There's a room in the Diefenbunker that was supposed to house a large amount of gold ingots in the event of a nuclear war. It has mirrors in the corners outside the vault so you can see all the way around the perimeter. It struck as one of the oddest things ever built.
@@Solnoric I think it was to have a way to control a major source of currency that would be used. Like a way to keep the economy more stable by controlling the stockpile of gold. That way some warlord can't stockpile a horde of gold dubloons and start overvaluing them to the point of ruining the economy. Or maybe it was like the movie Goldfinger in the hopes of keeping safe a large quantity of gold from being irradiated. But my suspicion is to keep it from being stolen by looters who'd know the whereabouts of Bank of Canada stockpiles or bank vaults.
@@SolnoricMost probably because it would be more convenient to return to a financial system that’s based on the value of a specific weight of a particular metal. Instead of the abstraction of paper money and coins made from a variety of metals that are supposed to represent currency.
@@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368or a return to the gold standard. In a situation as chaotic and uncertain as after a nuclear war, returning to a financial system that’s based on quantifiable amounts of certain metals would probably be easier to administer than an abstract system of various paper notes and coins made from an assortment of metals.
You know, the entire hazard of exposing oneself to hazardous radiation to take hourly measurements could of been solved by digging down a six inch diameter steel pipe next to the entrance tunnel and capping it with a thin aluminum box. Mount a pulley in the aluminum box at the top, run a rope or wire from pulley at top and pulley at bottom and you can run the meter up the inside of the pipe to the top. Then you could use a (surplus) rifle scope and a flashlight to read the meter at the top of the pipe while you are still at the bottom (safe) and underground). Lower the meter back down, go back in to your room and close the door to the tunnel and wait an hour before taking another reading. Gamma radiation is practically transparent to light gauge aluminum or at least a compensating factor (multiplier) could be used to give an accurate reading after the attenuation of the aluminum cap.
I think the fallout monitoring staff only had to survive long enough to monitor the fallout for a while, it wasn't important that they be protected from long-term effects of radiation.
You got a little muddled, ground observer corps was US civil defense and the British bunkers were operated by the Royal observer corps, founded in the 20's but tracing its roots to observation posts manned by the army and police during the first world war and the Zeppelin and gotha bomber attacks.
"You're probably getting tired of me standing here talking..." Not one iota Gilles. Speak on... your wisdom should be shouted from the rooftops. My kids would be privileged to have a teacher such as you.
Thank you, Matt, that really means a lot. Though all I meant was that I front-loaded the video with background when most viewers are likely itching for me to go inside the bunker :P.
Aww, but no he’s right! I found your channel after hanging around Forgotten Weapons and I think Our Own Devices is very underrated. Keep doing your thing these videos are Great!
Visited the Diefenbunker, as you said worth seeing at least once, go with the Tour option, You get a lot more out of the experience for 50 cents more. Also that bunker was "no family invited" too.
The British organisation you referenced was the Royal Observer Corps (ROC). It was actually only closed down in the 1980's. When many of the two man bunkers were sold off. Some were brought by farmers who's land they were on, so they could remove them. Many were brought just as playthings. A few are in the hands of enthusiasts who have refitted them out as they originally would have been and keep them as private museums.
The ROC bunkers were incredibly small and damp not to mention the hazard of the guy who has to get out into the recently irradiated environment to service the detector. Most of them were positioned fairly close to likely targets too.
13:14 The second pipe wasn't a spare inlet, it's only a few feet away, it is the vent pipe. On a normal bunker they would both have overpressure valves fitted and some kind of carbon filter. These appear to be missing on this example
based on the way the hand cranked air pump is laid out, I would guess the stack connected to it is the fresh-air inlet. Looks like a 'squirrel cage' (centrifugal) type of unit, similar to the blower of most forced-air furnaces.
Very nice to see this bunker! Happy they were never needed. But that would be so cool to have in my yard! I would have to find a way to use it; for storage, a meditation room, a computer room or something.... I would spend time in it.
A great presentation which brought back some childhood memories. In 1962 our family went on vacation from Vancouver to visit my aunt & uncle in Glendon Alberta. My uncle was the station master there & showed me the bunker that was installed by the railway station. Beside the small station he was in charge of the bunker too. It was similar in size to the one shown at Victoria Manitoba except it was at ground level being covered with earth from what I can remember. I do remember my uncle demonstrating the hand operate air pump that is seen in this video & looked similar.
