The night before catching the train to Suffolk I got out the maps to do some homework. The relevant Ordnance Survey Explorer map, ‘Woodbridge & Saxmundham’, wasn’t much help. It showed Orford Ness – the focus of the next day’s investigations – as an innocuous sliver of land and shingle clinging to a bend in the North Sea coastline below Aldeburgh. The symbols of wading bird and boot print indicated that it is a nature reserve with walking trails. Nothing about the secret stuff. But I knew it was there.
Anyone who has worked within the British defence establishment – and I occupied the very highest political office as Defence Secretary – has heard stories about Orford Ness. It is purely a place of recreation now. But over many decades, away from prying eyes, highly classified military research and experimentation took place there that involved the testing of parachutes, night flying, aerial photography, bomb aiming, early work with radar and the development of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. That much is certain. But there are many rumours and unanswered questions concerning the precise nature of this work and the potential danger it may have posed to the general public.
Its legacy is a series of bizarre structures built to accommodate the highly specialized procedures that went on within them – and in some cases to contain the fallout of those procedures should anything go wrong. These buildings have names straight out of science fiction: the Pagodas, Black Beacon, Cobra Mist. But there was no sign of them on the OS map. I had more luck, however, when I opened my laptop and called up satellite imagery of Orford Ness. Cameras orbiting 370 miles above the Earth do not lie. I zoomed in on the beach, clicked on a couple of blocky-looking structures near the white foam of the water’s edge and a window obligingly popped up to tell me I’d found the Pagodas.
The Official Secrets Act still governs much of what took place at Orford Ness. The MoD, my old stomping ground, remains tight-lipped. This is our ‘Area 51’, the code name for the top-secret facility in the Nevada Desert where the United States Air Force carries out its so-called ‘black projects’ – highly classified military research – and whose existence is officially denied by the US government. But thanks to new technology and old hands – former operatives who are willing to talk – Orford Ness is now beginning to slow-release its secrets.
My journey the next morning took me into the heart of the hidden state. My mission was to sift rumour from fact and in the process answer this question: if you found out what is really being done in the name of national security, would you feel safer?
The gateway to Orford Ness is the village of Orford, a village richly deserving of the epithet ‘quintessentially English’. It has a Norman castle, a Grade I-listed medieval church (both commended by the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner) and a rather fine seafood restaurant, the Butley Orford Oysterage, that I used to visit when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I walked down to the village quay on the north bank of the river and caught a little ferry that took me past bobbing yachts to drop me on the far bank. It’s a short crossing – barely two minutes – but it links worlds so disparate they seem oceans apart.
The landscape of Orford Ness can lay claim to being among the weirdest in Britain. It was not – or not just – the bleak vista of shingle, scrub and marsh that unsettled me. Seen in reality, as opposed to satellite imagery, the structures scattered across the Ness – pagodas, pavilions, bunkers, towers and concrete groundworks – had a truly surreal and sinister air. It was as if a giant had rummaged in a toy box and tipped out a jumble of apparently arbitrary concrete shapes. And here they sat, on the very edge of things, defying logic as well as the elements.
What struck me too, standing on the brink and seeing it for the first time, was the sheer size and scale of the site. The installations at Orford Ness were, and remain, visible from the everyday world beyond the north bank of the river. The personnel required to build, service and maintain the infrastructure, and conduct the experimental research that was its raison d’être, would have been plain for all to see as they came and went. Yet, to this day (and unlike, say, in the case of Bletchley Park), very little is known of what the people who worked here actually did or what the buildings were for.
Orford Ness is a spit of shingle and marsh measuring some 10 miles long by just over a mile at its widest point and occupying more than 1,900 acres. It was acquired by the War Office in 1914, immediately before the outbreak of the First World War, as a remote site ideally suited to the purpose of carrying out experimental military work. For the next sixty years this windswept expanse bore mute witness to audacious developments in weaponry and espionage until operations ceased in 1973.
