Oxfordshire is beautiful, but it’s also terrible, and we don’t often get a chance to see the terror. I’ve been to the inner sanctum of some of that terror – the war room left behind by the Americans when they departed from Upper Heyford airbase.
What’s so terrible about that, you may ask? Well, if it weren’t so disturbing, it would be funny. Think Dr Strangelove, the Cold War and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD)…several times over. This Battle Command Centre is where the world might have ended.
Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's anti-war film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Upper Heyford is a unique Cold War landscape that represents the best opportunity to remember and put into perspective the most important event in the history of mankind, where the Soviets and the Americans were dealing each day with the question ‘to be or not to be’.
They both had the capacity and the plan to destroy most, if not all, the people on the planet.
It’s right here in the rolling hills of north-west Oxfordshire, in the centre of chocolate box villages that the Americans located their Battle Command Centre with a wide range of aircraft and a very substantial nuclear arsenal ready for deployment.
When I last visited the Battle Command Centre to do an outside broadcast for BBC Radio Oxford it looked like it had been used yesterday, not 20 years ago this month when the US Air Force left the base.
The hotline for the nuclear bomb, with all the telephone numbers of the other USA bases still on the 1960s phone
Coffee cups with stains sat next to bits of chalk that were used to scribble information on the walls about the state of play in the Cold War.
The entrance to the Command Centre was a 6in thick steel door with at least five different locks. Immediately inside on the left was this shower room where anyone contaminated by a radioactive substance could rip off their clothes and shove them down a vent where they would be destroyed safely. The showers were industrial ones and still contained some bars of soap and heavy scrub brushes.
A long concrete corridor ran the length of the building. Just before the end on the right was a small room with a telephone, a large red Bakelite 1960s dial phone with three concentric circles added to the dial and separate codes for each level of the dial, codes that were changed daily.
This was the hotline to the desk of the President of the United States.
This unique telephone was made to receive the order that could end the world. It may sound dramatic, but when I stood there with that machine in my hand I knew I was touching something terrible and historical.
This large telephone kiosk looked on to the Battle Command Centre. Either the Dr Strangelove set designer had seen this Command Centre, or the people who constructed the Centre had seen Dr Strangelove, but the similarity was amazing.
It was a large operating theatre, only the patient was not a person but a planet. Yes. It was all real. You didn’t think so, did you? Neither did I… The 1960s sliding blackboards recorded the vital statistics of aircraft movement which were still written on them. When the Americans closed down this Battle Command Centre they left all the information on the wall charts.
Bill Heine in the war room at Upper Heyford
Banks upon banks of ‘modern’ white, grey and black plastic telephones stood empty with all the top secret details of the air force command centres across the globe still attached to the telephones.
I took a photo of one top secret phone to have a now out-of-date souvenir of how to contact the entire European nuclear network.
The whole site has this kind of resonance of MAD, including nine hardened aircraft shelters designed to withstand a direct hit by a 1,000lb demolition bomb.
When I visited, sheep were grazing on the fields outside the hangars and horses were inside some of them.
Even in the state of disrepair that I witnessed I could see Upper Heyford was a unique, well-preserved Cold War monument, an instructional monument and landscape.
The former base pictured in 2008
But that value has to compete with the need for more houses in Oxfordshire, a need which is desperate.
The air base lost that battle. Parts of Upper Heyford will be demolished to make way for a new housing development of some 700 homes.
How do you juggle these competing questions?
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