[NetBehaviour] Secret nuclear bases to be shown on public maps.

[marc]

Secret nuclear bases to be shown on public maps.

Military sites and spy centres will be revealed by Ordnance Survey.

By Severin Carrell
The Independent.

The precise locations of dozens of secret military and spy bases are to 
be revealed on Ordnance Survey maps for the first time, ending one of 
the last remaining legacies of the Cold War. For decades, tourists and 
ramblers have stumbled across secret radar bases, nuclear bomb stores 
and rocket testing ranges tucked away in quiet woods or remote hillsides 
because they had been "airbrushed" out of even the most detailed 
official maps.

But the Government's security chiefs have quietly abandoned that policy 
by scrapping its list of secret military and intelligence facilities - 
known officially as the "sensitive sites register". The decision was 
made earlier this year by the Cabinet Office but never formally 
announced; it acknowledged that the internet had defeated its attempts 
at secrecy.

Aerial and satellite photographs of the country are available on the 
internet, while web-based mapping services such as Multimap are 
competing directly with Ordnance Survey (OS). The change in policy means 
the last remaining 50 sites on the register - including the nuclear 
warhead factory at Burghfield in Berkshire - will now be marked on all 
the maps printed by OS.

The obsession with secrecy, which deepened once spying by the Soviet 
Union intensified during the Cold War, has been relaxed recently. The 
"sensitive sites register" has been slowly whittled down and OS has 
begun including some sensitive sites on its most detailed Explorer 
series of maps, but anomalies remain.

In western Scotland, buildings and railway tracks for Glen Douglas 
armament depot near Faslane nuclear submarine base are marked but 
unnamed on the most detailed Explorer maps, but are "airbrushed" out of 
the larger-scale touring maps. A rocket testing range in Wyre Forest 
near Kidderminster, Worcestershire, is shown by an unnamed rectangular 
field in the detailed maps, but omitted in all large-scale maps.

Some of the most sensitive sites will still not be named or will have 
misleading labels such as "disused airfield" or "depot". But the 
decision is a victory for anti-secrecy campaigners such as Alan 
Turnbull, an internet enthusiast who first exposed the availability of 
this apparently secret mapping data on the web.

more...
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1215961.ece