Switzerland has an extensive and sophisticated network of government built shelters and defence posts fitted with heavy weapons. As well, every house has its own basement shelter complete with air filter systems and power generating equipment. There’s a YT video on this somewhere.
In the mid 70's in Romania almost all new buildings were constructed with fallout shelters, at least in the big cities. I do have one in my building basement as well. Is rather spacious (is for tens of people) , has two airlocks, each with two big heavy metal doors, emergency lights, and air filtration system that can be used electric or manual, sanitary arrangements etc. But while initially maintained and taken care of, they eventually got abandoned by the authorities and people started using them for whatever purpose (storage etc) but civil protection. Lately though I see many of them restored to their initial purpose. You can see one of them (very similar with mine) here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nfCjXb6JrbA.html&ab_channel=STIRILEMDITV
We have those in finland too since the law mandates them in buildings over some user limit. No airlocks but they do have filtetration, supplies, emergency exit, etc..
I heard somewhere that the number 1 strategic target in Canada, from the USSR, was North Bay, Ontario. This is the mirror site of NORAD HQ, deep in the Cheyenne mountains, in case it is wiped out.
I got a Soviet nuclear bunker at my workplace. It's a section of the basement with airlock doors on both sides, rows of bare wooden bunk beds, a bathroom, air filtration system.
I used to live in Manitoba, and spent a lot of time at Victoria Beach, so good to see it represented here. Another place that might make a good video, is Maskwa. There were 'survival shelters' built by UofM architecture students in the 1970's. The brief was, they had a bill of materials, including the number of sheets of plywood, studs, etc. and the assignment to design a shelter where 2 people could stay the night, heating the shelter only with their body heat and 1 candle. Only 2 shelters were functional, after 20 years of being exposed to the elements. But the ruins make a great tour, and the variety of ideas is remarkable.
By the time I was old enough to know about it, multiple countries already had ICBMs with 30 minutes advance notice of the blast. When I asked my dad, what we would do, he said “if you stay at home, you’ll die at home; if you try to evacuate, you’ll die in traffic jams on the streets and highways. I’d rather stay home“
I'm not sure if you will read this, but I was hoping yall could check out the US M140 Chemical Agent Automatic Alarm Test set, and it's M10 Power Supply. Not too long ago, I acquired the M140 Test set and an M10 Power supply, and I have been looking for some replacement parts to get it functioning again, but I'm curious about it's history. I can send you pictures if desired.
Another interesting trip down memory lane for this US baby boomer. Fallout shelters were big in the US, I still have a couple of Civil Defense brochures about building them. I assume this also applies to Canadians there were two Conelrad markings on AM radios. The idea was regular radio broadcast would ceases and all stations would use these two frequencies so attacking aircraft could not use radio direction finding. I was a high school sophomore during the Cuban Missile crisis, thought the end of the world we imminent.
Southern Cross station in Melbourne, Australia has a similar issue with bureaucracy. Due to VLine (state) and Metro (privatised) sharing the station they can't agree to simple things like having bins on the plaforms
On a visit up to the great nation of Canada some years back, a conversation around the campfire driven by friends who were Canadian citizens struck up about successful government programs. They all agreed that aerial seeding of dragonfly larvae for mosquito control was a successful program, as well as... umm... the, err...
In Britain even though we would have been a primary target for Soviet weapon's we were supposed to remove our doors and bank up soil from our gardens or mattresses from our beds against a wall and hide in there ! Got to love British planning !!!
The British Home Guard is taken rather lightly after the TV series 'Dad’s Army'. However, there were hundreds of small underground positions stocked with explosives, etc. to carry on the fight after the Germans had landed. They were not allowed to talk about this whatsoever. All they were allowed to say to their wives or sweethearts. Goodbye. The shelters were stocked with one exception, a large bottle of rum.
1 Evacuation sounds great in Canada as there is a lot of open land. East US, Europe, where are you going to go, the next target? 2 Why did they put newdet posts at targets.
I own a surplus 5015/TD Radiacmeter. I need a source of batteries for it. The original batteries were a 6.7V Mercury battery type which is no longer made. The unit uses 7 of them wired differently. It also uses 2 1.3V batterries which I presume were analagous to today's D, C or AA cells. If anyone knows of a source for a battery equivalent to the original 6.7 volt batteries (hopefully of a size that fits in the unit) please advise me. Thanks.