The irony is that a place once associated with geopolitical conflict is now a nature reserve, owned by the National Trust since 1993. Instead of barbed wire and guard dogs it has wildlife-rich habitats that are home to brown hares, Chinese water deer, marsh harriers, and rare flora such as the yellow-horned poppy and sea aster. It is an eerily beautiful place, mysterious and peaceful. But I succumbed to the pull of the strangest and most sinister-looking of all the structures: an aircraft-hangar-sized, windowless metal box on stilts, dominating a remote site in the north of Orford Ness. On the way there I was careful to heed the signs warning of ‘Unexploded ordnance’ and keep to the path that winds through salt marsh and lagoons – both the Ness itself and the seabed that borders it are known to be littered with live bombs that failed to detonate in the course of decades of testing programmes.
The metal box is called Cobra Mist. It stands some 70 feet high, is built on piles that are sunk 90 feet into the marsh and occupies 40,000 square feet over two floors – a behemoth of a building that could have been a human outpost on Mars. According to local rumour it was a tracking station for Unidentified Flying Objects, perhaps because Rendlesham Forest, where UFOs were allegedly spotted in 1980, is not far away (though this theory is undermined by the fact that Cobra Mist had ceased functioning by then). One might spend hours poking around this enigmatic edifice and be none the wiser as to its former function.
The personnel who worked here stuck to their allotted tasks and were sworn to secrecy. They were careful not to ask too many questions about what was happening in other parts of the operation, and learned to rebuff any queries pertaining to their own area of expertise. So it was and still is well-nigh impossible, even by talking to people who were directly involved with the classified projects that took place here, to build a truly comprehensive picture of what had gone on. The first person I’d arranged to meet could vouch for that. Roger Darlington was a twenty-two-year-old civilian, from Chorley in Lancashire, when he started work at Cobra Mist in 1971. After gaining a degree-level qualification in electronic engineering at Bolton Institute of Technology, he successfully applied for the post of ‘signal processing technician’ and was required to sign the Official Secrets Act. It was his first job.
‘You had to be secretive,’ he said, as he greeted me at the entrance and led me through a clanking metal door into the dark and cavernous interior of Cobra Mist. ‘What you did, what you said, who you talked to. You were pressurized to be careful.’ He showed me a photograph of his youthful self, with long dark hair and beard – a hirsuteness that he said singled him out as an ‘oddball’ among all the military crew cuts. There were three levels of security clearance at Cobra Mist – white (the lowest), red and green. Roger had red clearance, which allowed him access to high-security areas but barred him from green zones, which were confined to intelligence officers. ‘Obviously when you were away from the base the natural question would be, “What do you do?” The answer that everybody was told to give was that the base was an experimental radio station. What I told everybody was that I swept up here. It was the easiest way.’
Inside, Cobra Mist is a disorientating mixture of huge open spaces and isolated rooms (100 in total, apparently, though I didn’t count), of corridors, stairways and steel doors. As we penetrated its now empty corners with the beams of our torches, Roger explained that the tin-box design was a ‘Faraday cage’ – that is to say, its metal skin protected it from electronic surveillance. What happened here was not only top secret, it was sensitive to outside interference. He led me up a metal staircase to the first floor and ushered me through a door marked ‘Conference Room’ where he recalled being shown the espionage equivalent of health-education films, warning against the dangers of Soviet ‘honeytraps’ – or, as Roger puts it, ‘basically, how Natasha could put you in a very compromising situation’.
Honeytraps were strategies involving attractive individuals whose mission was to lure the enemy into sexual behaviour that could lead to them being blackmailed for valuable intelligence information. They were commonly deployed by the Soviets during the Cold War, the name used for the ideological stand-off between East and West that existed from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This period was characterized by the mutual threat of nuclear Armageddon. And although nuclear-weapons testing, principally by the United States and the Soviet Union, had peaked by the time Roger had started work at Cobra Mist, each side possessed many thousands of nuclear warheads, trained on each other’s key installations and cities.
