We went on a tour of the Secret Nuclear Bunker. Shhhhhh! Don't tell anyone! We found it by cleverly following the signs
for the Secret Nuclear Bunker.
There are a series of bunkers, built in the early 1950s, which were designed to keep a minimal level of the government functioning
in the event of nuclear war. This bunker was three stories tall, all underground, buried under a farmer's field at Kelvedon Hatch. It had facilities for
communications, a BBC Radio studio for telling the populace what parts of the country no longer existed, a Map Room to plot where the
bombs were falling, an office for the Prime Minister, and dorms, sick-bay, etc. It could house 600 people, though there were only
200 beds.
Considering it was only decommissioned in 1994, it was all pretty eerie. The guy working there had worked on the fields of the farm above, and had
no idea there was a huge military installation under his feet until it got turned into a tourist attraction.
Since the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the risk is much more a single terrorist nuke in a suitcase rather than carpet-bombing the
whole country with nukes, the expense of keeping the bunkers running no longer made sense, and the government just sold them off. They now
operate as little for-profit museums.
Follow the traffic sign for the "Secret Nuclear Bunker."
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From the outside it just looks like a somewhat run-down farmhouse.
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You go down a long, easily defended tunnel to get in.
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There is still an amateur (HAM) radio station running.
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The extensive phone exchange. The assumption was that radio would be wiped out; only
deeply buried land-lines would survive.
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Much of the communication would be by teletype.
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They had two modern phone operator positions.
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And three of the old cord-board positions.
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State-of-the-art computer message-passing equipment, now 20 years obsolete.
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A one-inch Video Tape Recorder...I used to use one almost exactly like this in High School,
and it was obsolete then.
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More phone positions.
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I'm not sure the real bunker had a Commodore PET 64.
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More recent terminals like this were more likely.
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Flash glaring off the safety glass.
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Inside the radio studio, they've got a dummy wearing a Margaret Thatcher mask telling everyone to stay calm.
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The radio console.
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A reel-to-reel audio tape deck.
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Equipment for trying to determine the yield of the bombs being dropped.
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A mock-up of little underground rooms that two observers would be locked into for several months,
with sensors to the surface to try to detect bomb flashes and count radiation.
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Scrubbing filters to insure the purity of the air.
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The air conditioning compressors....they were BIG.
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An Apple ][ again...what is it with museums and Apples?
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The Prime Minister's office and sleeping quarters.
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Getting towards the main area that would be used to run the government.
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The DECwriter on the end is like a model I used in High School...it could print 120 characters per second! Woo hoo!
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Kaleigh next to the anti-radiation suits.
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The big central room that would be used to coordinate whatever remained of the civilian government.
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A blackboard spells out the effects of increasing radiation exposure.
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Dianne and Kaleigh dressed up as Civil Defence workers.
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They both commented, "Boy! Those are hot to wear!"
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A mini-computer. Probably a tenth the power of my laptop, if that, and it's bigger than a bathtub.
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Geiger counters stacked waiting to be used.
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A crane could haul things up the central stairway.
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The dorms were very cramped.
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Sick bay was a bit primitive. They didn't have a lot of options.
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They used cardboard coffins...easier to store.
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I love the government-issue toilet paper that says "USE BOTH SIDES."
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From her expression, Kaleigh isn't ready to sign up as a Bunker Girl.
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For 40 years, this tower was the only surface indication that there was anything else here.
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But as this sign shows, the times are a-changin'.
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