11th June 1988, Troywood, near Anstruther, Scotland.
Once his observations had been taken Archibald walked back to the guardhouse, wondering why with all the sensors available a member of the Royal Observer Corps section attached to the Scottish Northern Zone H.Q was regularly sent out to take manual readings. The guardhouse itself was a standard ROTOR bungalow guardhouse; however no addition of local Scottish stone, a pitched roof, chimney and dormer window could really disguise what was in fact a steel-reinforced concrete box.
An hour after descending the seventy-five feet to the upper floor of the bunker Archibald was in his office collating the RADIAC readings from the last few days before he passed them on to the people in Emergency Government. There they would be added to the information coming in from the UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation, which itself gathered information from a large network of posts manned by the ROC, though after a year it was anyone’s guess how many were still manned.
Looking away from the decay curves he looked at the pile of newspapers lying on another desk in the office. Like everybody in the bunker, with the exception of the Northern Zone Commissioner and Deputy Regional Commissioner for Scotland, Ian Lang, MP, Archibald had two jobs. His secondary role was as an archivist; why he had been given this job he didn’t know, possibly it had something to do with his mother having been a librarian.
At the moment he didn’t have much to work with, just the newspapers the bunker staff had brought with them before the attack and a few more that military and police patrols had found and brought back. His ROC work had kept him very busy, but he had at least managed to get them into date order.
He glanced at the headline of The Scotsman from 1st June 1987, a different world now.
‘USAF Base destroyed by nuclear blast’.
‘Emergency services from across the country are responding to this terrible tragedy….The Prime Minister has called for calm and has promised that there will be a full investigation into this ‘tragic accident’.’
Archibald could from memory recall that the next paper was a copy of The Courier; a Dundee based paper from a few days later.
‘Moscow invites Kinnock to discuss Nuclear Crisis.’
‘The Soviets and many in Europe have been demanding that all American built nuclear weapons should be withdrawn from Europe to prevent further disasters of this sort from happening again.
‘When asked Kinnock stated that he felt that it would be ‘inappropriate’ for him to negotiate with the Soviets and that any unofficial diplomacy by him at this time could be ‘unhelpful’ to the efforts of the government at a very difficult time.
There is growing speculation that Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher may agree to the forthcoming General Election being postponed until the investigation into the RAF Bentwaters blast is finished.’
The next series of headlines only got worse and worse.
‘IAEA – RAF Bentwaters Blast was Soviet weapon.’ The Times.
‘A separate joint USAF-RAF investigation has determined that the Ground Zero of the explosion was in the village of Tunstall, just beyond the base perimeter, rather than in any area where nuclear weapons were stored. This and the fact that the Americans have managed to recover several nuclear weapons from the badly damaged base lends credence to the suggestion that it was not an American nuclear weapon that exploded.
‘Government knew of Soviet ‘bomb plot’. The Daily Telegraph.
‘Hurd also revealed that just prior to the detonation a team from the SAS had stormed the house containing the bomb but tragically the agent had evidently been able to set off the weapon before he could be killed. The Home Secretary paid tribute to the SAS troopers, MI5 agents and police officers killed in the attempt to stop the explosion and condemned the Soviet Union for murdering thousands of innocent British citizens.’
‘Soviet government deny British government allegations.’ The Guardian.
*
That last headline especially stuck in Archibald’s memory. At the time the majority of the British media and the population itself had been sceptical in the extreme about Gorbachev’s denials. Ironically they were probably made in good faith as the ‘bomb plot’ had been carried out on the authority of KGB Chairman, General Govershin, who was apparently shot sometime before the final exchange.
Archibald didn’t like to think about the rest of the headlines. They charted the road to all out war and the end of the old world. The reasons behind the nuclear initiation at RAF Bentwaters became irrelevant as NATO and Warsaw Pact forces clashed wherever there was a common border.
Soviet use of nuclear weapons at sea soon lead to NATO retaliation in kind against Soviet warships, surface and submarine, and against Soviet naval bases. As soon as NATO nuclear weapons had initiated over Soviet soil the Soviet leadership had launched a major nuclear attack against NATO military and industrial targets.
Inevitably NATO had retaliated against similar targets in the USSR and Eastern Europe. There were no newspapers to chronicle this final phase of the conflict.
The surviving American and Soviet leadership had finally negotiated a ceasefire on 4th September 1987. Both sides now had the pressing matter of survival, further fighting was seen a futile.
***
Guardhouse entrance to Troywood RGHQ bunker.
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