![]() Before the second world war, the military began using the site as the largest munitions storage depot in Europe. Although limestone had been mined here since Roman times, serious quarrying took off in the years after 1837, when Isambard Kingdom Brunel began work on Box Tunnel, a huge engineering project that would result in the world's longest subterranean stretch of railway on the main London to Bristol line.īefore you enter the tunnel beyond Chippenham you will see a small industrial line branching off into the earth on the right-hand side. The Corsham Tunnels began life as an underground quarry producing what came to be known as Bath stone. And to ask the question: what would happen if we were attacked today? Sometimes it feels like we are being transported back 20 years and more, to a time when the existence of a last-stand facility such as Burlington was a given and to a period when we wondered not if, but when "it" would happen.Ī whole generation of young adults know nothing about living with the promise of mutually assured destruction and of the tragically pointless doctrine of "Protect and Survive", so we are here to tell them what it was like. Last October, the world learned of North Korea's first successful nuclear weapon test today fears are growing that it is only a question of time before Iran gets the bomb. Solid yet cavernous, surrounded by 100ft-deep reinforced concrete walls within a subterranean 240-acre limestone quarry just outside Corsham, it drives one to imagine the ghosts of people who, thank God, never took refuge here. It was a huge yet very secret complex, where the government and 6,000 apparatchiks would have taken refuge for 90 days during all-out thermonuclear war. Until two years ago, the existence of this complex, variously codenamed Burlington, Stockwell, Turnstile or 3-Site, was classified. As you stand in the torchlit cold, with the doorframes collapsing from dry rot and with water dripping down incipient stalactites, the room seems to fill with the voices of Harold Macmillan, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher, and you find yourself shivering. There is his toilet, and here, in the dead centre of a 34-acre underground bunker in Wiltshire, is the reinforced chamber in which preparations for nuclear winter would have been made. ![]() And this is the tub in which, in between ordering retaliatory nuclear strikes, the prime minister would have taken a bath. So this is where world war three would have been waged.
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