Cold War: Building for nuclear confrontation 1946-1989 by Wayne Cocroft and Roger Thomas, English Heritage, 拢24.99, ISBN 1873592698 Reviewed by Mike Holderness
NOT so long ago, you could navigate the small islands that make up the UK almost entirely by 鈥渙fficial secrets鈥�. Installations for detecting and responding to nuclear attack provided landmarks everywhere: here a radio mast, over there a weapons store nestled in a fold of the landscape, or a bunker under yonder where regional bureaucrats would skulk if the worst happened.
Now, much of this macabre machinery is 鈥渉eritage鈥�. Whether or not you believed that preparing for Armageddon was a good thing, Cold War is a bizarrely nostalgic document. It is packed with images of rusting radars, mournful weed-strewn missile sites and the tumuli where hellfire was kept under guard.
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Cold War confirms everything that the peace movements were able to discover by such simple means as spotting strange blank patches on the map and strolling over to peer at the blockhouses. This is the archaeology of a future that managed to happen anyway, and it records the story of a truly bizarre period.
For example: shortly before his death this reviewer鈥檚 father let slip that he had a place in a post-holocaust bunker. That, the bunker鈥檚 existence, and the fact that family were not invited, were official secrets. Then there was the time a head of civil defence in the UK admitted on live radio that he was preparing for an 鈥渁rea denial鈥� strike by US nuclear forces as much as anything else. Which made perfect sense in the twisted logic of the age.
The arid tone of this official history is the perfect monument to all that. And as is always the case in the shadowy world of security, what is not said is more important than what is admitted. There is barely a mention here of the Trident missile submarines, the Eurofighter or the Star Wars function of Fylingdales on the North Yorkshire moors. Those, let us hope, will feature in another such book.