09 July 2010

Scotland's Secret Bunker

I took Ciaran and Cameron up into Fife to Scotland's Secret Bunker. This is the Cold War remnant that would have housed to Secretary of State for Scotland and about 300 other troops in the event of all out nuclear war. It was a bit of an eye opener.
The location was proper Hollywood - the opening scenes from Matthew Broderick's War Machine. This Scottish farm, with its remote out buildings, looks similar to any other one.
Nowadays you can see that the shutters are metal and not wood, but that would not have been noticeable while operational. You then go into the farmhouse (you don't see much of the farmhouse actually - you go in the door into a gift shop with a small staircase heading downstairs, behind a turnstyle), through the turnstyle and down the flight of stairs. Its a deep set of stairs, certainly more than typical in a house, with a long doglegged corridor heading downward in front of you.


The corridor ends in a large blast door. Once inside the space is quite impressive, though with a full complement of over 300 people I'm sure its not that big really. All in all, there are two levels, completely isolated from the ground for both electronic and shock protection, each level being the size of a football pitch. Total depth is 40 metres with accommodation, medical, broadcast on the upper level and the real operational stuff on the lower one.
With dorms operating on a hot bed policy - you climb out and someone else climbs in - it was good to know that even at the end of the world class was noticed - the more senior officials slept 4 to a room with SecStateScotland having his own room.
The staff had an 18 hours duty shift followed by 6 hours sleep with closely monitored and chaperoned interaction between male and female staff.  Though, with no water for bathing I'm not too sure how difficult a job that would be.
I think the lack of people actually working (there were a good number of visitors so the corridors all looked busy) makes the rooms seem bigger than they need be. With more bodies pressed in I think a greater sense of the scale would be obvious.
As it was, the few mannequins which were present always looked understaffed for the job.
Some aspects are quite odd -on the whole the bunker looks like something out of the cold war (which makes sense) but this bunker was operational until 1993, yet the tech is very 1960s or even earlier, making it look much more like a 1950's show. I appreciate that the tech is donated and there are still national security issues - there are some rooms which are still off limits due to national security issues -but it seems hard to understand this bunker being used in the late 80's, again comparing it to War Machine.

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