In October 1962 I was nine years old. I did not understand the geopolitical complexities of the Cold War. But I knew what it was to be terrified by the threat of nuclear annihilation. In the second half of that month the military and political stand-off known as the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to catastrophe than at any time before or since. I shall come to the details of that event later (in both this chapter and the following, on the Foxtrot-class Soviet submarine) but for now I wish to fix in your mind the sheer scale of the fear that gripped ordinary people – my own family included. I remember vividly how my parents stayed glued to the radio and television with a growing sense of helplessness and disbelief.
What none of us was aware of then was that had the worst happened, the government of the United Kingdom had a plan. In this chapter I pass a sceptical eye over that plan – to borrow a catchphrase from a certain television comedy series, just how ‘cunning’ was it? My investigation took me to my old stomping ground of Cambridge. Between 1972 and 1975 I read history at Peterhouse, the oldest college of the University of Cambridge. For me the city and its world-renowned university were the epitome of learning, tradition and order. I had no idea that, less than a mile from my college, stood a building of striking ugliness that existed in case those very qualities should ever be lost to us.
It is known simply as the nuclear bunker and I became aware of it in the course of my researches into the Cold War. But what did it contain and what, precisely, was its intended function? Usefully, it is now owned by the University of Cambridge and there are plans to clean it up and use it for storage. Meanwhile I was given the key so I could explore at leisure and arrange meetings with relevant people on site. The building lies, incongruously, at the end of a road of smart new apartments, its Brutalist, box-like appearance at odds with the sleek lines of this new residential development.
There are no windows. Its skin of reinforced concrete, encrusted now with thick stems of ivy, is 5 feet thick. I climbed a short staircase to the exterior steel door and, once inside, needed a torch to light my way. A little way in was a ‘blast’ door with levers at each corner that were once turned to produce a hermetic seal – the bunker was evidently designed as an ark that protected those inside from contamination. Beyond that a staircase descended beneath a sign that warned: ‘Take care. Deep steps’. This took me to a long corridor with rooms on either side. In one I found a fire extinguisher with a label still attached: it was installed on 17 September 1962, just a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis flared up.
A technical notice on the wall told me this was one of the ‘Plant Rooms’. The headings on the notice included ‘Normal ventilation’ and ‘Ventilation in a gas attack’. It seems the bunker’s designers had taken the Boy Scouts’ dictum of ‘Be prepared’ to some pretty extreme lengths – but would it have worked? I returned to the entrance to meet my first witness, Rod Siebert, a former Army intelligence officer in the Cold War era and expert on secret nuclear installations. He had brought along a diagram of the Cambridge bunker.
‘It’s a bit of a labyrinth,’ he admitted. We were standing, it turned out, in the ‘old armed forces headquarters’, built in 1953 as the nuclear build-up between the superpowers of America and the Soviet Union was just getting underway. Britain was very much a target – not only because it was now the third member of the nuclear club, having tested its first atomic bomb the previous year, but also by virtue of having American nuclear weapons sited on its soil. The original bunker was built as a military command and control centre to function in the event of a nuclear strike on Britain.
‘An awful lot of people tend to think in terms of nuclear protection being underground,’ said Rod. ‘But thick concrete and steel provide a very high protection factor against nuclear weapons – even more than earth.’ As the threat of war and the magnitude of the weaponry escalated, the MoD decided to upgrade the facilities in the Cambridge bunker. ‘We are now moving into the more modern part, the Regional Seat of Government, which was built in the early sixties for the eventuality of a nuclear war,’ said Rod. The abbreviated names on the various doors gave the game away, although I had to trawl my memory of government departments to fit the right ones to the abbreviations: ‘MIN. PEN. NAT. INS’ was the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance; ‘MIN. OF LABOUR’ and ‘BRD. OF TRADE’ were somewhat easier to fathom.
The Cambridge bunker was designated RSG-4 (Regional Seat of Government-4), one of twelve top-secret facilities across Britain and Northern Ireland that in theory, at least, would have ensured the continued functioning of the country during nuclear war. ‘Under the Emergency Powers Act, central government would have devolved to headquarters such as this where a Commissioner would have worked to reconstruct the business of government,’ Rod explained. ‘The main purpose was to preserve the offices of state and the bureaucracy of central government.’ Each RSG would have had representatives of the main government departments. If one or more RSGs were destroyed the others could take up the slack. That was the idea.
At this point I felt I needed a break from the claustrophobic bunker atmosphere, and some time to reflect on the thinking behind the whole RSG concept. Outside, I sat on a bench next to a children’s playground and discussed the febrile atmosphere of the time with the investigative reporter and Cold War expert, Jim Wilson. He, too, remembered the naked fear that stalked the land in 1962 and that fear, he insisted, was absolutely justified. ‘We had American nuclear-tipped missiles on bases all the way down the east coast,’ he said. ‘Everybody realized these bases were vulnerable.’