Those tasked with the defence of their respective realms were in a perpetual state of hyper-vigilance and the Soviets were particularly adept at exploiting their adversaries’ weak spots. In the case of John Vassall, a civil servant who worked at the British Embassy in Moscow in the 1950s, it wasn’t Natasha but Dimitriy (and Vasily and Pasha) who proved his undoing. Plied with drink and photographed in compromising situations with several men, he was blackmailed into spying for the KGB and over seven years, until his arrest in London in 1962, passed on thousands of classified documents, containing information on, inter alia, Royal Navy radar and torpedoes.
This case was very much in the news at the time Roger was working at Orford Ness, as Vassall was released from jail in 1972. It was a cloak-and-dagger world and this building is still redolent of such times. I noticed, for example, that the Conference Room we were standing in had curtains – which struck me as strange as there were no windows visible from the outside. ‘Curtains, yes,’ said Roger, grinning. When I swept one of the curtains back there was just bare wall behind.
So what did Roger Darlington really do here? And what was the wider function of Cobra Mist? He told me that the highly classified project he was encouraged to think of as ‘an experimental radio base’ was in fact a new weapon in the Cold War. Cobra Mist was an Over The Horizon (OTH) radar system – that is to say a system that bounced radio waves off the ionosphere in order to ‘see’ over the horizon. In this way it could detect targets such as missiles at extremely long ranges, up to 2,000 miles away, in order to provide early warning of a possible attack. Conceived, financed and operated largely by the US government (with some input from the MoD and civilian technicians such as Roger), it was meant to keep tabs on missile launches in the Eastern Bloc. The Faraday cage we were standing in was not the half of it.
Roger, who was amazed to see birdwatchers on Orford Ness when he remembered the place crawling with security men with ‘big dogs and big guns’, took me outside, to the northeast side of the building. In front of us was marshland. Beyond that the North Sea – and many miles beyond that the heartlands of the former Soviet Union. But look closely, he said. There were still tracks on the ground, and concrete groundworks, that indicated a vast installation once stood here. ‘It was like a third of a circle, a big fan,’ he said. ‘It was made of eighteen lines of radio antennae which were each two thousand two hundred feet long. The antennae were a hundred feet tall, up to one hundred and eighty feet tall – different heights all the way down in a logarithmic curve.’
This forest of masts, known as an ‘array’, was removed in the 1970s but the sheer physical presence of such a colossal complex, occupying 130 acres, raised questions among puzzled locals – which Roger was careful to deflect when he drank in the pubs of Orford village. It was the potential data provided by this array – the most powerful radar of its kind at that time, according to the Pentagon – that the Americans and British were so keen to acquire and analyse. And this was what Roger was trained to do, in a ‘high-security receiving station’ that was, he said, ‘another “Faraday Cage” within the building itself’.
We returned to the building and he took me to another room on the first floor which he said was the operations centre. Fibre-optic cables were laid with the capacity to feed in vast amounts of data which would be displayed on screens. The room has a glassed-off partition along one side where, said Roger, ‘all the colonels could sit up and watch what was happening. At the back of the room was a huge map of the arc of the antennae showing all the strategic points. The central aiming point was mid-Russia.’
Inevitably, given the level of activity around Orford Ness and the intriguing nature of the structures taking shape, the media began to show undue interest in this ‘experimental radio station’. In May 1971 the Daily Express ran a piece by the investigative reporter Chapman Pincher headlined ‘CIA in Britain row’, in which he wrote that ‘left-wing Labour MPs feared “the base may now give the Russians another possible target in Britain”’. This was a hugely controversial subject at the time as the UK was a prominent member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the alliance of Western nations in ideological and military opposition to the Eastern Bloc, and had US nuclear weapons based on its soil as well as an independent nuclear capability, all of which put it directly in the firing line should the Cold War escalate into military conflict. In the early 1970s the UK government drew up a top-secret list of more than 100 sites that it believed would be vulnerable to attack. On the list were air and naval bases, radar installations – and (proving those ‘left-wing labour MPs’ right) Cobra Mist on Orford Ness.
