Wargame Articles

Finding Nuclear Bunkers

During the cold war many of Britain's nuclear bunkers were revealed by the Spies for Peace Group. They argued that they were not traitors, but were simply revealing what everyone new. It now turns out they were supported by the full might of the Warsaw Pact in order to locate and break into these bunkers. The classic book War Plan UK was written with the help of the Russians.

Now the Russians are no longer playing, the government publicly sold off all its bunkers e.g. Hawthorne (size of a small town, Corsham, they even have a railway in it). Well actually, this is not quite true. They sold the central government bunkers and the observer corps bunkers. The military retained most of the their bunkers (survival positions) and the local authorities just carried on building their bunker network. Currently, the central government bunkers are largely gone, but the military and local authority/ public service bunkers are better equipped than ever before. Basically, bird flu is a more credible threat than a nuclear war when it comes to spending limited local authority budgets.

Everyone interested in bunkers says that everyone knows the locations of all these remaining bunkers that were not sold off. So I checked this statement on the internet against my knowledge about several places I know about for work reasons. No details of them are to be found on the internet. Details about a few local authority ones are still there (as they have not been moved since the Cold War days and the spying by spies for peace), but the rest are absent.

Britain's new generation of nuclear citadels are largely secret.

Please do not tell CND/ cold war study groups as they would get very, very upset.