There is a large nuclear bunker a little down the road. The British government passed a white paper in 1992 declaring that the cold war was over, three years after the Berlin wall had fallen. The Ministry of Defence couldn't afford to refurbish it nor pay the taxes on it, so it sold this bunker to a business consortium in Edinburgh. It has been turned into a museum, and if you pay the entrance fee you can wander around its concrete corridors. It's a chilling experience. This exhibit is for mature people with an interest in history. I keep reading bad reviews this place got from idiot parents taking their children out for a day of family fun. Obviously, it isn't a children's playground and it doesn't have a bouncy castle or a rollercoaster or a boating lake. Gosh, some families really are incredibly stupid. This bunker is a totally important part of Britain's history, and it is absolutely brilliant that it is open to the public. I recommend visiting: it's one of the most interesting things on the UK tourist trail, although it may be expensive to enter because the electricity bills for ventillation and lighting are high.
The bunker was known to the locals pretty early in its history. My contact Ed in this area told me that a local builder was employed to work on it, and in spite of signing the official secrets act, he told his son about it and his son told everyone at school. This is what happens when you hire people in white vans. Nowadays Ed is a DJ at discos in the bunker, and it's a decent place for a rave: the music isn't going to disturb anyone next door as the three metre concrete walls provide sound insulation, and the canteen can be turned into a bar easily enough. The "beats from the bunker" event seems to be held annually, and attracts a few hundred people.
The nuclear bomb was a major Allied project of WWII, and over a hundred thousand people worked on it. Since Britain was threatened by invasion and aerial attack, the obvious place to site the project, called project Manhattan, was the USA, and the first test nuclear detonation occurred in July 1945, according to official history. (However there is a theory that the US Government tested the N-bomb on a US Naval base before this, and then blamed the explosion on other things.) In early August there was Hiroshima then Nagasaki and the nuclear age had begun. Both those bombs were small N-bombs, equivalent to approx 15Kt of TNT. I'm going off-topic, but it is debatable whether it was necessary to have this pair of nuclear bombings, as the military situation for Japan was hopeless, and they were probably getting ready to quit fighting anyway.
The Russians managed their first nuclear bomb in 1949, and it is suspicious how they managed to develop it so quickly, it's pretty clear that their spy network gave them insights into the techniques used by the Allies. The Berlin Wall was a relatively late item in the Cold War, being erected in 1961, and in actual fact the Cold War began with the Berlin Air lift of June 1948, when the Russians tried to drive the allies out of west Berlin by blockading their zone of the city. Hiroshima was a tiny nuclear explosion in the grand scheme of things, and by 1955 both the sides of the Cold War had developed 1Mt H-bombs which were 80 times more powerful.
At the start of the cold war, then, Britain established a line of radar stations down the east coast to detect Russian bombers. This project was called "rotar" and each station had a range of around ?100 miles. The more important stations had nuclear bunkers. This site was considered important because it was close to the RAF base ten miles north at Leuchars, and the Royal Navy dockyard at Rosyth on the north side of the Forth opposite Edinburgh. Throughout the cold war, Leuchars had warplanes in a special hanger, probably both nuclear bombers and fighters, that were fully armed and ready to fly. These were known as the "quick reaction alert force". They could be scrambled and into the air in a matter of minutes as part of a military response.
The thinking behind this probably runs like this: if the Russians were to attack Britain, they would initally launch nuclear missiles to destroy military targets, especially air-bases. This would help to prevent nuclear retaliation, and allow their bomber-planes to fly over Britain. Leuchars, then, would be one of the first things to be destroyed in any nuclear exchange.
It seems that there were daily incursions of UK airspace throughout the Cold War by Russian planes such as the Bear or the Bison, and fighters were often scrambled to scare them away.
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The building of the bunker, of type R3, began in 1951, and the scale of the project is exemplified by the fact that it took two years to complete. Firstly a big hole was dug in the ground, 38 metres deep, and several tons of gravel emptied into it. Then a framework of inch-thick tungsten rods was made, and 3m-thick concrete walls were set around these. The whole structure was coated in pitch, probably to provide protection from radioactive water, and then the excavated earth was replaced into the hole, covering the bunker. A replica farmhouse was built over the entrance to the bunker, which is very convincing and you can bicycle past it without any knowledge that it hides an underground bunker. This is the kind of secret base that you see in James Bond films, and it's fantastic to visit one and realize that they aren't just figments of an author's imagination.
The station was in use for three years before advances in radar technology made it obsolete, and it was mothballed in 1956.
From 1958 to 1968 the Royal Observer Corps had a base here. The Royal Observer Corps were busy during WWII watching for enemy planes in the skies over Britain, and relaying that information to RAF control centres. During the cold war they were trained to monitor nuclear blasts and subsequent radiation levels.
