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So 'numerous huge sites' which you seem to know are several times the volume of Earls Court have now become 'silos' which tend, if the often shown on TV American ones are anything to go by, to be not much bigger than the missile they contain plus a control room. And they are obvious from the air, so no secret. Our response and that of the Americans has been for a long time multiple warhead missiles fired from submarines.

The state of information control in the cold war cannot be equated to that during a proper war, so these fantasy projects of yours would have been impossible to build without knowledge of their constrcuction and the costs involved in our small country being obvious. Even when the US missile control centre in the mountain was built, its existance was never a secret. How could such several huge structures have been built in this country without the immense cost being seen in the budget and without any of the 1000's of workers needed for years to hollow out a hill letting on what was happening? This isn't Russia where whole secret cities were actually built on Stalin's orders after 1945.

In 1985 the total defence budget as a proportion of government spending was around 15%.

max_tranmere wrote:

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Oh well Max, that's it then. I give in. You've convinced me !laugh! !laugh!.

No it wont.

From my recollection the Gaia group that Emma Craven belonged to didn't as such "stumble upon" a hitherto unknown secret site in the Yorkshire Dales

Northmoor was an American-owned commercial storage/reprocessing plant for spent nuclear fuel rods - the sort of thing the THORP plant at Sellafield was designed for. A public business and a local employer, everyone knew it was there.

However what the Gaia members discovered was that within the Northmoor facility there was a secret and undisclosed plant beneath the main facility producing and storing weapons-grade enriched nuclear material (the kind of thing it is feared the Bushehr plant in Iran will be used for).

The amount of 'weapons-grade' nuclear material a country has is, for obvious reasons, of considerable interest to other nations and supranational authorities and such things are monitored and inspected regularly. The potential to build up an unacknowledged and unrecorded "secret stash" is an immense temptation to even the most open, honest and fair-minded nation (and let's be frank, there are no true completely altruistic governments anywhere on Earth!)

Huge underground citadels completely 'off the map' of the type Max alludes to would indeed be impossible to either build or maintain without their presence becoming known, however it would be far easier for legitimate facilities to be expanded beyond purpose without atttracting undue attention. The Sellafield site, for example is I believe covered by the Official Secrets Act, and closed, isolated sites such as Dounreay with it's military background could, potentially, operate covertly with minimal likelihood of exposure.

Phil, interesting points there. Sellafield may be closed nowadays (I'm not sure) but 20 years ago it was very much open. I went on a tour round it (in about 1990) as I mentioned in an earlier comment. Many members of the public have claimed that the place is a heavy polluter, even though the people there say it's not. A lot of people in wider society within the UK used to say there were three-headed fish off the coast there, and I remember a lot of people in Ireland have claimed over many years that pollution from Sellafield has done big damage to the Irish coastline.

Andy, I wasn't being specific in my use of the term 'silos', I meant it the same as when I referred to 'huge sites' - places for making and storing nuclear weapons - and yes, these places would be very big.