A RUINED APOCALYPTIC VIEW

Ross Clark visits the deserted

remains of Britain's top-secret atomic weapons testing ground

THERE IS a distinct thrill in being where one is not really supposed to be; a feeling I could not get out of my head as I leapt from the ramp of an old army beach land- ing-craft on to the pebble beach of Orford Ness. Yet entry to the disused Atomic Energy Weapons Authority works on the shingle spit which winds along the Suffolk coast is no longer prohibited; the perime- ter fence was taken down in March when the site was sold to the National Trust for £300,000. The spit where Britain's nuclear deterrent was developed in the Fifties and Sixties will become a tourist attraction when the Trust opens the site to the gener- al public in two years' time.

By then most of the concrete bunkers in which experiments were conducted will be gone, but as yet they still punctuate the skyline of a ruined, apocalyptic landscape just over the river from gentle Constable country. They lie submerged under banks of shingle which were supposed to absorb the energy of an accidental explosion, which, as far as a civilian can tell, never happened.

My guide for the afternoon was Chris Martin, a 43-year-old boatman whose father used to work as a laboratory techni- cian for the Ministry of Defence. His local knowledge of the tides won him the job of summer warden of Orford Ness for the National Trust. For the past few months he has been conducting tours to the mili- tary site for local people who used to work there prior to its closure in 1971.

'I never liked to ask my father what he did over here,' Martin told me in his broad Suffolk accent, 'but I've gleaned a lot of information over the past few months.'

We climbed into Martin's Ford Transit and motored along the narrow concrete roads which traverse the beach, pulling up several times to avoid running over young kestrels unacquainted with human company.

We reached a gate with an old sign: 'Foreign and Commonwealth Office — Broadcast Relay Station.'

'Very official title, that,' said Martin. 'Could mean anything. I'm not supposed to go beyond here.'

Ahead were a number of slim grey masts Which had been invisible two miles away, lost against the sky. Now owned and oper- ated by the BBC World Service, they are the remains of the American 'Cobra Mist' over-the-horizon radar which was commis- sioned in 1971 and abandoned suddenly 18 months later, after £55 million had been spent.

'The theory is,' said Martin, 'that there was a Russian trawler sitting off the coast jamming the system.' We turned back towards the old bar- racks, built when Orford became a Royal Flying Corps station in the first world war. Twenty years ago they had been left in good condition; now they are wrecked, broken panels of asbestos littering the ground. A scrap firm had ransacked the buildings; subsequently local louts have driven down from Aldeburgh in four- wheel-drive vehicles. On the ground were scattered bullets and cartridges, the bullets left behind by the military and the car- tridges discarded by poachers who come to bag pheasants. Martin showed me the canteen where Robert Watson-Watt had first conceived the radar. Outside were the concrete foun- dations of the pylons from which the first radar signals were sent. Watson-Watt had originally been commissioned to devise a 'death-ray', a Star Wars-style emission of radio waves capable of sizzling hundreds of German soldiers at once. The Air Min- istry offered a prize of £1,000 to any inven- tor who could despatch a sheep at 100 yards with such a device. Watson-Watt declared the task impossible, but suggest- ed radar as an alternative project.

Next we drove over a dyke known as Stony Ditch on to the shingle beach where 'You're looking a bit peaky. You need a few months in jail.' the atomic experiments were undertaken. According to the Ministry of Defence, no nuclear warheads were taken on to the site; the missiles and their conventional explo- sive triggers were tested in isolation there while atomic experiments were conducted at Aldermaston.

Martin drove us into the bomb store, half a mile away from the other buildings. Two doors at either end of the store used to be shut while the bombs were unloaded, a use- ful precaution as the mediaeval castle at Orford provides a fine vantage point just over the river.

'The police once caught a Russian agent with a pair of high-powered binoculars up on the top of the castle. All the visitors were asked to leave,' said Martin.

The main danger on Orford Ness these days comes from piles of discarded, flaking lengths of blue asbestos pipe-lagging. Clearing it up promises to be as grim a job for the National Trust as neutralising 400 bombs and mines was for the Ministry of Defence.

Of all the buildings at Orford Ness, the vibration laboratories may survive, their design valued by one or two architectural historians. They are called pagodas — oddly, because with their low-slung, pitched roofs they more closely resemble Frank Lloyd Wright's bungalows. The roof, a solid lump of concrete, was designed to blow upwards in the event of an explosion, then fall back on to the building, crushing the pillars on which the roof was supported and sealing off the structure like a tomb. It is difficult to see the point of this structure if it was not to prevent the leakage of radi- ation.

Martin and I stepped over a coil of razor wire to peer down at the chamber, which had as its floor a steel track. Along the walls were scales. It seemed it had been used as a giant vice for crushing objects several feet across.

The next building was much less substan- tial in design, with a steel truss roof. Inside were the remains of a centrifuge. Whatever dubious materials had been spun there, they were certainly good for the garden; whereas the rest of the shingle beach was entirely barren, inside the centrifuge cham- ber was a fine crop of elderflower bushes, bearing ripening fruit.

Four hundred yards from the centrifuge was an innocent-looking concrete wall.

'That was what they used to fire missiles at,' said Martin, 'in order to study the moment of impact. They used to have a camera mounted above in order to photo- graph the missile hitting the wall.'

'There don't appear to be any holes in the wall,' I said.

'That's because they patched them all up,' said Martin.

We walked up to the wall to take a closer look. Sure enough, there were odd patches of concrete where holes had been filled. I looked for missile fragments, but they had all been cleared away. 'On one occasion a missile ran off target and dealt the wall a glancing blow,' said Martin. 'Apparently it ran off into the sea and the divers had to go and find it. It was all hushed up.'

A few yards away began the bombing ranges, where Sir Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb had been tested, amongst others. Despite several years' work by bomb dis- posal teams, we decided not to risk walk- ing on the beach. Instead we turned back to the last remaining building, a thermal chamber for simulating the extreme high and low temperatures experienced by a missile in flight. A few more elderflower bushes had taken hold. And in one corner, hanging dangerously, was a foot-thick steel door designed, it seemed, to contain rather more than a conventional explosion.

Shortly we returned towards Orford, across the old airfield which will soon be put back into wheat production — a local farmer was allowed to cultivate the land on Orford Ness during the years when atomic scientists were carrying out their experiments on the shingle beach, so great was the demand for food production after the war. A National Trust man was cutting the grass nearby: the first attempt to reverse the dereliction. In two years' time people could be bathing from the shingle once again; though perhaps they will be put off by the presence of the Sizewell B pressurised water reactor, the nuclear industry's latest venture, five miles up the coast.