Britain's Secret Plan to Blow Up the Channel Tunnel with a Nuclear Bomb

Michael Peck

Security, Europe

Paris won't be happy...

If Soviet tanks ever blitzed across western Europe to the shores of the English Channel, the English had a secret plan to keep them from crossing into Britain.

Blow up the Channel Tunnel with a nuclear bomb.

This nuclear Brexit would have kept the “barbarians from the gates of Calais,” in the words of one British official during the Cold War, according to the newspaper the Independent, which found the plan buried in a government archive. The bomb would also would have devastated the coasts of England and France, making it a “Better Dead than Red” defense.

The bomb idea first surfaced in 1959, when the Channel Tunnel (“Chunnel”) was proposed as a means of connecting Britain with the European mainland. The very idea set off alarm bells among British officials. For centuries, the channel has been Britain’s natural barrier, the moat that kept the armies of Napoleon and Hitler (as well as immigrants and refugees today) at bay.

In the event of a Soviet invasion, tunnels and bridges all over Europe would have been blown up. But the Chunnel is a railroad tunnel thirty-one miles long (the underwater portion alone is 23.5 miles), leading to fears that conventional explosives wouldn’t be enough.

“The problem here is that according to Channel Tunnel Group engineers, the tunnel would be virtually unscathed by an explosion of very great magnitude since the force of the explosion would be dissipated along the tunnel,” a defense official told a committee pondering the issue in 1974.

Nuclear explosives would do the trick. However, there was just one problem with detonating a nuclear charge inside a long, narrow tunnel: “An atomic explosion in the tunnel could have a ‘mortar’ effect and cause widespread damage at the portals [of the tunnel] and in the surrounding area.”

Hence the planning committee agreed that it was best not to inform the French that their territory would be nuked. Some British officials also wondered whether the whole idea was pointless: if the Soviet Army could reach Calais without triggering thermonuclear war, then Britain was going to be conquered anyway (presumably the French would have surrendered already).

Read full article