A pair of lithium batteries will deliver 6.7V. 2 CR2’s will fit in a AA battery holder. NiCd recharge batteries put out 1.2V but the 1.5V from a standard alkaline battery is probably close enough.
@@allangibson8494 Sadly fitting those into the space provided in the device would require modification which destroys collector value. I will always wonder why Canada designed a system using batteries of a configuration not available outside of internal military supply.
@@felixyasnopolski8571 So silly that was. If they had just used simple D cells or something else commercially available the device would not be a useless box in the corner today. Of course like the Victoreen radiac it remains useless in peacetime even if it had batteries as situations requiring reading 500 Rote gen are thankfully somewhat rare these days. But I would love to have this unit working in a bunker instead of just sitting in a basement corner.
These really shows the psychological horror people had to endure every day during the cold war, how helpless average population were in face of nuclear threat.
Everybody I've spoken to about the time period says it was fine and not really any different from the 90's on up to now. Except of course back then you could afford everything you needed on a single entry level job.
There was no psychological horror. We knew of the fallout shelters and the Civil Defense supplies that could be had for free but that was the last thing we thought about. It's only you younger generations, conditioned to be panphobic (afraid of everything) who think it might have been horrible.
"Extraordinary ambitious, extraordinarily expensive and as we will soon see ultimately unsuccessful". Sounds like the gun registry, at least you got some cool bunkers with this fiasco. Never underestimate the power of parliament to spend YOUR money on THEIR pet projects. Never...
I’m sorry, but even in 1950s dollars $3 million is not that much money. The Canadian government absolutely could have afforded this project. I looked up the Canadian governments budget during this period and it was around $5 billion. $3 million is one half of 1/10th of 1% of the total budget, annually. Hmm….
It makes complete sense. These were never serious projects, they were only meant to look good to the public. People wanted to feel like their government was going to protect them from the nuclear bombs with civil defense kits. In reality, if the bombs had actually flown, we would've been plunged into nuclear winter and dead in a few years even if we sheltered and didn't die in the blasts. That's why governments have dropped the act and stopped giving a shit about fallout shelters now. The collapse of the USSR wasn't the end of psychos who could nuke us.
A citizen of any country can buy land in the Commonwealth, it is what has driven the insane real estate prices in fact. That and the previous 15 odd years worth of easy access to loan money.
Please while you are pontificating, do an analysis of how it was made, materials, depth, restored/shifted, ownership, legal status etc. History is great but you are actually by/in it.
A government project that took forever, cost a fortune way above estimates and turned out to be completely pointless, the hell you say. I simply do not believe it. The government has forced it's citizen's to rely on them, they could possibly be unreliable, not a chance, it would be unethical. I reckon we should have the government completely own and operate the food and agricultural system. What could possibly go wrong, everybody could be fed with no need to work for a living, I'm sure it would work...
A cynic would say the government might take a particular project and "run it into the ground" - I say they are utilizing "redundant destructive testing in order to supply people (who would have difficulty getting work as a toilet seat tester, etc) with taxpayer funded employment".
Oh my god. My wife would rather die. I think its awesome. My own little hidey hole to slowly go insane in. I dont think one pipe is for extracting air, hear me out: from my cbrn training in the us military, youd rather just have a constant influx of filtered air maintaining positive interior pressure. There is no effective way of completely sealing out a living space, so by having constant positive pressure, any leaks are just constantly pushing the contamination out
I would imagine a situation like sharing a space like this rivals relationship testing comprised of building IKEA furniture or setting up a complex and large camping tent with one's spouse. I've done the last two and barely survived.
@CanadianMacGyver >>> (1) Great video...👍 (2) Is that a birdhouse hanging in the tree above, to the left, and behind you in this video? {Yes, ADHD is real.}
I wonder: Would the Soviet Union have actually detonated nuclear weapons on Canadian cities? Of course, Soviet bombers and ICBMs would overfly Canada to attack the US, and Canada and the US, as NORAD partners, would defend the airspace. RCAF and other Canadian military bases would be likely targets to disrupt that defense. During the Cold War the USSR threatened US cities, and vice versa, for deterrence, but what would be the deterrence effect of threatening non-nuclear Canada and her cities? Anyway, seems like in the aftermath of a nuclear war, it would be good to spare a sane country or two to negotiate the peace!
