Burlington

the Government hideway under Corsham

THE bunker where the government of the country was to begin reconstructing Britain in the wake of a nuclear attack was shown for the first time on Channel 4 News on the 6^th January.

It was built in part of the 35-acre Spring Quarry in the late 1950's and was only decommissioned in 1989. It is still maintained by a small number of staff at a cost of a million pounds a year.

Burlington, as the radiation-proof bunker was known, was a replica of Whitehall with a "Main Road" running through it and every ministerial department represented.

There was even a version of the Red Lion, the Whitehall pub, but the name was changed to a more rural sounding Rose and Crown.

John Doherty was one of the engineers who built the bunker 100ft beneath the ground in an old quarry and was interviewed for the programme. "You could just open the door of the pub and walk in off the pavement, it had a large front window. But how they were going to get the beer down there I didn't know."

Many of the inner workings of the bunker come from documents uncovered in the Public Record Office by Duncan Campbell, an investigative journalist. They are described in a new book and were shown on Channel 4 News.

They show that as well as government offices and the pub, there was a medical centre, a dentist's surgery, a bakery, a laundry and everything the 5,000 inhabitants would need to survive for a year. The bunker's role was "to act as the ultimate source of authority during the period of survival and reconstruction after nuclear war".

The Prime Minister and the chiefs of staff would fly there by helicopter in the immediate afterrnath of a nuclear strike, the documents say. The rest of the 5,000 military and civil servants would go by train or road.

The country would be controlled from the PM's Map Room where Prime Ministers from Harold Macmillan to Margaret Thatcher would be briefed continuously by MI5 and MI6.

"They were expecting a precautionary phase prior to nuclear attack which would have been expected to last around two weeks. Then there was 'a destructive phase' lasting one to two days; a 'survival phase' of a month and then a reconstruction phase of about a year." Mr Campbell was quoted as saying.

What was meant by reconstruction is not clear from the documents so far released, Mr Campbell said. "The real Dr Strangelove question of how they would reconstruct the population is not there. That's almost more interesting really. What were they going to do about reproduction. That kind of paper must exist somewhere. There is no reason to keep fascinating material like this secret and current Prime Minister Tony Blair should order his officials to release it."

Nick McCamley, whose book Secret Underground Cities tells the story of Britain's Cold War bunkers, was shown around Burlington. The main purpose of the bunker was to maintain communications within Britain and with the outside world, he said. "There was an enormous telephone exchange to keep them in touch with various parts of the country."

The bunker was finished in 1961 just in time for the crisis in relations with Moscow caused by the building of the Berlin Wall in August.

One memo from that period said: "In view of the international situation, the Treasury is pressing ahead as rapidly as possible with plans for occupation of Burlington." But Harold Macmillan and his defence chiefs might not have been alone. Mr Doherty said a lot of local people had been involved in the bunker's construction.

"The discussion used to be in the local pubs that if anything did happen, we knew where it was and we were going to make damn sure we were going to get there before them."

So, if it was such common knowledge amongst all the locals, who is to say if the Soviets at the time did not also know and have plans to deal with it ..............