Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Inside my local nuclear bunker the old fears suddenly seem comical

Inside my local nuclear bunker the old fears suddenly seem comical

Whenever I read of a great wave of public alarm,’ my grandfather used to say as he peered over the top of his Daily Telegraph, ‘I am gripped by a massive calm.’

I do not know what Grandad thought of the nuclear shadow said to be hanging over us through the Sixties and Seventies; indeed, I do not know what I think myself. As a young Tory I did share the alarm. More recently the questions asked by Andrew Alexander, the Daily Mail’s right-wing columnist, about the assumed imminence of a nuclear threat during the Cold War, have reopened more minds than mine. In place of ‘nuclear’, I have just typed ‘unclear’. Perhaps my unconscious mind is trying to tell me something.

But alarm was real at the time. I cannot count the number of debates, speeches and arguments I entered as the Conservative MP for West Derbyshire to make Margaret Thatcher’s government’s case for a high state of readiness. Just how ready we were, however, I had not appreciated until a discovery last weekend. Unknown to me, there was a subterranean nuclear bunker in the middle of my own rural constituency. There still is. I have just visited this astonishing time capsule.

Visiting friends from Nottingham told me about it. They had been looking at a website on which is posted details of a Royal Observer Corps survey of their own nuclear monitoring posts, of which there are apparently hundreds across the country.

Most of these were built in the 1960s. The purpose was not shelter: they were to be occupied during high-level nuclear scares, when, on a signal, volunteers (two or three in the case of the post I visited) would clamber down into the bunker and stay. The volunteers’ job was to take readings from above their bunker and feed these into a central monitoring station in Coventry.

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