The then prime minister Harold Macmillan had authorized the siting of ninety such missiles on British soil as part of the NATO defence strategy aimed at countering the Soviet nuclear threat. They were there because it brought them within striking distance of Moscow and other potential targets in the Soviet Union. For the US this was certainly a dividend of the so-called ‘special relationship’ (a phrase first used in the context of US–British relations by Winston Churchill). But the arrangement left Britain exposed. In 1955 the MoD commissioned a secret investigation into just how vulnerable we were.
This was known as the Report of the Strath Committee, or the Strath Report. ‘It was the first real study of what thermonuclear war would do to the UK,’ Jim told me. ‘Within the first few hours a third of the country’s population would be wiped out. Water supplies would be contaminated. Food supplies would run out. Massive numbers of people would be injured.’ The Strath Report revealed that Britain had more nuclear targets per acre than any other country in the world. It concluded that we would be utterly destroyed by nuclear war. Its terrifying findings were shared only with the Cabinet and the report was not declassified until 2002.
The government’s civil defence planning in the face of this overwhelming threat was based around the RSGs. It believed that following a nuclear strike it would take about two weeks for the fallout to subside to safe levels. The bureaucrats chosen to keep the show on the road would sit it out in their reinforced concrete bunkers, then start to impose order on the dazed survivors. One of the people chosen to fulfil this function was a BBC journalist called Michael Barton, who in 1953 was invited to a top-secret meeting at the Civil Defence Staff College in Sunningdale, Berkshire.
I met him back at the entrance to the bunker and we descended into its dark, labyrinthine heart. ‘The first thing they said to me was, “Barton, we want you to go on a civil defence course,”’ he said, as we crept along by torchlight. ‘It was all very hush-hush. I ended up sitting around a huge table with brigadiers and admirals – lots of war ribbons dangling over the table. And this huge map of Britain. This is a smaller version.’ We paused in a corridor while he trained his torch’s beam on the piece of paper in his hand. It showed a Britain spattered with circles. ‘They represent where they anticipated the Russians would drop a nuclear bomb,’ he explained.
This map is a terrifying document, for the circles fall not just on the major cities and industrial centres, of which there are many, but on military bases and radar stations right across our green and pleasant land. Michael continued with his story. ‘They said, “Well, Barton, we want to assign you to one of these nuclear bunkers in the Lake District [in the event of an attack].” Now just hold on. We’d just been talking about four-minute warnings. I was based in Leeds. I had a motorbike. I probably could have got there in two and a half hours.’
Such stories were shaking my faith in the whole viability of Britain’s post-apocalypse planning, but it turned out that this wasn’t the half of it. Michael and I pushed on till we had reached the very nerve centre of the bunker, the War Room. Here convex Perspex windows on two sides gave the military top brass a view into the operations centre where the enemy’s activities would have been monitored and the situation on the ground constantly updated. Waiting to meet us was another man recruited to the cause of civil defence. Peter Lindley was an eighteen-year-old naval rating when, in September 1962, he and some colleagues were sent to RSG-12, beneath Dover Castle, to take part in a classified Cold War exercise.
‘As soon as we got to Dover we started asking passers-by where the Regional Seat of Government was,’ he said. ‘I had no idea it was top secret. When we realized what we were getting involved in – a nuclear bunker – it was quite frightening really.’ The exercise was a highly classified NATO war game code-named Fallex 62, designed to test the UK’s ability to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack and land invasion. Peter was assigned to the War Room at Dover, which he said was similar to this one in the Cambridge bunker.
‘On the second day,’ he told us, ‘the Commander came rushing in with a signal in his hand. The signal said, “Nuclear burst in the Channel”. He said, “How do I know if this is true or not?” And I thought, well surely we’d know about it if there was. He said to me, “You go up top now and see if there’s anything untoward going on.” So I went up looking for mushroom clouds and goodness knows what …’ This tale of incompetence and cluelessness, in the context of the most serious threat ever posed in the history of human conflict, I found truly dismaying. ‘I could hardly believe it,’ agreed Peter. ‘The disorganization was even more frightening than actually being in the bunker.’
More frightening still were the conclusions drawn from Fallex 62. Peter had brought along a copy of a now declassified document marked ‘NATO Secret. A Report by the Military Committee to the North Atlantic Council on NATO Fall Exercise 1962’. It concluded that ‘The exercise emphasized the profound problem of command and control’; there was ‘considerable difficulty in acquiring the necessary information’; and ‘serious military weaknesses’ were exposed. In a nutshell, no European country could provide adequate defence from a Soviet nuclear attack.
Nevertheless, the MoD continued to recruit non-military staff and volunteers to work in the RSGs should they ever be needed. My next witness, Mark Sansom, turned up with some intriguing artefacts from the Cold War era: a battered cardboard box marked ‘Biscuits. Do not drop’ and dated ‘28/5/63’, and a green anti-contamination suit. Mark was a civil servant with the Ministry of Agriculture who helped to maintain the site well into the 1990s. ‘Up until the end of the Cold War, our main role was to deal with food distribution, post-nuclear strike,’ he said. ‘We stored items such as these biscuits, which would be handed out to the population after the bomb had gone off.’
