never knew of the bunker.

If the four-minute strike warning sounded, he said, he and his friends planned to run to the top of their town’s multi-story parking garage for a front-seat view. “We would watch the nukes come in on London and wait for the aftershock to arrive,” Fernando said.

Taking the Subway to War

But the transfer of government functions to this and the other bunkers would have been more likely to happen during a period of increasing international tension, rather than in response to a sudden strike warning.

In the event of a full evacuation, a nearby airfield was to be used to bus people in, others would arrive by car, and some would travel incognito on the London underground’s railway system, a line of which ran to within two miles of the bunker until 1994.

A priority for the operation commanders was to implement the evacuation without triggering pandemonium, a task that was assisted by existing Civil Defence guidelines for the population.

“The big fear,” Parrish said, “was mass panic, which is why many survival manuals tell you to get under your kitchen table, stay inside. But it wasn’t for protection, it was crowd control.”

Life After the Bomb

If nuclear bombs were dropped, their electromagnetic pulse would wipe out almost all forms of communication. Each of the four bunkers around Britain would control a main and a sub region. In Kelvedon Hatch, a cabinet minister or even the Prime Minister would command the country’s southeast region.

People would work for two shifts and sleep for one, gathering information on where bombs had gone off, noting where radiation and fallout would be blowing, while commandeering buses and distributing food and supplies recovered from local stores and depots.

Armed security detachments also stood ready to wipe out any mobs of irradiated, starving people who tried to force entry to the site.

Michael Parrish, who has turned the former bunker into a museum.

Echoes of the Past

In 1998, Anya, a visitor from Moscow, was one of the first Russian visitors to tour the bunker. Feeling somewhat uncomfortable in the group as the guide spoke of the Russian threat, she remembers it now as an eerie peek at the other side of the coin she had known growing up in the former Soviet Union.

“When I was a schoolgirl, I clearly remember thinking that Ron­ald Reagan was the most horrible person on Earth,” she said.

The closest the superpowers came to nuclear war was during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Few are aware of other critical moments, however, like the perilously rising tensions in 1983 (see Russian Life, March/April 2013). NATO exercises in Western Europe were so realistic that the Soviets interpreted them as a prelude to an invasion, and Moscow’s nukes were duly armed.

More aware than most of Britain’s preparations for all-out war, the Parrish family concluded that self-preservation was futile.

“However, we did seriously contemplate digging a bunker on the farm, sort of burying a petrol tanker in the ground,” Parrish said. “But that never came to fruition.” RL