But the Cobra Mist project was not going to plan. There was talk of it being too susceptible to what Roger referred to as ‘noise problems’ – radio interference, or deliberate jamming. This was a common Soviet tactic in the Cold War era and Roger was only half-joking when he referred to rumoured sightings in the seas off Suffolk of ‘Russian trawlers that didn’t fish and had a lot of antennae on them’. A joint American–British team of experts was convened to get to the bottom of the ‘noise problems’ but failed to do so. Then, one Friday, Roger was told not to come in to work the following Monday. ‘It was very, very abrupt,’ he said. ‘All of a sudden your job’s gone.’
Cobra Mist officially closed down in the summer of 1973. The hardware was dismantled, the personnel redeployed or, like Roger, simply laid off. A huge amount of investment – estimated at $1 billion in today’s money – and effort had been expended. For what? Was Cobra Mist a billion-dollar mistake? A Suffolk white elephant? No definitive explanation has ever been forthcoming for the scrapping of this supposedly cutting-edge surveillance installation.
Perhaps Cobra Mist was deemed uneconomic. It was also, you could argue, as much a part of the arms race as the missiles and bombs, and as such would have been in breach of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) nuclear non-proliferation treaties of the early 1970s – which may have made the authorities increasingly nervous about proceeding to full operational capacity. In the end, the project code-named Cobra Mist concluded as mysteriously as it had begun – without tracking a single Soviet missile, or indeed becoming a target of Soviet firepower.
Cobra Mist was the final chapter in Orford Ness’s history as a site of highly classified military experimentation. As I walked back into the middle of Orford Ness I was looking out for buildings associated with the very dawn of radar technology. I had in my bag a painstakingly researched document entitled Atomic Weapons Research Establishment – Archaeological Survey and Investigation. Produced by experts at English Heritage, a body responsible for Britain’s historic buildings and sites, who mapped and examined practically every inch of Orford Ness, it proved an invaluable crib sheet to the site on the day I visited.
Though the report refers principally to the tenure of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) here after the Second World War – a period I shall come to presently – it also covers activities that took place from the time the War Office acquired it at the beginning of the First World War. I was looking for the ‘Street’, a line of buildings connected with the airfield built by the Royal Flying Corps, the forerunner of the Royal Air Force, in 1914. There are just two buildings left intact now, single-storey huts at the south-west end of the ‘Street’, whose nondescript appearance belied what went on within. For, on 13 May 1935, the huts were taken over by a select group of scientists who became known as ‘the Islanders’. And what they proceeded to achieve here changed the parameters of modern warfare and almost certainly saved Britain’s bacon in the Second World War.
If the code name Cobra Mist smacks of Cold War paranoia and Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film Dr Strangelove, the interwar project with the code name ‘RDF’ is straight out of the Flash Gordon movies of the mid-to-late 1930s. As that decade progressed the defence establishment in Britain became increasingly concerned by the scale of German militarization, and in particular the threat to the civilian population posed by aerial bombardment, should hostilities break out. Fears were further stoked by rumours that the Nazis were developing a so-called ‘death ray’, some sort of particle-beam weapon that could be used to bring down enemy aircraft (Ming the Merciless, Flash Gordon’s sworn enemy, had just such a weapon in his considerable toolkit).
In 1934 the Air Ministry actually offered a prize of £1,000 to anyone who could develop a system of directed radio waves capable of killing a sheep at 100 yards. Unsurprisingly nothing came of this, but the fantasy that it might be possible was to set a hare running that culminated in one of the most important military–technological developments of the twentieth century. The scientist principally responsible was Dr Robert Watson-Watt, then superintendent of a department of the National Physical Laboratory near Slough.
Watson-Watt gave the death-ray idea short shrift, but he did believe in the feasibility of bouncing radio waves off enemy aircraft in order to detect – as opposed to destroy – them. After an initial trial in Northamptonshire, in which Watson-Watt and his assistant Arnold Wilkins succeeded in obtaining a signal from an overflying RAF bomber, in the spring of 1935 they moved operations to those two huts in the secretive setting of Orford Ness.
