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Are Wikileaks Servers In a Nuclear Bunker?
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian has a two page spread on the background of some of the Wikileaks people, the Wikileaks scheme for "an open-source democratic intelligence agency" and the possible location of its secret servers — an abandoned US nuclear weapons base at Greenham Common and a radar station in Kent. "The Kent bunker is deep underground and supposed to survive 30 days after a nuclear strike.""
Other advantages of a bunker are
Missile silos would also offer some unique experiences in bungee jumping. Or, you could plan on not having to take out the garbage for several decades.
I read that whole article before I visited slashdot this morning, and nowhere does it suggest that WikiLeaks' servers are in those bunkers. The Bunker was a past business venture of Ben Laurie, who designed the encryption methods used by the site. That information is presented to give insight into one of the minds behind the creation of Wikileaks, nothing more. Any connection between the Bunker and Wikileaks is made by the reader, not the author.
... and it's a pretty amazing place if you're at all geeky. They don't let people into all of it these days, but I went down before it was fully operational, a few years ago.
The blast doors are a sight to be seen - they're about 4 feet thick of solid steel. There's blast doors on every entrance and at locations inside. Even the taxman would have a hard time getting through that [grin]. Then there's the air purifiers, which can filter out all known airborn toxins for the entire complex, and several diesel generators for backup power. The diesel tanks are large enough to keep the whole place running for weeks.
There's the room that was always guarded when the place was operational, and didn't appear on the blueprints... There's the fact that everything everywehere is tempest shielded, and there's the fact that it has sufficient fibre coming into it to carry most of the internet traffic worldwide - literally metre-thick bundles of the stuff. Oh, and it's H U G E inside; they'll not be running out of space any time soon...
Quite an amazing place.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Any shelter you make is going to have a hard time withstanding a direct hit. That's just not the point. You have blast shelters and you have fallout shelters. Blast shelters are designed to withstand some blast damage. The further you are from ground zero the less blast damage you will take. That's where the blast shelter shines. You might be in an area close enough to the ground zero where you would otherwise be killed by the pressure and heat and flying debris, but if you're in a blast shelter you have a much better chance of surviving.
The blast damage alone isn't the only killer. Fallout shelters are designed to protect the blast survivors from the subsequent radiation and provide them with enough food and water until they have to leave.
These things will increase survivability even with a large h-bomb attack. While the chances of this happening have gone down since the Soviet collapse, the shelters themselves are far from obsolete. The wide spread notion that we're all dead in the event of a large scale nuclear exchange is simply not true.
And despite the frequent criticism of the old duck and cover movies, this is still the best thing to do if you see bright flash on the horizon. It's far better than standing there mouth agape looking stupid when the blast wave hits.