How a seaside town prevented nuclear war
Scarborough’s secret bunker had key role in tracking Soviet ships taking missiles to Cuba
IT IS A coastal resort known for its sandy beaches and fish and chips. But amid the hustle and bustle of summer tourists, Scarborough has a hidden secret about how it helped avert a nuclear war.
Today a newly declassified document from GCHQ reveals how staff sequestered in a tiny bunker on the North Yorkshire coast helped bring an end to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
These workers had the relatively mundane task of monitoring the Soviet Baltic fleet and merchant shipping in the northern hemisphere. In October that year, their hideout was thrust into the centre of world affairs as tensions between the West and the Soviet Union threatened to escalate.
On October 16, 1962, John F Kennedy, the US president, had been told the Soviet Union was secretly shipping nuclear missiles to Cuba, 90 miles off America’s south-eastern coast.
US forces established a naval blockade to prevent the ships from arriving, but some Soviet vessels were already on their way to the island. A confrontation between the two naval forces risked an escalation into nuclear war.
Operators in the Scarborough bunker detected the Soviet ships and reported their position and direction.
Tony Comer, GCHQ’S historian, told the BBC: “Traditionally just another task at the bottom of Scarborough’s priority list suddenly escalated to the very top priority for British intelligence.
“Were the Soviets going to call Kennedy’s bluff or not? Scarborough was the organisation that was able to say
‘The room was full of people, headphones on. Your role was to not miss a beat’
exactly where these vessels were, when they stopped sailing towards Cuba and when they turned around and headed back to the Soviet Union.”
The role of the secret hilltop site overlooking the North Sea was broadcast last night on the Radio 4 series The Secret History of GCHQ.
A veteran of the bunker said: “The room was full of people, headphones on. Your role was to not miss a beat.”
Today’s director of the base, still a functioning GCHQ location, who would only give her name as Sheila, said: “If you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to put your hand up – somebody’s got to come in and take your place.” Alongside the work at Scarborough, Britain made two further contributions that helped Kennedy formulate his strategy.
First, David Ormsby-gore, the British ambassador in Washington and a close friend of the president, was accorded the unprecedented privilege of sitting in on sessions of the National Security Council. On Oct 23 he made the crucial suggestion that the proposed “quarantine line” of the American naval blockade be modified from 800 miles to 500 miles off the Cuban coast. This would give the Soviet ships more time to react, and provide Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian president, with a face-saver. The second was revealed in 1993 when government documents released under the 30-year rule showed that at the height of the crisis,
Harold Macmilan. the prime minister, offered to give up some of Britain’s nuclear weapons in exchange for Soviet withdrawal of missiles from Cuba.
The papers included a personal note to Kennedy which said: “I put the proposal that it might be helpful to save the Russians’ face if we undertake to allow the immobilisation of our Thor missiles.” The offer was not taken up.
The crisis ended when Khrushchev “blinked”. He sent a telegram proposing that, if America would promise not to invade Cuba, he would withdraw the missiles. It was, in Macmillan’s opinion, “a complete capitulation”.