He opened the box and lifted from it a tin with a circular lid, still sealed. ‘We’ll flip it open – just like a tin of paint,’ he said, ‘and underneath this bit of paper here we have nineteen-sixty-three baked biscuits.’ He took a bite: ‘Still good.’ Rather more tentatively, so did I. They were quite dry, but tasty. But how were the biscuits supposed to reach the survivors on the outside? This was where the green suit came in. Mark invited me to put it on. The trousers and jacket felt far too flimsy to afford any kind of protection against radiation. They were accessorized with white gloves with black rubber gauntlets over the top and a gas mask. Thus attired, I was supposed to be ready to venture forth into the wasteland dispensing biscuits to the crawling wretches who remained after the balloon had gone up.
‘Absurd’ hardly does it justice. Getting into the mood, the ex-BBC man Michael Barton reminded us that his function was no less preposterous. He was supposed to keep the populace informed – if, that is, he had made it to the Lake District bunker in time. ‘There being no other way, no newspapers, no other communications, just radio, one of these very military chaps said to me, “Now Barton, don’t forget, you’ve got to keep the morale of the troops high, so I’ve chosen some records for you to play.”’ The one that has stuck in Barton’s mind is a sentimental wartime ballad called ‘I’ll Walk Beside You’ by the Irish tenor John McCormack. ‘I don’t know about you but I get a sense of the macabre when I hear those words,’ said Michael. He was referring particularly to the line ‘I’ll walk beside you through the golden land …’.
It turns out that in October 1962, as the world teetered on the brink of nuclear annihilation, Whitehall mandarins were proposing to console us with dry biscuits and sombre music. In this chapter I have already evoked the spirit of the television comedy series Blackadder. By this stage in my investigation of RSG-4 I was beginning to feel that Baldrick must have been the mastermind behind nuclear facilities such as this. The Cuban Missile Crisis was no joke, of course. The Soviets’ decision to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba – just 90 miles from Florida – and the Americans’ determination to stop them set the two superpowers on a collision course that for several days looked unavoidable.
At one point nuclear-armed B-52 bombers were scrambled to within striking distance of the Soviet Union. But the most dangerous moments occurred on 27 October, when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba (the pilot, Rudolf Anderson, was killed) and the US Navy dropped ‘practice’ depth charges on a Soviet submarine, unaware it was nuclear-armed (for dramatic eyewitness accounts of this episode, see the next chapter). Either incident could have led to all-out war. But it didn’t. As Britain – and the world – held its breath, the US president John F. Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev found a way of stepping back from the brink without losing face: the Soviets would remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba if the Americans removed theirs from Turkey.
Britain’s Regional Seats of Government, including the bunker in Cambridge, had been on high alert for these two desperate weeks. The following year the US, the Soviet Union and the UK were signatories to a treaty banning nuclear weapons tests – a milestone that signalled the de-escalation of nuclear sabre-rattling between the superpowers. The Cambridge bunker and the other RSGs were never operational. Michael Barton did not have to jump on his motorbike and make a mad dash for the Lake District with a set of ludicrous tunes in his panniers. The biscuit tins remained sealed. We were not to know it then, but never again – so far, at least – would the world come so close to destroying itself.
But for some the enormity of the continuing nuclear threat was a moral abomination. My final visitor to the bunker was the writer Natasha Walter, whose parents, Ruth and Nicolas, were active in the peace movement. As I gave her a guided tour of RSG-4, she told me that at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis her mother and father had formed a group named Spies for Peace with the aim of exposing Britain’s secret nuclear plans. ‘They were prepared to risk a lot for what they believed,’ she told me. This included the treasonable offence of disseminating official secrets.
‘My parents, back in 1963, managed to break into a bunker like this [it was RSG-6, near Reading],’ she explained. ‘There were four of them and they divided up, each with a different task. One had a camera and was taking photographs. One of them was copying documents, one was drawing a map of the area.’ Their most prized find was the list of names of those who would be allowed into the bunker in the event of nuclear attack. ‘That’s what my parents were protesting about,’ explained Natasha. ‘You can’t make plans for a nuclear war – basically saying, we’re happy for the whole population to be wiped out – and keep that a secret. The people have to know what’s being done in their name.’
She showed me a copy of the pamphlet produced by Spies for Peace, entitled Danger! Official Secret RSG-6, following this raid. Four thousand copies were reproduced and sent to newspapers, politicians and notable public figures. ‘When the document was published, the Daily Express called for capital punishment for Spies for Peace,’ said Natasha. ‘Let’s not forget, that was the culture war of the sixties. The Establishment against the youth. I admire my parents’ courage. They didn’t do it to aid the Soviet Union. They did it because they believed in liberty and justice for people in the UK.’
I respect the evident sincerity of Natasha’s parents, but I am not on the same side of the argument. Nuclear weapons couldn’t be uninvented and I believe we needed them to defend ourselves against a Soviet Union that had already colonized half of Europe. Nevertheless, the Cuban Missile Crisis revealed some painful truths. Britain was no longer powerful enough to shape world events or defend her people from a hostile superpower. The delivery system for our nuclear weapons was rudimentary, our defences woefully inadequate and much of our contingency planning for nuclear attack firmly in the realms of fantasy – as I had discovered on my illuminating return to Cambridge.