Day village was a heartbeat from destruction
SCIENTISTS wanted to nuke the Heartbeat village of Goathland to create a radioactive pit under the moors, secret documents have revealed.
They planned to evacuate 1,000 people from the beauty spot for the ambitious plan to explode an atom bomb under the Northyork Moors.
The village is famous astv cop Nick Berry’s fictional beat of Aidensfield in TV show Heartbeat. Later series starred Joe Mcfadden. Goathland Station also featured as Hogsmeade Station in the Harry Potter films.
But in 1969 it was earmarked for a secret experiment to blast out a giant underground cavern to store gas.
A nuclear bomb powerful enough to flatten an entire city was to be dropped down a 2,000ft shaft and detonated to melt the rock under the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Scientists believed the towns of Whitby and Pickering, 10 miles either side, would experience nothing more than a jolt, cracking the plaster in a few cottages.
They thought that after a few months the inside would have cooled enough to rake out the radioactive waste, with the vast chamber used to store gas.
The £9million scheme is revealed in a dossier discovered in the National Archives.the study, called Possible Sites for Completely Contained Nuclear Explosions in Northyorkshire, was part of Operation Plowshare.
This was launched in 1961 to see if artificial harbours and canals could be created by detonating a few wellplaced nuclear bombs, thus avoiding years of mechanical digging.
Researchertom Scott, who found the files, said: “The national park is stunning. It is historic, not somewhere I would expect someone to set off a nuclear explosion.
“It is not clear if locals would have been told what was going on, but it would have been difficult to hide.”
Mr Scott said, according to the report, not much would happen on the surface apart from “a bit of a jolt, a rumble and few birds startled”.
And as shockwaves spread towhitby and Pickering, damage would be limited to “plaster cracking and other minor structural damage”, amounting to no more than £5,000 at 1969 prices.