Report - Collyweston Bomb stores, Peterborough - Feb 2014

paulpowers · Feb 14, 2014

I was heading back from Peterborough and decided to pop in as on my last visit I didn't get around all the sheds.

It looks like there is now some work going on in the large bomb shelters, lots of the graff has been painted over and the smell of fresh paint still hung in the air

The bomb storage bunkers were each intended to house two Blue Danube thermonuclear bombs on their trolleys and were fitted with an internal crane gantry to carry the 7.32 metre-long casings, which contained all of the circuitry, detonators, initiators and enriched plutonium required. The fissile cores were stored separately in the adjacent core storage buildings and were only loaded into the bomb casings immediately before they were needed, to provide the critical mass which would result in detonation of the main charge. In 1953 the perceived British stockpile requirement was 800 bombs each yielding between ten and twelve kilotons of explosive power. There are several hundred such munitions bunkers on British post-war airfields, most of which did not house nuclear devices.

I managed to get around and got a bit of video as well but like a knob I was looking through the view finder and not where my feet where while stood on one of the stores and went for a bit of a fall, luckily my shoulder took the brunt of the fall and I saved my camera but dislocated my shoulder.

MAH07692 - YouTube

It's not as dramatic as it sounds, as a teen I used to dislocated my shoulder as a party trick but 17 years later it stings a bit

Anyway on with the pics