Here and at Bawdsey, a short distance down the Suffolk coast, they developed a system originally given the deliberately vague acronym RDF (for Range and Direction Finding or Radio Direction Finding) and subsequently known to the world as radar – the transmission of radio waves that reflect off targets and return signals revealing the location of those targets. By the time that Britain declared war on Germany, on 3 September 1939, a network of radar stations known as Chain Home was operational along much of the south and east coasts of Britain.
Capable of detecting enemy aircraft as they approached home airspace, Chain Home proved decisive in the Battle of Britain, which was conducted in the skies mainly over southern England by the RAF and the Luftwaffe between July and October 1940. As German bombers and their fighter escorts crossed the coast in waves, British Spitfires and Hurricanes had already been scrambled to meet them thanks to the early warnings provided by Chain Home.
Amid the wild and remote surroundings of Orford Ness I paused to reflect that the story of radar is a classic case of British muddle coming up trumps. The country may, notoriously, have underinvested in rearmament during the 1930s, but hidden away in odd, windswept corners geniuses like Watson-Watt and Wilkins were giving us the edge in less conventional ways. (Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bombs dropped in the Dambusters Raid of 1943, was in the same mould.) When Winston Churchill concluded, famously, of the Battle of Britain that ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’, he was referring to those brave fighter pilots who fought off the Nazi foe. But they couldn’t have succeeded without the unsung heroes of Orford Ness and other secret establishments who had had a vision and made it a reality.
The cessation of hostilities in 1945 did not, however, signal the end of military innovation. As the ‘hot’ war against Nazi Germany and the Axis powers gave way to the Cold War against the Soviet Bloc, the need for individuals capable of thinking ‘outside the box’ was as great as ever. From the old radar huts on the Street I walked due south, crossing the watercourse known as Stony Ditch, into the nuclear age. And it did look appropriately apocalyptic. I was now on the shingle beach and it was scattered with an extraordinary collection of vast buildings that dwarf the human form. This could easily be a film set, standing in for a distant and inhospitable planet. And the work that took place here, driven by scientists of courage and ingenuity, was hardly less amazing or disturbing.
Twenty years ago, as the Defence Secretary in John Major’s government, I was happy to make the argument that nuclear weapons were vital for our national security. They enabled us to retain a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and play a vital part in the NATO alliance, which was dedicated to providing collective military protection in the event of Soviet attack.
The Soviet Union had finally collapsed in 1991, at least partly due to NATO’s unrelenting commitment to hard defence and maintaining military capabilities, including the nuclear option. It was certainly not the time to relax our nuclear vigilance. But I didn’t spend much time thinking about the work required to devise and maintain such apocalyptic armaments. Indeed I had only a hazy idea of where and how our nuclear capability had come about. Now I found myself standing in the very crucible of this weapon to end all weapons, the place where nuclear bombs bearing cryptic names such as Blue Danube, Red Beard and Yellow Sun were, literally, tested to destruction.
The complex of structures surrounding me were where the testing took place. They were built and used between the mid-1950s and early 1970s by the AWRE, the government body in charge of Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. And after the AWRE ceased operations in 1971 they were dismantled, reduced for the most part to a jumble of concrete and steel that lies littered like the pieces of a fiendish jigsaw puzzle.
I had arranged to meet the National Trust archaeologist Angus Wainwright here on the shingle. He was a key figure for me, having spent decades trying to solve the riddle of this place. I noticed he couldn’t help smiling at my expression of bafflement as I gazed around from pagodas to towers to bunkers. But he admitted that even he was left guessing by certain structures and pieces of hardware. ‘Really the key to understanding [Orford Ness] is the people who worked here,’ he told me. ‘The trouble is, on a site like this, which is very secret, if you didn’t work in a particular building you would know nothing.’ He also pointed out that the buildings were decommissioned in such a way as to make it difficult to make sense of them afterwards. ‘Often I can be dealing with a site that is hundreds of years old and I’ll know more about it than [the much more recent archaeology] here,’ he said.
