For sale: One des res nuclear bunker Anyone who's looking for a no-frills bolthole with a Cold War heritage might like to check out a 1959 vintage Royal Observer Corps nuclear bunker, set in "an elevated position with panoramic views over the Derbyshire Dales". Views of the ROC nuclear bunker The winning eBay bidder for this prime piece of real estate will …
The phone line there will have a higher priority than most others in the UK - so when the masses panick and the networks struggle, at least you know you can dial the Cabinet Office.
I wonder how much the government sold it for - someone will be making a tidy packet - if only the governemnt sales/auctions were open to the public.
... I'd planned, on surviving any conflagration, to get hold of some oxyacetylene welding gear and do a good job of welding up the doors of any bunkers I came across. I knew where most of the the local ones were.
Imaging the faces if you will, after the two weeks of self-imposed isolation is up.
"At last we can get out of this hell-hole and build a future, a bright future worthy of our position and importance. I declare this bunker now open..... What do you mean the door's stuck Carruthers? God damn it man, let me have a go.... OK chaps, anyone know how much food and water we have left?"
But, they were manned by Royal Observer Corps personnel, their main purpose was to simply observe where enemy nukes landed using a range of external instruments that worked on very low tech principles, then relay said information to the people in the proper nuke bunkers under GCHQ and Parliament so the people in charge of a rapidly vaporising nation had a general idea of what was left standing.
Interestingly enough, they did lots of training to ensure they could perform their tasks such as changing external measurement devices fully blindfolded. It doesn't take much to realise why they might need to operate without the ability to see, in the event of a full scale nuclear attack.
More info here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Observer_Corps#Nuclear_Reporting_Cells
Yeah, there was a massive one compared to this in Colchester (corner of Lexden and West Lodge road) It was one of the surface-type shelters with a good foot of reinforced concrete as the roof, with blast doors, etc.. It even had two stories... Me and a group of mates in our mid teens took a load of tools with us and managed to take one of the doors off its hinges to have a look around, but by then the Observer Corps were no more, and there wasn't anything very interesting left apart from a couple of phone lines which were still connected which we used to make all sorts of prank calls. A couple of years later it was completely demolished and there is a couple of blocks of flats there now!!!
This is all a con. Whichever poor sod buys it and goes down the hatch will find an old Apple II into which they'll have to type 4-8-15-16-23-42 every 108 minutes for the next three years or the world will end.
"Des res" in both senses of the words, brother.
(Penguin 'cos there ain't no Swan).
I think you will find that one of the benefits of system x is the ability to have call hierarchies that are designed to allow important calls to get through. This was designed precisely with atomic war in mind, that and all sorts of other contingencies, flood, etc. The same is applied to cell phone sites, certain sims have priority over others in the event of a congested network - as do blue light calls.
Hand grenade - cos they dont have a mushroom cloud (common reg sort it out)
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