Red faces over white elephant as two tribes could go to war...
In the mid-1980s a nuclear bunker was built under what is now a car park in Carmarthen town centre. Robert Harries talks to the mayor to find out more...
WITH tensions escalating between the US and North Korea, the threat of nuclear war seems more prevalent than at any time since the 1980s.
If only there was a specially built bunker in Carmarthen; somewhere to shelter from the destruction and chaos that would exist in the event of a catastrophic nuclear war...
Well, there is. Sort of. A stone’s throw from the town centre there lies a nuclear bunker. Built in the mid1980s, it is hidden beneath a car park in King Street; people park on top of it every day – some of whom don’t know what exists under their feet.
This Cold War legacy, this underground reminder of a blot that stained the now-disbanded Carmarthen District Council, lies redundantly beneath Carmarthenshire Council’s staff car park in Spilman Street.
You’d never guess it was there. When I come to visit, a Ford Fiesta is parked above it. Access to it is denied, and it is no longer operational.
If Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un ever put down their sabres and plunge the world into a dystopian existence only seen in Hollywood disaster movies, this three-room subterranean cavern would serve no purpose, other than acting as an ironic symbol of a time when panic engulfed a town, and indeed a nation.
Due to an escalation in the Cold War that saw the US planning to install cruise missile bases in the UK, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher encouraged local councils to build nuclear shelters, with a promise of a grant to cover most of the cost – rumoured to be around £400,000.
For younger generations, it’s difficult to imagine the day in 1986 when around 7,000 people descended on Carmarthen to form a human chain in protest at the bunker’s construction.
One protester, a young woman, tried to scale a 12ft-high metal fence which was spiked at the top. As she did so, a security guard pulled her away and her little finger, caught on the fence, was ripped off.
One man who had a bird’s-eye view of the mayhem was Mayor of Carmarthen Alun Lenny. Working as a BBC journalist, Mr Lenny was holed up in a room at the town’s Ivy Bush Hotel, which overlooks the car park.
“It was a very tense time, politically,” said Mr Lenny. “There were instruction videos of what to do in the event of a nuclear war – take off one of your doors, lean it up against a wall and barricade yourself. They also told you to stock up on baked beans!
“It was a tumultuous time – farmers were protesting against EU milk quotas, and it was the height of the miners’ strike, on top of this issue with the bunker. It was a good time to work in news!
“Despite most people being against it, the council decided to go ahead and build the bunker and it backfired horribly. It, and Carmarthen, became a focus for anti-nuclear protests. I was here on a bank holiday weekend in 1986 when thousands of people took part in a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) protest. I was on the top floor of the Ivy Bush with two other newsmen from the BBC, all taking it in turns to keep lookout at what was happening down below.
“It was an amazing scene. Thousands of people formed a human chain down Spilman Street, down Castle Hill, along Station Road and up The Parade. The bunker was surrounded.”
Despite my best efforts, I was not allowed entry into the bunker on health and safety grounds.
Mr Lenny has had the privilege, and explains that visions of a highly sophisticated underground abode – like something from a James Bond movie – are inaccurate, to say the least.
“There are three rooms, a generator, a map on the wall, and a telephone,” said Mr Lenny. “It looks like an RAF control room from the Second World War.”
The cost and the controversy associated with the project meant the bunker turned into a source of embarrassment for Carmarthen District Council.
Once the protests were diluted and the construction was complete, the bunker became something of a white elephant, one that lay dormant as the Soviet Union broke up, the Cold War came to an end, the Berlin Wall came down, and the world retracted from the ultimate brink.
More recently, the ghastly prospect of a nuclear fallout has, according to some, reared its head once more with political tensions becoming more febrile across the world. So, is there a chance that a fortunate few could be spared a radioactive death by heading to a car park in Carmarthen? “No,” says Mayor Lenny, abruptly. “It’s not operational, and I don’t see how it would have been operational back in the 1980s. It was tokenism. It was ludicrous.
“If there ever is a nuclear war, that’s it. I don’t see how jumping into a hole in a Carmarthen car park is going to save your life.”