He took me into ‘Laboratory 3’, made of reinforced concrete, semi-submerged in the shingle, with a barrel-vaulted roof. ‘This one has a few clues in it because you can see the insulation everywhere,’ he said. ‘This is the lab where they were heating up or cooling down bombs.’ Angus told me that the AWRE research conducted here had two elements: testing the ballistics of bombs (the accuracy with which they flew after being dropped), which involved the dropping of dummy bombs from aircraft over the North Sea and on Orford Ness’s own bombing range; and testing the ‘safety’ and reliability of bombs by subjecting them to various strains and stresses – including extremes of temperature – so that when the day came for them to be dropped on Kiev or Moscow or Leningrad they would go off faultlessly. This testing was known, with typical insouciance, as ‘shake, rattle and roll’.
On 3 October 1952, Britain had become the world’s third nuclear power, after the USA and the USSR, when her first nuclear device was successfully tested in the Monte Bello Islands, off Western Australia. Three years later a dummy of the first operational nuclear bomb, Blue Danube, was tested at Orford Ness. Among the aeronautical engineers who worked on the Blue Danube project was Professor John Allen, now ninety-five. Professor Allen, a modest man, is one of the cleverest scientists of his generation and it was a particular privilege to meet this rare survivor of a pioneering age among the buildings where he and his team carried out their dangerous but vital work.
‘I was called to a secret meeting and I was told that they wanted me to be a leader in the design and the ballistics of our atom bomb which was called Blue Danube,’ he told me. He described ‘a fine collaborative spirit’ among the scientists, engineers and ‘oddballs’ involved. ‘We realized we were pioneering dangerous “beasties”, but although some people called them weapons of mass destruction I’ve always only seen them as deterrents.’
The bombs which were dropped over Orford Ness were dummies. ‘But they had the right shape, the right size, all the right equipment,’ explained Professor Allen. ‘Orford Ness’s job was to track not only the flight of the bomb itself but how it left the aircraft, and that was a terribly difficult thing to get right.’ There was plenty of scope for error and on one occasion, he admitted, a bomb was dropped by mistake and landed in someone’s back garden. ‘Not a thing you would welcome and I’m not sure their insurance would have covered it,’ he said, wryly.
Blue Danube had an explosive yield roughly equivalent to the atomic bombs dropped by the Americans on Japan at the end of the Second World War. By the chilling logic of the arms race, however, it wasn’t ‘enough’ to have bombs that could flatten entire cities, as had happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In the battle to stay ahead of our enemies we were developing a weapons system that was a thousand times more powerful: the hydrogen or H-bomb.
In 1963 an eighteen-year-old school leaver from Ipswich found himself pitched into the very heart of this project. Les Barton was my final witness and it was his task to show me the buildings that, above all others, captured my imagination on Orford Ness: the Pagodas, otherwise known as the Vibration Test Buildings. From the outside, the raised roofs gave them the appearance of ancient temples. They were similar in design so we chose just one to enter. And as he led me through the entrance passage and into the central cell we fell silent, necks craning, taking in a design of obvious purpose and austere grandeur.
Built in 1960 for the testing of weapons of fearsome power, the Pagodas are reinforced concrete chambers measuring 54 feet by 24 feet, covered by massive concrete roofs raised clear of the walls on sixteen concrete columns. Beneath our feet the floor of the one we entered was covered in parallel steel beams. The overall design, said Les, was geared to absorbing an explosion in the event of an accident. Not only are the walls immensely thick and strong but the roof stands proud of the walls for a reason: ‘If a serious bang ever did occur the columns were designed to fall away and the roof of the pagoda was intended to plummet into where we are now, in the base of the building, to contain what was happening.’
So what on earth went on here? Before we got to that, Les explained how a ‘callow youth’ with qualifications in physics and chemistry found himself at the centre of the AWRE’s research into the latest weapons technology. ‘I was working in a chemistry lab, which was not particularly thrilling, when my grandfather saw an advert in the Ipswich Star,’ he told me. He was interviewed by a government panel of ‘three or four guys’ and the next thing he knew ‘a bloke with a bowler hat and a moustache – a James Bond caricature – showed up unannounced in Ipswich’ to carry out security vetting by talking to his parents and employers. ‘Obviously I passed,’ he said.