Probably everyone knows this, but the aftereffect of a nuclear explosion near the ground is a big cloud of radioactive dust, which usually travels hundreds of miles on the wind, and rains radioactive material called fallout in a belt ten miles wide as it travels. Air-burst nuclear explosions, by contrast, produce little fallout. It is surprising that the fallout is dangerous for quite a short time. Some of the half-lives of radioactive material are thousands of years, but the fallout seems to have quite a short half-life. It is extremely dangerous in the days after the blast, and this necessitates residing in a radiation-proof shelter, but after a fortnight it seems you can walk around outside again.
The Royal Observer Corps (ROC) created a network of small one-person bunkers throughout Scotland, each one sized 7ft x 16ft x 7ft in size. One of these would be ~6m underground, and reached by a ladder down a concrete shaft. It had its own independent source of electricity, ventillation, sanitation, food and water, and communications. Each one was equipped with a suite of monitoring devices: an ionisation chamber to measure ambient radiation levels, a set of pin-hole cameras to record the position of any nuclear bursts called a "ground zero indicator", and a blast-meter to measure the peak overpressure caused by the burst. I expect these recording stations would be sited close to any likely targets such as cities, but they would also be sited in rural locations in order to monitor the path of fallout.
In 1970, the shelter was refurbished and it became the "Central Government HQ for Scotland". In the event of a nuclear war, the Minister and Secretary of State for Scotland would be flown here from Edinburgh, thirty miles away on the other side of the Forth, and they would continue office from their underground location.
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The bunker is pretty big as bunkers go. You can wander around and look at the various rooms, which have been refitted to reflect the state of the bunker in various stages of its life. To enter the bunker, you enter the normal-looking but cleverly reinforced farmhouse, and descend a flight of steps to the basement. There you'll find the tunnel leading to the bunker entrance.
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It's ~100m long, and at the end there's a 90 degree bend, and then a right-angle turn to the main entrance to the bunker, which is closed by a pair of half-inch steel plate doors. The engineering of this entrance is deliberate and remarkable (todo diagram). The blast from a nuclear burst would pass down the tunnel, probably attenuating on the way down, and focusing its direction forwards rather than to the sides. It would lose energy in passing the first bend, and would go past the bunker doors, bounce off the end of the tunnel and return the way it came. The only thing that would concern me is that it would leave lots of radioactive dust in the tunnel.
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The bunker contains rooms like these:
- Two dormitories, one male, one female
Each dorm contained 16 bunk beds. Thus the basic staff of the bunker was 64 people. I think it's reasonable to suppose that the bunker would support ~100 people, although the exhibition claims that it would house 250: a claim that I disbelieve.
- Doctor's surgery
Inevitably there would be casualties to be cared for at some time. There isn't any cure for a radiation overdose.
- Armoury
This room contained guns; I expect they would be used against Scottish people: marauders of the post-nuclear landscape and not Russians.
- Meeting Rooms
I expect some pretty major decisions would be made in the meeting rooms, such as what to launch at the USSR and so forth.
- two cinemas, a lecture room and a theatre
There would be lots of briefings and special missions to be described by the high-ranking officers. The staff of the bunker would have included scientific advisers and meteorological experts to predict the weather and path of fallout.
- Central Plant room
This contained air-conditioning and heating units, the bunker had to be able to filter fallout dust from the outside air for a minimum of one month.
- Canteen
The bunker has its own water-supply from an underground spring.
Apparently they had the idea that the genders should be segregated in the canteen. I can't help but wonder if there's a bit of Noah's ark thinking to it.
- broadcast studio
Yes, the bunker had its own broadcast studio. I'm not quite sure what they intended to do for an aerial since no-one could go outside to erect one. Nevertheless the idea was that there would be radio broadcasts containing war news, official announcements, survival advice, fallout warnings and so forth. The BBC had a plan to establish the Wartime Broadcast Service (WTBS). I suspect the broadcast equipment had to avoid using transistors and microelectronics as these would be burnt by the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear burst.
An original recording of a war-information bulletin was playing, and it was informing the listener what the attack warning / fallout warning / all-clear would sound like. What fun!
- Storage Warehouse
The third floor was a general warehouse. It would have stored a ton of dried and tinned food, although I doubt frozen food, unless that was a later addition: the freezers would have been difficult to operate.
- Switchboard room
Dating from an early part of its life, this was the communications centre of the radar base.
The Switchboard room (1950's)- Radar monitoring room
In the Rotor phase of its life, the bunker was a radar base.
The Radar screens
In one of the cinemas one of those 1970's public information films was playing. It told you how to create a fallout shelter in your house. It told you to have a load of food and water in buckets, and that you should barricade your windows and walls with sandbags full of earth, as the gamma radiation from fallout can penetrate several metres of concrete. Indeed, if you think about it the average brick terraced house of Britain offers almost no protection against the layer of fallout dust that would collect on the roof and the ground outside. You really need to be underground.