Les was assigned to a team that subjected atomic and hydrogen bombs to extreme environmental pressures. ‘In order to make the weapons rugged enough to get to where they were supposed to go, and not blow up in the meantime, they would undergo the most extreme stress – vibration, thermal shock, centrifuge,’ he said. In the Pagodas they were, among other things, tested for their ability to withstand the accidental detonation of 400 pounds of high explosives.
The size and strength of the Pagoda was beginning to make sense. Les now made what to me was an extraordinary claim that on occasion the bombs being tested contained both high explosives and fissile material (i.e. elements capable of sustaining a nuclear reaction). But he discounted the possibility that a catastrophe could have occurred if any of the testing procedures had gone wrong. ‘There was never any danger of a nuclear explosion because although the weapons were fully charged they were not able to be triggered. The worst that could have happened was that if the weapon had ruptured there was a possibility of leakage of radioactive material.’ He seemed pretty sanguine on this point but I could feel my eyebrows shooting up and staying there. This wasn’t just highly classified work, it was also mortally dangerous, especially with a centre of civilian population (Orford village) being so close and London just 100 miles away.
Teenagers nowadays may find it hard to believe that the young Les Barton would embrace nuclear weapons so enthusiastically. After all, while he was risking his life at Orford Ness, Bob Dylan was singing anti-war songs such as ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and many of Les’s peers were marching on AWRE’s main site at Aldermaston in Berkshire with ‘Ban the Bomb’ placards. But Les comes from a family that has suffered the effects of warfare in the twentieth century as much as any. His grandfather almost died at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915–16, his grandmother’s brother went down with HMS Hood when it was sunk by the German battleship Bismarck in 1941 and his uncle returned from the Second World War both deaf and shell-shocked. These family traumas shaped his thinking and made him acutely aware that ‘there were people out there that wanted to kill us if we didn’t stop them’.
In particular, of course, the Soviet Union. In 1962, the year before Les started work at Orford Ness, the world came as close as it has ever been to all-out nuclear war when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the US president John F. Kennedy faced each other down over the Cuban Missile Crisis (an event I cover in detail in subsequent chapters). ‘The attitude here was that what we were doing was very important,’ Les recalls. ‘It was not a distasteful thing, to work on an atom bomb.’
More than half a century on, the world faces threats of a different order. The bombs and rumours have disappeared from this sliver of Suffolk. Visitors train their binoculars on migrating birds, not flying ordnance. Orford Ness seems, at first sight, a million miles from the archetypal English village with which it shares a name. But the two are inextricably linked, and not just by the ferry. Travelling back to ‘normality’ on that little vessel, it struck me that the people who worked at Orford Ness – and continue to staff similar facilities elsewhere – did so in order that little Orford village, and the Britain that lies beyond it, could remain free to lead the largely tranquil and civilized life we have led on these shores since the last time we suffered invasion, a thousand years ago.
A thought still bugged me, however. How close did we come to a possibly catastrophic accident at Orford Ness? A stray bomb, a radiation leak? Perhaps the answer is that we’d rather not know. We pay other people to worry about such things, and to live with the knowledge of what could go wrong. As Defence Secretary I was in such a position for two years and I admit I carry secrets that I will never divulge. But this responsibility was only temporary. The burden was lifted from my shoulders as it is lifted from all serving politicians when they leave office. The people who really feel its weight and often can’t even share it with those closest to them, are the people like Roger Darlington, Professor John Allen and Les Barton who worked at the coalface with little reward or acknowledgement.
Britain’s defence policy during the Cold War may have been shaped by politicians, but it was implemented and maintained by the scientists and engineers – the boffins – of places like Orford Ness. This hinterland of shingle and marsh became a testing ground for the technology that kept us safe in the face of the most destructive military capability the world has seen. There is no memorial on Orford Ness to the men and women who worked there. They will have to make do with its strange, bleak beauty. As Professor Allen told me, ‘You don’t get Nobel Prizes for this, but it has to be done.’